Toonlet

» see toonlet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Toonlet removed the only obstacle it was able to remove. You did not need to draw, which was true, and which was not the thing standing between me and a webcomic. What stood there was having something worth saying in four panels every day, in English, to people who would answer underneath it. The site was open to anybody with a browser, so the distance here is not a phone bill or a border. I just was not going to be a person who posted a strip on Tuesdays.

It was founded in mid-2007 in Portland, Oregon by Craig Schwartz and Seth Ladygo. Schwartz had come out of Electronic Arts, where he produced on The Sims and SimCity, which explains a lot about the product: it treats a cartoon character the way a game treats a customizable avatar. A beta went public at the end of that year and the site opened properly through 2008.

The tool was Flash. You built a face and a body from premade parts, then swapped pieces around and saved the results, so that one character accumulated a library of moods you could pull from while writing a strip. People who could draw were free to load their own parts in. Professional cartoonists drew art packs for it, Peter Bagge among them, which for a free site run by two people is a genuinely surprising thing to have pulled off.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

The part that made Toonlet different from every other comic maker was not the editor. It was that a finished strip was published like a forum post or a blog entry, sitting on the site with a comment thread under it. Other webcomic tools handed you a picture file and left you to find an audience. This one put the strip and the audience in the same place, so a comic was a thing you posted at people rather than a thing you exported.

That is a social network with a very specific entry requirement, and the site ran a Top Strips section daily with five to ten comics in it, which is the sort of number that tells you the community was real and small. You could also embed strips elsewhere, and Silicon Florist wrote up the embed code in February 2008 the way local tech blogs write up a hometown startup doing something clever.

~ the cracks ~

The editor was Flash and the whole product was the editor. When Apple refused to put Flash on the iPhone and Adobe gave up on the mobile version in November 2011, that decision landed differently on different sites. A site with Flash video could re-encode. A site whose core interaction was dragging cartoon eyebrows around inside a plugin had nowhere to go without rebuilding itself from nothing.

Everything else was moving at the same time. The reply-underneath model that made Toonlet feel modern in 2008 was ordinary by 2012, sitting on Tumblr and on Facebook with no character builder required anywhere. What had been the site's structural idea became a feature of the entire internet, and the site kept the harder half of the deal, which was the editor nobody could run anymore.

~ the long tail ~

There is no shutdown post. Wikipedia records 2015 and the Internet Archive agrees with it in the flattest possible way: captures come in monthly and healthy through the summer, the last good one lands on 22 September 2015, and after that the crawler stops finding a site. toonlet.com answers nothing at all today.

The archive kept the pages and cannot run them. Flash reached its own end on 31 December 2020, so the strips people made are sitting in captures as dead rectangles where the player used to be. Everyone who built a character out of parts on that site lost the character along with the site, because the character was never a picture. It was a saved set of instructions for a program that no longer exists.

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