Jerkcity

About

Jerkcity is a webcomic created by Michael Lopp, Tristan A. Farnon, and two other individuals known only by their handles, Deuce and Pants. Published almost daily since 1998, Jerkcity was originally created with Microsoft Comic Chat^[2], and its crude and ridiculous content including jokes about drinking, drug abuse and sex, has earned it a lasting fandom.

Premise

Jerkcity follows the adventures of four characters: Pants, Rands, Deuce, and Spigot and contains no actual character development, plot, storyline, or continuity.^[12] The creators described it as “a story told out of order.”

Left to right: Pants, Deuce, Spigot and Rands

History

In mid 1990's, Michael, Tristan and the two others met each other via a private chatroom where they amused each other with bawdy humor, programming jokes, and other off-color humor.^[12] In May 1998, Michael Lopp purchased the jerkcity.com domain name without having any actual use for it. Lopp later discovered Microsoft Comic Chat,^[2] a graphical IRC client created by Microsoft, and decided to use the jerkcity.com domain for it. Lopp then used three years worth of logs from group's chat room to create the comic strip. The first strip was released on August 17th, 1998.^[11]

Online Presence

Jerkcity was mentioned in a Buzzfeed article titled 80’s And 90’s Web Comics Were Insanely Geeky. On September 18th, 2008, YouTuber SpamNapkin uploaded a video titled "Funny Jerkcity Joekz", featuring several strips of the series, and gaining over 11,100 views in the following seven years. On February 26th, 2010, YouTuber stretchpants uploaded a video titled "Jerkcity: SPACE JERKIN'", which was a re-upload of an animation featuring Spigot masturbating with planets in the background; this video gained over 10,000 views in the following five years.

On May 26th, 2010, a subreddit dedicated to the series was created, to which over 166 subscribed in the following five years.^[5] On April 8th, 2013, the Tumblr blog Jerkcity HD^[6] was created, containing fanmade remasters of Jerkcity comic strips.^[6] In addition, other popular fan blogs have been created, such as Dick Missiles,^[7] Jerkcity Hi-Fi^[8] and Regular Jerkcity.^[9] As December 5th, 2015, searching on the artist community deviantART the keyword "jerkcity" leads to over 100 results,^[10] and the strip and its fanart is also present on other communities like Tumblr.^[4] Amongst the strip's cast, Spigot has become the most popular character, and is thus featured the most in fanworks.

Search Interest

External References