Webcomics are a great thing. You can find great art and good jokes around all over the place. But the one webcomic that brought me into the whole genre, UserFriendly, has just lost me as a viewer. It's been a great comic, and loads of laughs over the years, but it's fallen to the same thing that's ruined others. You see, the latest arc is apparently about the fact that one of the older characters has just gotten cancer.

Joke-a-day comics are great, though over time, a lot of them wind up evolving into plot-lines. That makes sense, because there's only so many single-comic jokes you can do before you start running out of inspiration. To quote another cartoonist, "How many ways can Garfield swat a spider before it gets boring?" Even my comic's done that. What you need to do, though, is make sure that those plots are still in the spirit of the strip: still intending to be funny. An individual joke for most comics, and stringing them together to make plots along the way.

The problem comes when that joke-a-day comic suddenly tries to go into "serious" matters, and that can often mean the death of a good strip. After all, the readers don't read the comic to see something serious and depressing, they read to see something funny and be entertained by the characters they like. Strips can still discuss something serious once in a while, like the "Calvin and Hobbes" strip where they find a dead bird, but pulling a comic into a whole arc where one character learns that he is dying can destroy the whole spirit of the comic.

So, goodbye UserFriendly. You had a great run, and you were one of my favorites for a very long time, but it looks like it's time we part ways.