Awkward Pause by Ryan Harby

I'm still finding collections of random webcomics that I don't read regularly, which is fun. There has been a lot of doom-mongering about the death of short cartoons, and it's true: the market for single panels disappeared even before the periodical ecosystem did, and newspaper strips are mostly dominated by a few, often-lousy, zombie strips. But some people will always be crazy enough to want to make funny little stories, and the web makes it possible for them to do so and push them out into the world.

I'm pretty sure there's very little money in it these days, though: that's one big difference. Forty to a hundred years ago, a cartoonist could make a good living by selling regular single panels or having a moderately popular strip. Now all that money goes to a few big tech companies, which they like to claim is "progress." Well, they would, wouldn't they?

Anyway, my point is: stuff exists because cartoonists are crazy.  (Otherwise known as Popeye's Axiom; see below.) It might not be an ideal state, but at least the work exists, some of it gets collected into books, and I assume at least a few creators are selling enough books to buy, I don't know, some avocado toast every now and then.

That all brings me to Awkward Pause, a 2021 collection of Ryan Harby's comics. It looks like this was originally Kickstarted, and then transitioned to the small Canadian press Renegade - Harby himself is from the fine city of Winnipeg, out in the cold frozen tundra. (I kid Canada.)

Harby originally used the series title Honey Dill - apparently a local sauce little-known even in the rest of Canada - but seems to now just be posting cartoons on his own site as "comics." (Sometimes in-jokes run their course, I suppose.)

And I was happy to see that Harby takes full advantage of web publication - these strips are not all the same length or in the same format. Cartoonists spent a hundred years fitting their jokes into specific boxes - single panels, daily strips - but they don't have to do that anymore, and it's refreshing to see cartoonists who understand their new freedom and just work out this joke in its best length and style. Harby does that: he has a lot of square four-panel comics, but plenty of longer ones and a few shorter.

His line is cartoony and softly rounded, usually with fairly bright colors. And his stuff is funny, both the drawing and the writing, in a modern quirky "wait, what was that?" kind of style popular with the Kids These Days.

So go buy his book, or check out his comics online, or buy a sticker - they look pretty cute, actually - Harby does know how to "draw pitchers" and does it well.