I'd have to disagree. Checking the referal stats for my own webcomic, as I often do either out of insatiable curiosity or crushing insecurity, I'm not sure which, I've long since discovered that the people who read my webcomic have very diverse tastes in webcomics. Seeing links to my comic being refered from people's personal links pages, blogs, and "What webcomics do you read" forum posts I can tell you that there is just no way to pidgeon-hole the people who read my comic and that each reader seems to have individual tastes that are quite broad and varied.

About the only thing that is almost universal is anytime I follow the referals back to someone's personal links page, nine times out of ten the person who links to me also links to Sexy Losers. Other than that it's usually a grab bag of comics from different communities covering different genres and themes.

There do tend to be little cliques of fans. Referrer logs no doubt give a better picture of where people in general are coming from, but if we define fan as someone who participates in the comic community, and examine forum activity, it becomes obvious that a majority of fans don't move much outside their own 'groups'. Eg, there's a Dumbrella crowd, a Keenspace collective, a Sluggy community, a PA ... well, riot, etc, etc.

I browse or participate in rather a lot of forums, and you can tell how many links to the 'outside comic world' there are in any particular set of forii by watching the webcomics news dispersal patterns and seeing how quickly information trickles through the community. I would agree with William G about keenspacers being particularly insular in this regard. They know there are other comics out there, but if they're not on Space or Spot, they're not worth talking about.

As for this being a bad or good thing, I don't really think it's either ... people tend to aggregate in a community they feel comfortable with, and that's great, because it fosters support for individual artists. It is a shame when a clique-y atmosphere results in an 'us vs them' mentality amongst fans, but it's probably inevitable, given human nature. Having said that, I wouldn't complain if I saw more people crossing the webcomics forum divides. I always get a small thrill of familiarity when I recognise a name from another place, it's a little like going overseas and running into an old friend.

I have to admit to being pretty insular myself -- but it was a result of my job as editor of the Modern Tales Newsletter. When part of your job includes reading every comic in the MT family, it doesn't leave time for much else. That said, I have made efforts to go out and find comics I like that were outside the MT group. Which was sort of successful--I found a number of outside comics I like, but the vast majority of them later joined MT, leaving me, once again, with only a small handful of extra-MT comics to read.

I'd say that was pretty true. There's many different circles reflected by comic links pages; there's Buzzcomix circles, Drunk Duck circles, Ponju.net circles, KeenSpot/space circles, and all these little sub-circles in them... there often seems to be some kinda bias that leads you round and round and round. Not always, but yeah, people's links pages can often be quite reflective of thier own comic. One thing I've noticed is if someone links Return To Sender, there's a good chance they'll link Demonology 101 too. Don't think it's a bad thing, as someone said, we sit where we're comfortable. If I had a links page, half of it would be taken up by Hot Bullet Press, and the other half by Drunk Duck (with only a few exceptions), simply 'cos those are where I live. I wanna send people to comics I know and enjoy, and those comics tend to get into a clique 'cos they follow similar themes. That's good for readers imo, 'cos if they like your comic, they'll probably like what you like... the only problem arises when a reader is blinkered into thinking that's all there is, I guess. But hey. That's sheep mentality, and it's their fault. >:[ Stoopid readers. heehee

Yeah, I know what you mean. When I first found Keenspot, I thought that was IT. Then I found Keenspace, and I thought THAT was IT. Then I found other comics living by themselves, and I was like "crazy bastards..."... (and yeah, then I joined 'em. XD) I never even looked at the Funny Papers list, or TWC for a good long while. Penny Arcade & Megatokyo were things I discovered about a year after I'd got into comics, 'cos people kept talking about them. Even now I'm finding little caches of webcomics I've never seen before. Hell, I go to TWC now and it's full of stuff I've never seen before, it's a whole different source for me. I'm beginning on reflection to think it's pretty hard NOT to be insulated, there's just too MUCH.

Still, at least nowadays the whole "buy ad-space here!" thing gives us an opportunity to tap into an audience that otherwise wouldn't see you, ever. The only way I could broaden my horizons in the past was by trawling google, now potentially I can do it by accident. :D

Also, there's a few things like this and this popping up that seem to kinda spread the word with a more even knife; if these kinds of sites turned into the most used primary portal for new readers it'd do a lot for getting the right readers to the right places and keeping their horizons wide. Or perhaps not.

Haha! Case in point, this is the first time I ever found out about www.webcomics.com. XD Yellow. O_o

I think a lot of it is time. There are so many demands on our time, and so many people and advertisers vying for our attention, that we have to spend what time we have with a certain economy.

Someone who spends a few hours a day on the computer may spend the better part of that time catching up on their favourite webcomics, and participating in a few forum threads. That doesn't really allow for a lot of cross-pollination (unless a favourite creator happens to send you there... Remember January's Gaming Comics Issue, and the ensuing flood of angry posts?).

Comics fans may be insular, by nature, but I think time is the dominant factor.

It's hard to avoid being insular, because of the sheer volume of stuff out there, the frankly poor quality of most of it, and the lack of organized indexes to help you find what you want. And some communities of webcomics are difficult to access for technical reasons. Take Keenspace, for instance. The Keenspot site which hosts it doesn't mention it except in their "Services" page. The link to it in their "Services" page is a bad link (at least it was when I tried it.) And http://keenspace.com apparently is not a good link. I finally got to the site by googling it, and found that it's still a bit difficult to get places, but at least they have a search engine. I did a search on "reality," but alas most of the strips that came back were pretty far from reality in any way. Some of them show no comics when you link to them, etc.

http://www.onlinecomics.net/pages/index.php is the best portal site I've found for locating comics of quality by subject or genre. It's still pretty time-consuming to navigate, though.

This whole process is a lot easier, I suppose, if you're just interested in gag-a-day stuff. If you're looking for something else, though, it's quite a challenge. Which is one of the reason sites like Comixpedia and http://webcomicsreview.com (The Webcomics Examiner) exist.

--Joe Zabel