The Bottom Line

Issue date: 2/28/07 Section: The AT Wire

Media Credit: Scott Ramsoomair VG CATS is just one of many web comics to gain worldwide fame in recent years. Sites like TopWebComics.com aggregate these comics for easy access, and allow users to rate them, creating a hierarchy of popularity.

Last week, Xfire hosted a special chat session with Scott Ramsoomair, the creator of VG Cats, a weekly web comic dedicated to parodying video games.  Only about 50 Xfire users who signed up were invited to participate and ask questions.  I was one of the lucky few to get a spot in the chat.

Web comics have become very popular over the past several years.  Even more popular than just web comics are the web comics that relate to video games.  Ramsoomair’s creation is one of the more popular of these web comics, and with good reason.  There are currently 227 VG Cats comics, most of them drawn by Ramsoomair himself.  The comic originally involved two cats, one male cat named Leo and one female cat named Aeries, who played video games together.  Since then, Ramsoomair has turned the comic into more of a parody.  Rather than focusing on two gamers, he has taken Leo and Aeries and placed them in the universes of the games.  Like any traditional comic, the style of VG Cats has changed a lot since its original design.

“Along the way I watch different shows, read different comics and try to adapt style changes,” said Ramsoomair.  “It’s just one of those things that [happens] naturally.”

Even though the main topic for VG Cats is video games, Ramsoomair admitted that he will cover topics outside of that realm.  “It keeps it fresh for me,” says Ramsoomair.  “I can get bored with video games from time to time.”

While web comics may not reach people in the same way that traditional newspaper comics do, the format for them is better because they apply to specific audiences.  VG Cats attracts video-game enthusiasts from across all the genres.  A World of Warcraft fan can find just as much humor in Ramsoomair’s comic as a Halo fan.  The VG Cats website currently has 6,301 registered members and is continuing to grow in popularity.

Rather than Ramsoomair being a comic artist first, he considers himself primarily to be a gamer.  His creative abilities as an artist are secondary to his passion for video games.  Most comic artists would consider themselves to be artists above anything else, and this is what sets creativity apart from creativity explored through video games.

I know I’ve advocated about how video games need to be taken more seriously by the mainstream of our society, but can you blame me?  All of these amazing and creative things are happening every day thanks to video games.  Yet, all people hear about and all they care about is how the latest murder crimes relate to the latest installment in the Grand Theft Auto series.  Web comics, such as VG Cats, are taking a traditional form of creative expression, turning it upside down and over-clocking it.

Despite the fact that video games and the culture surrounding them isn’t being represented fairly by the Jack Thompsons of our society, people like Ramsoomair have taken it upon themselves to explore original and creative ways of expressing their passion:  video games.  When Ramsoomair was asked whether the fans, the money or the experience kept his passion for comics alive, he replied, “The games.”

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