Baby steps? Perhaps. But as someone once told me, “Any forward progress, no matter how small, is still a move in the right direction.”

The medium had a chance to redefine itself in the ’80s, when a new breed of cartoonists with names like Larson, Breathed, and Watterson came along and shook things up with their strips. Of course, you could argue that they all started treading familiar territory; The Far Side was nothing really special in its early days, Bloom County started out as a rural Doonesbury clone, and even Calvin’s overactive imagination was subdued and downplayed when he first appeared in newspapers. But following those familiar formulae in the early going helped establish them as successes, from which the artists were granted a certain amount of artistic latitude to work within; talking animals and Seussian landscapes began to invade the Bloom Boarding House, Calvin became nothing if not a modern, brattier version of Winsor McCay’s seminal Little Nemo, and cows and anthropoligists began populating Gary Larson’s single-panel world.

For any new strip - web or print - to make any sort of positive impact on the medium, in all likelihood it must first pretend to be something a bit more conventional, just to let the artist get his or her foot in the door. Then, once it gets a strong fan following going, that’s when you should start shaking up the status quo. I’m not saying you should be out to clone Sluggy Freelance or MegaTokyo or Penny Arcade or some other über-successful webcomic, but it should still follow a somewhat familiar pattern… at first. Once you’ve drawn readers in with a familiar bait, that’s when you should produce the hook.

Any strip that does not evolve with time is doomed, at least from a creative standpoint. Believe it or not, Garfield actually started out as a really good strip, focusing on life as seen through the eyes of a cynical, lazy cat. This gave it a perspective few other cartoonists had at the time, with the possible exception of Fred Bassett and maybe Peanuts whenever it focused on Snoopy. I’d even go so far as to say the first year to 18 months of Garfield were some of the most entertaining stuff on the comics page at that time. Even ignoring the purely profit-driven, cynical motivation behind its creation, Jim Davis seemed to be on to something here. The problem, of course, was that the strip never moved beyond what worked in that first year; the only thing that’s noticeably changed since then was Lyman, Jon’s roommate in those early days, quietly being dropped from the strip after some conservative (in the political, rather than dictionary, sense) markets complained about the obvious “implications” of two single men sharing a living space. And thus Garfield stands as a shining example of what happens when a strip succumbs to hardening of the creative arteries for the sake of continued business. It’s like Nancy used to be, only without the charming sight gags that were Ernie Bushmiller’s trademark even at his most monotonously formulaic.

…Wow, I really went on and on, didn’t I? o_O Anyway, tl;dr - Sometimes, before you can change the rules, you have to play the game. Just make sure the game doesn’t end up playing you…