Collectors, Storytellers, and Web Pros: Making Comics and Building Community During the Pandemic

Abstract

In this article, I profile three online communities for comic creators that I began participating in during the COVID-19 pandemic, namely Cartoonist Kayfabe, the Sequential Artists Workshop, and Comic Lab. I use Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory of communities of practice to argue that each community provides a different perspective on making comics, developing an identity as a comics creator, and building comics communities. To construct these profiles, I draw from participant-observations and from publicly accessible, online materials. Taken together, these profiles help comics studies scholars better understand the complexity of the US comics landscape and the role that creator-oriented communities play in shaping parts of this landscape.