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

Scott McLoud??

[Anonymous Coward]

I read all the way up until I saw the name "Scott McLoud" and realized this article would be a waste of my time. The man is a pretentious ass and I'm surprised any publication still takes him seriously.

Site is slashdotted! Here's the text

[scumbucket]

The rebirth of comics

Mild-mannered cartoonist Scott McCloud is fighting for freedom and justice. Working from an office in California, the 40-ish father of two is using his Wacom graphics tablet, and Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Flash software to free his comic books from the confines of the printed page. Many are following his example.

McCloud, regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on comics, has taken his fight online because he believes the web can liberate comics by offering an "infinite canvas". He is one of many authors using the web to breathe new life into comics - transforming the familiar genre into a colourful, dynamic and interactive experience.

Online, comics fill pages of almost any size, allowing artists to ignore the conventional pattern of sequential panels read left-to-right and framed in a rectangle.

"When digital media comes into collision with an art form like comics, it has the ability to bring out what is unique about the medium," McCloud says. "In comics, things change right away. You're no longer confined to a rectangle. You can create a map of time that you move into and navigate through in ways unlike any other art form."

McCloud's work offers excellent examples of his theories. One of his web comics, My Obsession with Chess, tells the story of how his teenage obsession with chess led indirectly to his career in comics. The story scrolls downwards for over five metres, moves from side to side in a chessboard pattern and is engaging, if only because readers must work out how to read the comic at the same time as digesting the thoroughly interesting story.

Another of his works, The Right Number, adopts a new form for comics. Produced in Macromedia Flash - a tool that adds animation and interactivity to web pages and requires the reader's browser to have a Flash plug-in installed - each panel of the comic appears from within the previous panel. The concept of pages has been abandoned in favour of a tunnelling effect, with each new panel zooming out towards the reader and awaiting a further click to progress to the next part of the story. "As a graphic designer might put it, we've moved off the X and Y axis to the Z axis," McCloud says.

McCloud is far from alone with his online experiments. Dilbert creator Scott Adams included the www.dilbert.com address in each of his daily comic strips and found their presence in newspapers quickly built the audience that helped turn his anthologies into bestsellers. Rob Malda also scripts his homosexual adventures daily at slashdot.org.

The hyperactive Wachowski brothers, writers/directors of The Matrix trilogy, were also early users of web comics. The first Matrix film was accompanied by online comics that fleshed out their dystopian universe with material perhaps too dark to have the broad appeal of the movie, but more than capable of building loyalty among fans.

Thousands of web comics have since sprung up, with one site, OnlineComics.net, linking to more than 1700. The comics range from short comic strips updated daily to sprawling graphic novels published in unscheduled but eagerly awaited chunks several pages long. And they are growing in popularity: McCloud's The Right Numbers was read by more than 1500 paying readers within weeks of publication. Electric Sheep counts its readers in the tens of thousands.

Superheroes have muscled in on the action, too. The Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil and Marvel's familiar crew take on a whole new dimension in Marvel's dotcomics. The site uses Macromedia's Flash plug-in to replace the familiar process of turning the page with an interactive experience that helps get you inside the hero's head.

Every panel of the dotcomics is clickable, making speech balloons an insight into the characters' thoughts as you progress. Pop-up mini-profiles of each comic's heroes and villains enhance the action too, creating a new experience unimaginable in the offline world.

Web comics offer many other new reading experiences, alt

Re:all for it

[grub]

Kazaa?