The Rebirth of Comics

Malfourmed writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is running a story on web based comics and how the new medium can change the traditional "left-to-right in a rectangular frame" paradigm. Concentrating on the work of Scott McLoud it also mentions geek favourites Dilbert and The Matrix, among others. Micropayments are discussed, with the article claiming that after you pay your 25 cents "most of which goes straight to McCloud, cutting out the middlemen that make it difficult for comic artists to make a living from their work, and in the process doing justice to their talents." One of the more interesting sites discussed is the Oz Comics 24 Hour Gallery, the result of a competition in which artists had 24 hours to create an original, 24-page comic. So popular was the contest that the server suffered from a veritable slashdot effect."

Comments

Some Fun Game Related Comics

[larsoncc]

I check Penny Arcade, Little Gamers, and Real Life Comics an awful lot. Probably too much to be healthy.

Why? Because the web provides me access to humor that is very, VERY specialized. Find comics like these in a Sunday Paper, or a comic shop, or anywhere else.

Comics online will go up as bandwidth does

[192939495969798999]

I think that media like comics, video, etc. will start to flourish online with things like Micropayments, but more with the increase of bandwidth. It is remarkably difficult to set up a server that will receive & redistribute 10,000 comic strips a day, versus one that just gets 10,000 hits per day.

Unfortunatley.

[anonymous coword]

A lot of the web comics are poor quality, make obvious jokes, and have lame characters. Sure there are some good ones. and I do like the cheap laughts, but reducing the barrier to entry also reduce the quality level.

Re:Unfortunatley.

[jandrese]

Yeah, these guys should strive for the level of quality found on the comics page of your local paper where the jokes are always fresh and the characters interesting...

If you hadn't noticed, 90% of the comics page is stuck in a rut so big it's been reclassified as a box canyon. It seems that paper editors choose the least offensive most watered down cheap fare they can find for the comics page. This practice has turned the whole thing into a tremendous waste of time, as the same few jokes are told over and over again by the same old tired characters.

so, what are the Lockhearts up to this week? Fighting again? Andy Capp is in a bar or falling down drunk? BC is preaching again? Ooh! The Family Circus has another one of those dotted line things.

I recall

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember an article that Scott Kurtz (pvponline.com) posted a while back, on how the sunday comics haven't been funny for the past 10 years. Blondie, while starting off in the depression, actually had a plot based on romeo and juliet, with unlikely characters Blondie and Dagwood. Anymore, it just doesn't have the magic, or the humor. The great thing about web comics is that they do not have to have an audience in order to thrive. The greats like Penny-arcade, Megatokyo, and Mac Hall, are all very specialized and niche-based humor. Whereas, in a syndicated comic, it would be hard to be successful while making jokes about video games, anime, and other relatively 'outside' subjects.

Not to mention the fact that free hosting and no need for an editor produces a lot of general crap, but that's really just the price to pay for the really good quality webcomics that are out there.

Books vs. Strips

[shelleymonster]

The article is also mixing comic books and comic strips. Sure, stuff like Dilbert , User Friendly, The Boondocks, and Achewood work well on the web. They're short and easy to read. Most people who read comic books, however, relish the strip to the store, holding it in their hands, filling up the long white boxes...

web comics ... sigh

[YllabianBitPipe]

Ah another comic thread on /. I really like the idea of web comics but the comic world is going to run into the same problems the music biz is dealing with. First off, there's a lot of people saying, let's do a comic on the web, it's so cheap, we'll get more of an audience, we don't have to go through a publisher. Well, then there's the whole issue of how do artists get paid, how do artists keep their work from getting ripped off, etc. but I think a lot of these topics miss a key element of web comics ... is the medium even appropriate for the type of comics that you create?

I think the type of comics that are most suited for the web are strip comics like the dailies in your local newspaper. Reading a graphic novel on a computer screen via the web is, frankly, a huge pain in the ass. I don't care how you present it, panels to fit the screen, no scrolling, click on the image to go the next page, I just find it tedious. The content is too long for the medium in my opinion. And I WANT to read graphic novels ... it just seems like, not on the web. I think what needs to change is, higher resolution monitors.

So I think graphic novel type stuff CAN work on the web, it just needs to be created with the web in mind from the beginning. Make the pictures standard screen size, use nice readable anti aliased fonts, make the art appropriate for web reading: large, not tons of tiny characters that look like blurs, and LENGTH. I don't really want to click through 100 images and bore myself to death.

And, I would argue, as soon as you start thinking of putting multimedia geegaws like audio, just go Flash all the way and animate your whole project.

homestarrunner.com

[efflux]

not comics (more like an interactive cartoos)...but definately worth a look, and it definately shows off the media potential of the internet.

Re:Good point

[ChaosDiscord]

The comic book store is another story. While for the average comic book reader, the comic book store is part of the experience, I think a lot of people are afraid of comic book stores.

True enough. That's because some comic book stores suck. There are also excellent comic book stores where the staff are professional and friendly, the "heroically proportioned" comics aren't shoved in your face, and the "weird" comics that will creep many people out are a bit out of the way. If you're in Madison, Wisconsin Capital City Comics is great. It's comfortable enough that my mom shops there (she's not a comic book geek, or really much of a geek at all, but she discovered that she enjoys the Star Wars comics).

If your local comic book store sucks, see what you can do to improve it. At the very least let the owner know that you think his antics are harming his reputation. If that doesn't work, look for another store within your shopping radius. In the worst case, move to strictly mail order (if you need unusual stuff, many local stores like Capital City Comics will ship just about anywhere). As long as you keep going you're saying that the behavior you're seeing is acceptable.

I think the web (as I posted below) is most suited to strip comics. Not graphic novels or comic books. But collecting, I agree, is a huge deal to many comic book collectors. There is no value in an "issue 1" of a website comic, if it's been blasted all over the web.

Comic book collectors? I think you mean "speculators," the idiots responsible for the comic industry bubble and crash in the 90s. The majority of the "value" that they created existed only from the price inflation, the original publisher saw little to nothing of it.

The core of the industry's customers remain people who just want to read good stuff. We buy it so we can re-read it later and share it with others. We re-purchase collections of comics we already have so we have an easier to store and share copy. I eagerly collect print versions of web comics I love. (This isn't a new idea, print collections of newspaper comics also sell very well, in many cases better than traditional comic books.) The lack of rareness will do minimal damage to the value.

As for not being suitable for comic books, that perception is changing. One of the most popular comics, Megatokyo is pushing the edges of a strip comic. At his current rate (about 10 pages a month), he's publishing the equivalent of a 20 page black and white comic every two months, a respectible rate for an independent comic. He's just chosen to release it page by page every few days instead of in comic sized chunks every two months.