Are Webcomic Exploitables Getting Old and Losing Value in the Meme Economy?

Photoshopped webcomics seem to be a safe investment in the web's volatile meme economy, but they might be getting a little stale.

One of the more popular meme formats in this day and age involves digitally editing a humorous comic to create new variations, a genre typically referred to as “exploitables.” By using an artist's original illustration as a template, the barrier to entry for creating similar jokes is significantly lowered, allowing internet users who lack certain artistic skills to earn low-effort karma, retweets or other social media points. But the style has often taken a predictable turn, leading to comics that merely criticize those with opposing political viewpoints, philosophical beliefs or pop culture tastes.

For example, a series based on the comic “All Life Is Precious” by Owl Turd features a spider who utters various offensive statements that cause a young boy to crush it in his hands. As one would expect, most edited versions were created to deride whatever the author happens to disagrees with.

More recently, a comic in which a father abandons his own child for saying that "Cars is the best Pixar movie of all time" spawned a nearly identical round of memes. This trend has even launched a meta in-joke among Know Your Meme users, who edit the images to sarcastically mock how these kind of jokes “sure are productive.”

To be fair, not every webcomic meme takes this route. The recently revived “How to Talk to Short People” series, which originally chastised those who crouch while talking to the vertically challenged, quickly veered off into absurdity with nonsensical and bizarre variations. Additionally, edits of the undying classic “Loss” by Ctrl+Alt+Del serve as exercises in lateral thinking, testing how well one can subtly recreate the comic's iconic 4-panel setup.

Clearly, webcomics are capable of providing templates for a wide variety of memetic variations, allowing internet users to create their own clever, unique and interesting adaptations. But at the moment, it seems like the internet is just fine with repeating the same joke over-and-over again.