Land of the Lustrous

There used to be a kind of webcomic whose author, faced with the terrifying freedom of the website format and the urgent need to publish or perish, either failed or refused to rein it the fuck in, to set purposeful boundaries around their thing. Billions of years go by, universes are created and destroyed. Time is travelled. Physicists are named and quoted by full-on fireball-throwing wizards. I'm not saying these are always bad things for a story to do, just that a lot of webcomics in the 00s looked like this. Unicorn Jelly is the one I often think of, maybe because it's such an early example.1 Joke-oriented sprite comics and two-gamers-on-a-couch comics sometimes exploded into this. Homestuck was maybe the apotheosis, but was only remarkable in its lasting so long that, by the time it ended, webcomics had mostly moved on from that kind of maximalist Science! fantasy. Or at least that's my understanding. If people still do it, it's not what I follow or see regularly. Don't make the…