About

Twitter the Comic^[1] is a Tumblr-based webcomic which translates funny, witty or absurd tweets into 4-panel comic strips. Many of the tweets are from accounts that are considered part of Weird Twitter.

Origin

On November 19th, 2012, artist Mike Rosenthal of VectorBelly^[2] posted a series of five comic strips to his Tumblr blog. The most popular one of these^[3] (shown below, left) has gained nearly 8,000 notes as of April 2013. The strip was based on a tweet^[4] made by @pissrifle on August 14th, 2012. The tweet has gained more than 1,500 retweets and 2,300 favorites as of April 2013.

Spread

On November 27th, Pleated Jeans^[5] highlighted a series of ten of these comics, including a fan submission to the blog by @cscomics.^[6] The same day, another selection of the comics, along with their original tweets, was shared on Buzzfeed.^[7] In November, the blog was featured on cartoon and art blog Daily Dawdle.^[8] In January 2013, the blog saw additional attention from Techcrunch^[9], Imgur^[10] and Reddit^[11], where a comic about sarcasm gained 3,145 upvotes and 1973 points before being archived.

In February 2013, Rosenthal submitted a photoset^[12] containing ten of his comics to the Great Tumblr Book Search competition.^[13] The post was featured on Tumblr's LOL and Comics tags, accruing more than 98,000 notes as of April 2013, when the project was announced as one of the runners-up in the competition. In 2013, Twitter: The Comic has also been featured on Cheezburger^[14], Laughing Squid^[15] and Trendhunter.^[16]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References