Comics artist Todd Webb chats about his ongoing comic strip, THE POET, which he posts daily to Substack. Keep up with Todd Webb at toddbot.com. We discuss being a cartoonist, the comic strip format and the world of THE POET! What is this comic strip about? Read my review here. Basically, you have the elder poet, searching for the meaning of life, and his snarky pigeon cohort always ready to knock him down a peg. And you just run with that premise.
The process of creating comics is multi-layered and complex. There’s quite a bit going on for an art form that hasn’t always gotten the respect it deserves. Well, attitudes have evolved over the years. The more I think about the comic strip format, in relation to the comics medium and beyond it, I find more and more to ponder over. The essence of a comic strip is to pare down to the basics. That said, just like any other creative endeavor, it’s all about how you get there.
Comic strips have been under the critical, and academic, microscope more and more over the years. After over one hundred years of comic strips, with landmark comic strips paving the way, from Krazy Kat to Peanuts, we have definitely had the time to make inroads in comics scholarship, which continues to find its place. After all, even a hint of “comics studies” really only dates back a few decades, when you stop and think about it, with such notable titles as Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art in 1985 and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics in 1993.
Comic strips evolved, truly blossomed, with American newspapers. What we have now is a brave new world of online comics. If we consider comics scholarship to be a relatively new thing, then online comics is but a blink of an eye in the big picture. We discuss this subject as part of our conversation which naturally dovetails into a deep dive into how artist Todd Webb answers the call with his comic strip, The Poet, which he publishes daily and collects into a volume format and smaller books. You can say that Webb has learned his lessons well and incorporates many of the beloved tropes and mechanisms that go into a successful comic strip.
Today’s THE POET comic strip.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion on this or that work of comics. My general rule is to never forget to let the comic strip speak for itself. Upon reading one episode of The Poet, and as I steadily progressed, I was utterly charmed. It’s fascinating to me that a nice straightforward comic strip, pared down to the essentials, can speak to just about anything under the sun. And, yes, it is poetic, for good measure.
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