While I love examining community in Poorly Drawn Lines, this blog will focus on both a different webcomic. Allie Brosh’s “Hyperbole and a Half” covers a wide range of topics including the power of a dinosaur costume, fun games to play with a brick, getting lost in the woods, and her personal battle with depression. For this post, we were required to read two of Brosh’s last posts, “Adventures in Depression” and “Depression Part Two”. These posts outlined the struggles Brosh went through with her depression, both the feelings (or lack thereof) she experienced as well as illustrating how non-depressed people overgeneralize the situation and can often make it worse.
Through interacting with both the print and digital forms, the main difference I noticed was the concept of linearity. Digitally, it is very easy to track how Brosh’s depression affected the comic—the first two years of its existence boasted a combined 157 posts while 2011 contained only five, the last of which being “Adventures in Depression” in October. The next post, “Depression Part Two”, didn’t arrive until over a year later in May 2013. While it may not have been a conscious choice, the time between posts and general transition to a bunch of happy and funny posts early in the comic’s career to only a few dark posts as time progressed impacts the feel of the comic. No longer is the comic simply a collection of various random and silly life events, but instead a complex and personal account of Allie Brosh’s life.
However, Brosh completely strips away this feeling in the print edition. The first thing I did when sitting down to read it was check for “Depression Part Two” on the last few pages. However, to my surprise, it wasn’t there. Instead, I found both comics dealing with depression starting on page 99, less than a third of the way through the book. By abandoning the linearity found in the digital version, Brosh completely changes the feel of the comic. Because the episodes are just shoved between two other comics you would most likely read right before and after, the story loses much of its weight and significance. While I haven’t discovered the reasoning for this decision, it goes to show how the natural tendency of webcomics to be displayed in a linear fashion can completely change the feel of a story.
Poorly Drawn Lines and Well Written Blogs 