I’d like to nominate Brightest, Girls with Slingshots, Penny and Aggie, Something Positive, Wapsi Square, Schlock Mercenary and Templar, Arizona for inclusion in the list.

I think you’re right, the lack of a regular schedule probably does drive people away, but the author seems content to deal with those losses rather than to set and struggle to maintain a schedule.

To me, it seems likely that the idea that of a Caucasian “default human” is a local phenomenon. In Japan, I’m willing to bet that the average person on the street does not identify the simplified representations of people on signs in the subway as “white”. When a child in Cote d’Ivoire, Chile or China draws a simplified human figure, I doubt the parents assume that the figure has a different skin tone than the most commonly seen “colors” in their local area. It could be argued that Western media, ever more pervasive around the world, might be influencing the default imagined human skin tone, but I’m not sure how often its influence dominates over what children see in the people surrounding them.

We part ways even further when you take issue with the idea that the “default human” is cis and able-bodied. I don’t see either assumption as peculiar. Unless and until Western society stops categorizing people into the binary categories of male and female, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to expect the default human to identify with the gender category that’s the closest fit to his or her genitals.

You also mention the “diverse mosaic of human life.” Applying that to gender identification, even societies with three gender roles don’t encompass the entire spectrum of human anatomical variation, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them assume that people will be divided equally among the three categories.

Again, with the assumption of able-bodied status, I don’t see anything startling. The default status of a statistically average set of human chromosomes is to code for a person with four functional limbs and the standard suite of human senses. DNA transcription events, gestational issues, and accidents during and after birth all move people away from the deault state, but to expect a statistically average human to be blind, to be deaf, or to be without the use of a specific limb, is to misunderstand both statistics and biology. A reasonably large proportion of people in the real world do differ from the statistical default, but when the difference is between baseline (able-bodied) and the collected group of all variations from baseline, considering the default human to be able-bodied does not seem unrealistic to me.

Stick figures are powerful because they’re symbolic representations that can be customized in the viewer’s mind. Expecting human beings to avoid the impulse to categorize everything we experience, to recognize and represent every individual item, from grains of sand to animals to other human beings, is ultimately futile. To ask us to throw away all symbols for exact representations of individuals, specifically in this case to give up “default humans” in favor of crisply defined individuals in our artistic endeavors, is to reject one of the most powerful tools we have for thinking about our world. It’s just not going to happen.

As a white man i see stick figures in comics as the characters peopole put to them so if they say
“Im looking for a new bra” its female
or “My cock itches” its male

otherwise like ninty percent of people a stick person is a STICK PERSON

short formed to Stickman just like huMAN.

This is another non issue like HIStory is sexist because it doesnt contain HERstory.

These sterotypes your talking about are being perpetuated by you and your ilk and thats about it

I’m a big fan of hypercomics. I love how they make use of being a digital comic, whereas a lot of web comics could be converted to print form fairly easily. is a good example.