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 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.