It represented a subculture of the very online, when being very online felt transgressive and maybe a little odd.Įven if it didn’t exactly tell a linear story, Pictures for Sad Children created a tiny universe with an array of strangely relatable, yet nearly indistinguishable, characters: mouthless people with stick arms, rectangular bodies, and round heads, all living in grayscale. Pictures arrived at a time when Tumblr and LiveJournal meant more than Facebook. “when an employee dies, replace them,” his boss reads from the company policy manual. Ultimately, Paul returns to work only to find that he can’t have his old gig back. “i’m still doing things i don’t want to do to pay for things i’m not sure i want,” Paul confesses from within a fountain in Paris. Paul travels the world, finding himself just as bored and unhappy in Egypt as Oklahoma. Directly and indirectly, it explored depression, anxiety, and a deep discomfort with modern life and capitalism. It took minimalism and surrealism and wedded them to existential dread and extremely online culture. Thus begins Pictures for Sad Children, a webcomic that for its seven-year run, starting in 2007, set the tone for what it meant to make jokes online.
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