Do you read comics or webcomics?

[andrewducker]

If so, my friend Padmini would love to hear about your habits in a very short survey here (that page tells you what she's investigating - the survey itself is the link above "Hello World").

It's very quick (seriously, it took me less than two minutes to fill out), and it would be very much appreciated.

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

So, what exactly is the distinction between a comic and a webcomic? Most of the webcomics that I read are also available in print.

Isn't this almost exactly as misleading and pointless as the distinction between "comics" and "graphic novels"?

[andrewducker]

Pretty much all webcomics I read are from the single row our single page school. Most non-web ones are twenty-odd pages bound together.

The two formats seen to be produced by different people, and marketed in different ways.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

That's true for about half of those I read. They're standalone 3-4 panel comics equivalent to the traditional newspaper comic strip, which is unsurprisingly given that some of them (Red Meat, for example) moved from print to web in the late 90s.

Others, however, have ongoing narratives and look more like digest-sized comics published page by page (consider Questionable Content, or Scary Go Round).

To put it a different way, Dickens' novels were all originally published in installments. Does that make them different from a novel originally published in one volume?

[diotina.livejournal.com]

Hi, I'm Padmini-the creator of the survey. Interesting question!
To respond to the Dickens question: yes. The fact that the writing and publishing process was spread over time, and was influenced by such factors as fan mail makes it quite different from a scenario where Dickens would have approached his publisher with a complete manuscript.

In terms of format, what I'm interested in is that despite McCloud's formulating his 'infinite canvas' idea around ten or so years ago, webcomics still largely do imitate the page. I guess I'm thinking of 'comic' as print comic, which has no way of breaking out of the page format, whereas a webcomic has the potential to do so. Alt-text, though a rather facile example, does demonstrate there are definitely some things webcomics do that comics can't.

Hope that goes some way to answering your question?

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Hi Padmini,

I take your point regarding Dickens' ongoing revision of his novels in response to audience reaction, but isn't that also true of print comics where a narrative spans many issues. For example, it's pretty clear that Sim tweaked Cerebus because of (or in spite of) the reactions of his readers.

re: the infinite canvas, the only person who seems to be doing this to any great extent is still McCloud. Meanwhile, in the print arena we have people like Jason Shiga and Chris Ware who are doing far more with comic structure (principally spatial hypertext - Shiga's Meanwhile being a beautiful example) than I've seen on the Web (McCloud's Choose Your Own Carl aside).

Where a few webcomics seem to be distinguishing themselves is in the use of interactive elements (Michael Lalonde's Orneryboy, for example), although there are a few interactive print comics out there (the recent Ellis/D'Israeli SVK, for example).

Nick

[diotina.livejournal.com]

Re: Ware, I couldn't agree with you more--his creations can often defy digital, the crazy large format of Quimby the Mouse comes to mind, for example. However, the very nature of the comic app on smartphones takes the idea of the device as window almost automatically, given the constraints of size. I interviewed the creator of the Scott Pilgrim app (Robot Media) last week, and he confirmed that when they're migrating print content to phones they're not thinking about pages but panels and it's that shift I'm interested in.

Interactivity's definitely a factor to consider, and this isn't a contest--much the way we're coming to accept that p-books and e-books can co-exist, I'm pretty sure the same applies to comics...but what it does mean is that we're going to be seeing a wider variety of business models, especially now apps are becoming part of the comic reading market.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more of the dustjacket for Jimmy Corrigan, which I showed my MSc students in my lectures on hypertext last year; there's no single reading order (or even start point), but a strong visual grammar for things like temporal and spatial relations.

I quite like the panel-in-panel convention that Shiga uses in several of his books to indicate simultaneous but asymmetrically visible action, but it's hard to see how well that would work in an environment that limits the reader to viewing a single panel at a time (similarly, there are common page layouts involving juxtaposition of parallel action that wouldn't work as well when rendered panel by panel).

Thinking of other possible webcomic features, I'm actually a little disappointed that there's not more adaptivity (given the amount of work that's been done in the adaptive hypermedia and elearning communities over the years), but this is probably more to do with the costs of authoring adaptive works.

[andrewducker]

I'd say there was a difference between things published in instalments, and things published in a big chunk. Taking Questionable Content as an example there's clearly a punchline at the end of (almost) every page, which isn't something you tend to get with things published in longer chunks.

Whether most things are taking advantage of everything the web offers (like, say, the recent Hobo Lobo makes a stab at), is a very good question. I'd say most didn't.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen Hobo Lobo before - thanks for the pointer!

re: the episodic nature of some webcomics, you're right that some rely on punchlines at the end of each page, but this isn't true for all; Scary Go Round seems to manage pretty well without them, for example.

[tysolna]

*does the survey*

You know, this is also a great way to find new webcomics!

[andrewducker]

I'll do that in a poll tomorrow, if I remember!

[skington.livejournal.com]

I find the idea of a webcomic app for a smart phone baffling - why the hell would I read any type of graphical content on a small screen? (Not to mention that 40-odd webcomics opened in tabs is my favourite way of starting the day.)

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

The page you're linking to needs better formatting. It introduces the survey with no clue how to find it to take it.

[andrewducker]

Totally agreed - that's why I said where to find it in my post.