Both comics and memes rely on the same interplay of visual and verbal elements for their humor.

It's undeniable that the rise of the Internet had a profound impact on cartooning as a profession, giving cartoonists both new tools and a new publishing and/or distribution medium. Online culture also spawned the emergence of viral memes in the late 1990s. Michelle Ann Abate, an English professor at The Ohio State University, argues in a paper published in INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, that memes—specifically, image macros—represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and creative ways in which they operate.

"One of my areas of specialty has been graphic novels and comics," Abate told Ars. "I've published multiple books on various aspects of comics history and various titles: everything from Charles Schulz's Peanuts to The Far Side, to Little Lulu to Ziggy to The Family Circus. So I've been working on comics as part of the genres and texts and time periods that I look at for many years now."

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