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Platform / Smack Jeeves

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The next generation of Webcomics is here.

Smack Jeeves was one of the oldest free webcomic hosting services on the internet, allowing users to upload and organize their own webcomics. Since 2005, Smack Jeeves had come to host over 47,000 comics online. It had a lot of yaoi and sprite (usually Sonic) comics, but also hosted some hidden gems.

One of the most popular webcomic hosts in the early 2000s, the site began to decline as The New '10s wore on, largely because little effort was made to make the site compatible with users on mobile devices (a mobile app was never produced), and competitors like Tapastic (later Tapas) and Webtoon emerged which filled this void, along with presenting pages in the more trendy Korean style (albeit at the expense of customizabilty and side content), and providing creators with opportunities to monetize their comics on-site. Gradually, many popular Smackjeeves creators migrated there.

Although explicitly pornographic comics were not allowed, this prohibition was often loosely enforced in the site's early years, and occasional nudity and sexual situations (as long as there was at least an ongoing Excuse Plot to break them up) were generally allowed to be displayed uncensored. This was one of the reasons why the site continued to be popular into The New '10s, as competitors like Tapas and Webtoon were much stricter about even non-sexualized nudity. However, once the site changed hands in the mid-2010s, the new owners began to crack down much more harshly on NSFW content, which helped to speed the site's collapse.

In early December 2019, the site's new owner launched a redesign which reduced the authors' ability to customize their pages by enforcing a uniform look and limiting strip sizes. The change also deleted blogs, cast, and info pages, stripped authors' ability to moderate comments, closed the community forums, and reset passwords deemed weak. This eliminated all of the things that kept Smackjeeves distinct from other webcomic sites, leading those authors who had remained (because they liked the Smackjeeves format) to leave in large numbers, mostly migrating over to ComicFury and other, similar sites.

In late August 2020 the site temporarily "region-locked" access from outside the US and Asia. The reason is rumored to be the refusal to abide to privacy laws of EU and countries that followed suit. This caused yet more people to leave, although by this point almost all of the few webcomics that still regularly updated there were mirrors that were also hosted elsewhere. Finally on November 3, 2020 the owner declared that the site would close on December 31.

According to this Reddit post some nice people managed to save 34,757 out of 36,100 comics before shutdown and uploaded them to archive.org. All webcomics that were neither hosted elsewhere nor preserved at archive.org should be considered lost.

Comics formerly hosted on Smack Jeeves:

Tropes commonly used on Smack Jeeves:

  • The Artifact: The name "Smack Jeeves" began as a parody of the name of the now long-forgotten search engine AskJeeves.com, whose mascot was a helpful butler named Jeeves.note  SmackJeeves, in turn, used an image of a cartoon butler getting slapped. As the original reference faded into obscurity, the butler-getting-slapped graphic was quietly abandoned, but the site's name remained.
  • Author Avatar: Especially for the sprite comics.
  • Boys' Love: Some of the most popular comics are about Boys' Love.
  • Development Hell: invokedA few comics have been known to restart more than once.
  • Filler Strips: There's an entire comic devoted to Filler Strips.
  • Schedule Slip: invokedAs with any webcomics.
  • Sprite Comic: Sprite comics are often hosted on this site.

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