Jerkcity is one of the ur-webcomics, a weird chat-transcript-as-comic habit among some friends that started way back in 1998, facilitated by the almost nearly as weird application Microsoft Comic Chat, a piece of software released in 1996 and featuring the art of beloved weirdo Jim Woodring. You’d type, and cartoon characters would belch out the things you said emphatically into word balloon, lettered of course in MS Comic Sans.
The comic was surreal, profane, incoherent, hilarious, self-aware, self-loathing, etc. It managed though its mannered-nonsense approach to vocabularian freestyling to birth what indirectly became one of Metafilter’s favorite memes, “hurf durf butter eater“. The whole mess is a little hard to explain other than that everybody was probably pretty high at the time.
Jerkcity HD, then, is a brand new blog collecting submissions of reworks of the original Jerkcity strips by anybody and everybody, so long as you abide by a few rules. With the original Jerkcity being daily updated for 15 years now, the chances of actually catching up with the archives are vanishingly slim, but I don’t figure that’s really the point, so let’s not worry about it. The point, such that it is, is that people are jumping in and the results are lovely and awesome and so on.
I’m digging it, and looking forward to seeing all the weird directions people take these reinterpretations in. I’ve got a bunch of ideas of my own, and have chucked my first submission in their (reportedly a bit crowded already) bin, but here it is in the mean time, reworking this strip shown above:
