Jeph Jacques' attempt at making his comic syndicate-friendly.

I’m back from the Land of the Dead—in my case, North York—and I still have a number of blog entries to do here at The Boar until I’m done! Apparently, I have the choice to post for another term, so I figured I’ll keep on going until then!

Initially, I was going to talk about what I’ve learned about the writing process when it comes to comics. Rather, I’d like to point you to, of all things, a meme started on Twitter. Yep, instead of giving you all a list of self-learned tips that could help expand your creative mind, I’m giving you a list of badly-made comics. It’s got the same academic effect I had in mind, but it teaches it so much better.

Questionable Content creator Jeph Jacques started #ifitweresyndicated, a Twitter hashtag thread where Jacques has asked “every webcartoonist [he] know[s] to do a shitty syndicated version of their comic and post it on twitter” (2:40 PM, Jan. 13/10). While it’s only been two days, it’s spawned a large amount of replies containing badly written gags, imitating some of the worst newspaper-syndicated comics and comic puns known to date. From satires of vagely racist puns in syndicate comics to overdoses of fall-on-your-back pun responses, this is some of the most brilliant crap I’ve seen in a while.

Though I’m a fan of comics, such works from syndication have become more and more of an unimpressive thing as years have passed. Last week I checked the Saturday Star’s list of funnies hoping that it would correct me on such an assumption. But no. Save for a few, these comics still suck.

I’ve learned two things from writing this entry: (1) newspaper comics continue to fade into a slow and brutal death, and (2) I have no idea how to reference a Twitter post in MLA.