Art Harder

Plotting Relationships

October 11, 2010 at 1:17 am by Alex

As I was randomly browsing r/Webcomics today, I ended up at Piperka’s webcomic listing.  As I passed over the lists upon lists of webcomics, I realized that I was familiar with quite a lot of them.  If I didn’t read the comic regularly, I had at least heard of them and maybe even met the creators at a convention.  So it occurred to me to wonder exactly how many comics have I encountered in some form or another on the internet?

I decided I would find out.  I copy-and-pasted the top 1200 comics* on Piperka (as of October 10, 2010) into a spreadsheet, then went through the whole list marking down my relationships with every comic that I recognized:

1. Read Regularly: I am up to date with the comic and read it on a regular basis.
2. Read Previously: I at one time was a regular reader but am not now;  a comic that is either finished, I lost interest in, or I lost track of.
3. Archive Trawling:  I am currently working my way up through the archives of the comic.
4. Reading List: I wish to read this comic, but I haven’t started to yet.
5. Know Creator:  I am friends or acquaintances with one or more of the creator(s) of the comic.  This is anything more than a casual introduction at a convention; they will more than likely remember me and my work.
6. Met Creator:  I have encountered one or more of the creator(s) of the comic somewhere, but it was only a casual introduction and they are unlikely to remember who I am if we meet again.
7. Heard Of: I do not read this comic, but I have heard of it.  This can range from knowing roughly what it’s about to simply having seen the name somewhere.

*The comics listed on Piperka also include some newspaper comics and image blogs, all of which are counted in their popularity rankings, and side projects for the same comic are sometimes given individual listings as well.

Overall, the data is interesting.  Out of the top 1200 comics, I have at least heard of 297 of them.  Of those 297, I currently read 44, and there are 36 that I used to read.  I have met 60 creators, and I know 17 of them.

When I first browsed through the list and came up with this idea, I thought these numbers would be a lot bigger, simply due to the fact that the more popular comics, duh, are more visible.  Still, I ended up including the top 1200 comics just because I kept recognizing other names every time I clicked through to the lower and lower ranks as I was collecting comics for the spreadsheet.

I’d be interested in some sort of social network that could plot these kinds of relationships in the webcomics world.  It would be interesting, especially for obscure comics, to see how many people recognize it by name versus how many people actually read it.

Posted in Comics, Musings

Tags: networking, webcomics

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