Wondermark

Webcomic by David Malki

Wondermark is a webcomic created by David Malki which was syndicated to Flak Magazine and appeared in The Onion print edition from 2006 to 2008. It features 19th century illustrations that have been recontextualized to create humorous juxtapositions. It takes the horizontal four panel shape of a newspaper strip, although the number of panels varies from one to six or more. It is updated intermittently. A typical Wondermark episode consists of one or more Victorian era drawings of people and/or objects, repeated for several panels, with dialogue added to create a joke. In some cases, the images vary from panel to panel, creating a narrative. Occasionally, the joke in the last panel takes the form of a purely visual gag. An additional moralism can be found in the comic's image alt attribute. The creator, David Malki, has stated that the images are obtained from public domain primary sources such as 19th century era periodicals. Malki obtains these images from public libraries and from his own collection of rare books.

There is no narrative continuity in Wondermark; each episode is generally unrelated to the previous or next, although on rare occasions a scenario will repeat for a second episode. In some episodes, situations and dialogue indicate that the setting may be the 19th century; in others, the characters allude to recent events or use contemporary technology (such as computers), often adapted to the period setting using steampunk influenced designs. Although certain images are used multiple times in different episodes, Malki has stated that each episode is meant to be read independent of any continuity. The subject matter of the comics is diverse. Wondermark's targets have included politics, business, censorship, fashion, self pity, and paranoia.

Besides the comics, the Wondermark website includes a number of features and articles.

In this occasional blog series, Malki reposts and annotates interesting period articles and images he's discovered in old books, magazines, and newspapers while looking for source images for Wondermark.

Malki provides commentary on the making of individual Wondermark episodes over accelerated 2 minute long time lapse screen recordings of that strip being created.

A podcast in which Malki describes the process of designing and printing a Wondermark book collection. This series is available to Malki's Patreon subscribers.

The Making of Wondermark is a facetious behind the scenes look at the creation of the comic strip. It satirizes the committee rules process that creates many newspaper comic strips as well as other elements of popular culture (such as movie trailers, which Malki used to edit as his full time job). It also presents a humorously exaggerated view of the time, effort, and number of personnel necessary to produce the comic strip.

In this blog series, the Wondermark character Gax, an alien being who hates humans, answers advice questions sent in by actual Wondermark readers.

At comic conventions, Malki creates sketches at his table using a dice based random phrase generator. Photos of some of the sketches are posted on the Wondermark blog after each show.

In July 2007, Malki brought a video camera to the San Diego Comic Con and asked his fellow comics creators, "Who's better, me or Comic Con?" The result was a 16 minute documentary film that explores the question in depth.