Slashdot Mirror
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."
Then who are web hosting providers and ISPs?
Ah yes, it's been years since I've thought of comics; Archie & Jughead, Betty & Veronica, Darl McBride & the Goatse.cx guy...
Trolling is a art,
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.
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
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.
stuff |
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.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
So popular was the contest that the server suffered from a veritable slashdot effect.
Think they're ready for the real thing?
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
No Sluggy Freelance reference. This story describes what it calls "specialized" comics, but Sluggy seems to have wider appeal than much of what they describe.
There is no 'i' in team, but there is in fiasco...
I assume "The Rebirth of Comics" is following "The Death of Comics"? Anyone?!
Up next, "The Rebirth of Linux!"
I'm all for ANY distribution method where the artists actually get a sizaeble sum of the profits. .
Wouldn't "dramatic" or "tragic" books be a more apt name?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Does anyone remember the late stanlee.net?
Ah, such great expectations till it crashed:-p
I agree that specialized comics are probably one of the best things about webcomics. Plus, since they're not controlled by someone in a suit (unless the artist wears a suit) and they can have content that you might never see in a newspaper. The site of the character in Penny Arcade banging his head against the wall drawing lots of blood comes to mind, or zapping the N-Gage pimp with a cattle prod or whatever that was. I made a webcomic 'cause I had nothing to do while unemployed and needed some type of cheap creative outlet.
Kick in the Head
Megatokyo.com Machall.com
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Concentrating on the work of Scott McLoud it also mentions geek favourites Dilbert and The Matrix, among others.
Is this an unintentional spelling error of Scott's last name, or an intentional jab at what some people think of his ideals?
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
e-comics, e-books, et. al. just don't work for me because I cannot lie back on the sofa, sit on the toilet seat, read while eating, etc. Good old paper is my preference until there's a more handy way to read e-books. Handhelds don't work well for me either since they just don't contain as much information in 1 page as a book and require frequent scrolling.
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.
Interesting article about the same subject.
Summary (from the site): Although micropayment is a great thing in principle, existing implementations contain big problems which block their success. This article analyzes these problems and proposes a new solution without them. The solution lacks most traditional spending features, but still preserves the "spirit of micropayment".
Cheers! The Psychic Burrito
Anyone familiar with the publishing of Web-based ads -- you know, banners? banners with standard sizes and pricing for levels of traffic? -- could tell you that Web publishing faces some of the same constraints traditional paper models do.
Strips within Flash movies -- to use an example from the article -- just replace the four-panel, left-to-right constraint with another set of limitations. Have the right player? How big a monitor? Do sites that might want to syndicate your comic have a layout that'll accomodate your "infinite" canvas? Maybe we should agree on some standards to help people along... Sound familiar? Take a look at the flash-based ads you see around; they're a standard size, usually more or less square, so as to be set into a variety of text articles.
I'm not convinced that a subscription service is the model that'll reach critical mass, either. A dedicated site of comics for $3 a month will reach solid fans, but it won't have the same broad appeal as the funnies in your paper. And there was already a specialty market for graphic novels, right? We're talking about freeing the popular, daily strip from the tyranny of four-boxes-in-a-row. To do that you'd want to get to a sort of syndication model: ISPs might allow their users' custom home/news pages to include a certain comic, something like that. Again, you're facing some standardization to make something like that work.
It's a publishing thing, not just a magic Web thing.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
No fair! I demand the chance to get involved in any Slashdotting!
On a more serious note, Dilbert fans please note do *not* forget the "t" in the web address when at work.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
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...
got biv?
i host two sites that use a crappy bash CGI that I wrote... although they do the first 90% of the job, is anyone aware of any comic specific CRM packages available? I've been trying to teach myself enough PHP to finish a half written phpnuke module I wrote that does the same as the bash above, but I mean... c'mon. Admitting I wrote a CGI in bash is embarassing. Help a brother out with a handy hyperlink!
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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.
This one is sometimes pretty good.
Here's the LINK and the url: http://www.normalbobsmith.com/pfss_comic10.html
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
... at a theater near you. http://www.americansplendormovie.com/main.html
talking about webcomic, here's one I like a lot: A Modest Destiny, a few days ago, the owner's forum was kind of attacked by people From Mall Monkeys, who were jealous because AMD reach 3rd on the top web comic...
it's a hard business to be a web comic...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Think The Devil's Panties, which is probably one of the most creative comics I've ever seen. Always funny. Usually twisted. %-)
Some of my favorite weekly comic strips have made the journey from print (in news weeklies) to online. Presumably, these guys don't get paid to reprint their comics on the Web, but it increases their exposure and maybe convinces their fans to lobby to get them into local weeklies.
Tony Millionaire's Maakies is pure genius.
Try Underworld , by Kaz, if you want to tickle your cynical side.
Breakfast served all day!
I think these two comic formats have very different venues from each other. A comic book is meant to have more than a 10-second total viewing time, and usually has a more involved story and has a larger time to develop the action. The strip, on the other hand, must be satisfy the reader on a daily basis, and usually has to stick to formulaic jokes in three or four panels to succeed.
Correspondingly, in the physical world, the comic book is sold by itself, while the comic strip is tossed in amid a sea of other reading material(other comics, ads, articles...) and left to "sink or swim" as it will.
I think a similar dynamic applies online. The web-comic in strip format generally relies on advertising to succeed, but a full web-comic book might get somewhere through micropayments.
But I can say fairly confidently that nobody would pay money to view one strip.
not comics (more like an interactive cartoos)...but definately worth a look, and it definately shows off the media potential of the internet.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
Bill Watterson broke this a while back in the later years of his Calvin and Hobbes strips. Once he got popular enough to be able to dictate some things for artistic sake, he declared that his comics will only be published in a rectangular area where he has free rein inside, free from panels or any other limitation within. Most papers required all comics to be broken into panels so they can be arranged how they saw fit. Watterson hated those limitations, especially for a strip that was so involved with fantasy and imagination. Some papers had to actually shrink his area in order to keep the proportions right and for other comics to flow right around it, but he remained steadfast, and thats how the sunday strips were presented until he ended the strip, a strip still sorely missed by me and many others.
I used to really love Magic Inkwell by Cayetano Garza. He's been into this whole weird mexico-type stuff for a little while now that I don't really dig as much as his older stuff, but I still really like his style.
I find this to be quite true when I look at comics in the *.jp domain. Everything is right to left for some reason, and the characters speak in little picture symbols. Must be the Internatioanl Date Line.
I have a hard time with comics from the *.au domain, thought. They appear on my monitor upside down.
--- Ban humanity.
Bill Watterson's work on Calvin & Hobbes was absolutely brilliant.
I was really saddened when the strip came to an end.
Any word on what he's up to now?
Build boards not bombs
I can't believe that nobody's mentioned e-sheep yet. e-sheep rocks! Apocamon, The Spiders, Barracuda, they're all great. And jwz loves 'em too.
Anything you can do, I can do meta.
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. I don't even know how one would begin to value jpgs and gifs. Will the print versions always be more valuable just because of rarity? What if there is no print version?
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. Seriously. the other day at a comic book shop two of the clerks were slapping shipping tape on each other's heads and drawing on them with magic markers. Don't ask me why. All I can say is, if that were going on in your local Barnes & Noble bookstore many people would say, the help there is retarded, we're not shopping there anymore. Only in a comic book store have I had clerks look at what I was buying and make inane comments like, "This shit scares me". Luckilly I'm used to that kind of crap so I keep going back for more (a couple of comic-cons will harden you up for that kind of banter). I've also had a few embarassing experiences when I take someone into a comic book store for the first time, and all they can focus on are the anime chicks with huge boobs. How many of them there are and how large are the boobs. So many potential customers leave the stores thinking most of the comics out there center around muscle-bound super heroes and over-sexed babes with huge boobs. And I guess, truth be told, this is actually an accurate observation. But many people just don't look beyond that to realize there's other kinds of comics out there.
I guess if you LIKE that kind of experience, then comic stores are enjoyable but my point is, I think in general the "comic book store experience" is detrimental to the comics industry and in fact is a barrier to comics gaining a wider audience. It's the image, the types of people that shop / work there, the attitudes of store owners that customers aren't a priority, etc.
Sexy Losers
You may be grossed out by a few of them at first, but they are just so funny.
I'm a fan of Irregular Webcomic, which seems more innovative than any of the examples mentioned in the article. The comics are pictures taken with a camera, rather than drawn. Generally pictures of Legos or painted miniatures, with some shots of the script's creator in there.
Lots of funny strips, especially the Star Wars ones.
Most of the webcomics out there that are generating profit from their sites are doing so because they never had that intention to begin with. They set out to do something they enjoyed that they hoped others would also. For a webcomic to be successful, the creators have to enjoy it, because it's a lot of work and it takes a long time to build a fanbase, let alone start making money.
The webcomic I write, BandWich, has a very limited fanbase despite being having been around well over a year. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication for a webcomic to be successful in such a saturated field.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
I really respected his decision not to license any Calvin & Hobbes products, although I did think perhaps a single item- a simple plush Hobbes doll identical to the "toy" Hobbes in the strip- would have been cool. There's also a part of me that feels a *little* fan service is a good thing.
And I still I think C&H could make a killer cartoon in the right hands.
--- Ban humanity.
SinFest
RedMeat
Ok, RedMeat is in a few papers, but it still rocks.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Watterson went way out on a limb with that decision but he felt it was the right thing to do - and he was very right! He lost space in a lot of papers (my parents got both of the big local Sunday papers and I'd always go for one in particular because they printed C&H properly - large) and lost some papers altogether, but the art was worth the sacrifice.
I still have the final C&H strip tucked away in my high school yearbook. Yeah, it was a little cheezy. So what.
I too miss C&H but I'm glad that Watterson went out on top instead of letting the stories get recycled and old. He left on his terms at a point where we could never say "hey, C&H was great until...", unlike other cartoons featuring an orange feline which should have been put to rest a long time ago.
Our universirty system allows us to pillage the intellectual capital of all these third-world nations. This is why they'll always be doing yesterday's technology - we stole all their best minds.
The other thing is that new, innovative companies won't start up overseas. R&D jobs don't go overseas. Hell, they don't even leave the US east and west coast, for the most part. Let's talk about tech jobs going overseas after they even hit the US midwest. If you're truly working on something high-tech, today's high-tech, you'll never have to worry about your job moving.
Ultimately, what xenophobes need to realize is that writing shitty code doesn't make anyone "high-tech." You're no more entitled to an inflater salary than the auto workers who saw their work moved overseas - if someone with no education can do your job cheaper, you don't deserve your job.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As long as it isn't too good. Scott Adams in his retrospective book (Seven Years Of Highly Defective People) said that he received complaints when he started using a computer to do lettering when he was having some issues with a hand injury. It was one of those fonts design to look like hand lettering. Personally, I don't think I would have noticed if he hadn't brought attention to it. As long as it's legible, the text blaoons are sort of invisible to me after so many years of reading comics of all kinds. I read the text without thinking that I am reading text.
--- Ban humanity.
How much do you think he's pulling in through donations? Is it enough to keep him over the poverty level? Maybe I'm just cynical, but I would imagine if he's able to do this, he's a single guy with no kids and low expenses.
In the spirit of those people promoting their own stupid comic strips, I'll mention my established Album-a-day project , wherein participants are challenged to create an entire album in one 24-hour period. There's like 60 albums there.
Crap is good, because
1) it means someone is taking risks
2) someone is trying to do stuff
3) you never know what will turn out good
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
8-bit Theater. Remember Fighter, Thief, Red Mage, and Black Mage from Final Fantasy? Well, they're the main characters in this strip. Archives go back a year or two. Rather entertaining.
d+pad covers the goings-on at a video game store. The artwork is pretty crude, but if you're into the gaming world at all, you'll enjoy it.
Goats is a VERY disturbing strip. The early artwork was a lot less refined than it is now, but how can you go wrong with a strip that involves overclocked lemons and a Satanic chicken named Diablo?
PvP is a strip about a fictional gaming magazine. Sometimes crass and goofy, but often hilarious (go to any geek gathering and see how many people laugh when you shout "Panda attack!"). I know I'd subscribe to any magazine that had a 300-year-old blue troll as an intern.
And, of course, Sluggy Freelance. Best. Webcomic. Ever. But you really have to go all the way back to the beginning of the archives. There's years of great stuff in there. (Worship Bun-bun!)
I know that no day is complete without reading all my webcomics... which is really easy using bookmarked tabs in Mozilla. I just click on one bookmark, and the browser opens up a dozen separate tabs with all my comics loaded.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Komikwerks.com is a web comics site that has been successful enough to launch a print anthology. A wide range of comics well worth a look for comics fans the world over.
Second soul, and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power. Light. -WSB
Here's my favorite: College Roomies from Hell. If you thought college was Hell, wait till you meet your roommates!
:)
Because the tentacle freak said so.
Luis
--- Sueños del Sur - a webcomic about four young siblings
Jerkcity is the best web comic. This has been proven objectively, using science.
On a similar note, one site (that I know of) was trying to start charging for recieving comics through one's e-mail. It seems that after they realized that no one was going to pay for the comics they can read ON THE SITE, that the plan was modified, to if a person wants to read MORE than one comic through their e-mail. Granted, I'm only interested in getting Dilbert through my e-mail, so I don't know if there have been any other changes. Let's pay for things that should be free!!
"People are not born bastards. They have to work at it." ~Rod McKuen~
Offshore American High-Tech is one of the funniest yet most under-rated webcomics out there.
-Ghastly
as a collector of comics for over 20 years, the things I see as a problem are:
online comics can't be read in bed or on the shitter unless you print them out - and who's going to do that for one strip?
online comics can't be collected.
However, I am impressed that some comics like User Friendly, PvP, Dungeon (I think that's its name?), and others have been collected in trades and/or normal comics. It does show that some webcomic creators do have what it takes to make it in the world of "real comics."
But that's part of the problem. MOST, not all, but most webcomics are very very low quality, unfunny, or contain copyrighted material - i.e.; sprite comics.
In time, I think this will be more viable as a business, but this isn't the time. And this isn't a rebirth. It's just somebody realising what's been going on for nigh on a decade.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
Marvel initiated a "web comics" version of their popular comic books a few years back called DotComics.
During that time, they had a full issues of Ultimate Spider-man and Ultimate X-Men released every month in Flash format. The UI is pretty interesting, as each comic panel is magnified as the story goes. There's advertisement in between.
I haven't been on DotComic for a while (a year or two), notably because they started having only the first half of the comic books as a trailer, and also some of their titles fell behind schedule online. Looking at it now, there's quite a few titles under the free section, and there's many more under the members section (which IIRC, is a free registration.)
But I think it's still an effective marketing strategy because I actually enjoyed these comics and read them when I otherwise wouldn't have. The writing was excellent, and the art was very nice. And I'm sure I told at least 2 or 3 people about the site. And now, I'm actually buying the actual comic books because it got me hooked.
(I just bought the hardcover version of Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 1, which collects #1-13 and I'm still collecting Ultimate X-Men.)
I love to read comics on the net and my favorite is the well known General Protection Fault (GPF). I would really like to support the page but buying the books is not my top priority, because I already have the content on my HDD. I'd like to subscribe, but that is only possible for $4.95 a month (ok, a little cheaper if you subscribe for longer but still)... I know that this includes premium access to a lot of other comics too but I don't really want to read them, I want to read GPF. If I'd had to pay a buck a month or maybe even less, that's what I would conside a micropayment - and that is what the internet is still waaay lacking.
Btw, if anyone wants to start reading it but is new, read it from the beginning. It's worth it and otherwise you won't really understand all of what's going on.
~Squisher
It's at www.sinfest.net.
As long as it's legible, the text blaoons are sort of invisible to me after so many years of reading comics of all kinds. I read the text without thinking that I am reading text.
I don't know about that... Penny Arcade always uses fonts, and I don't consider it any huge travesty, but I think hand-lettering does give the comic a certain personality. It's kind of a subtle thing, and it's certainly not the most important part of the comic, but it's nice to see different artists' lettering styles. Some of the big sound-effect type text can be kinda neat, too. I have to say, though, I'd rather see a nice, readable font than chicken scractch.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
In general, voice talent for online content is grotesque. But for comics it's positively criminal.
Why?
Because when comic artists use their own, untrained voices to act out the lines they write, you can hear every bit of their insecurity, apprehension, false bravado, delusion, and contempt.
And if they use their friends', you can hear their inability to understand the material, as well, which is a failure of both acting and directing.
(This problem extends to Pam Anderson's "performance" in Striperella on the actual television, so don't expect it to get better online just because a few people pro-up.)
(Okay, Homestar Runner isn't too bad, but after six or eight characters, they hit their limit, and now it's undeniably The Strongbad Show featuring Homestar Runner.)
$0.25 is NOT a micropayment! A decipayment, maybe. Quite a stretch to being a millipayment.
Where's the truth in advertizing about this MICROpayment #>(%!^@ (r^p?
One nice thing about webcomics, is that anyone can do one, ie: me.
I have actually been doing mine two days a week for over a year on keenspace.com, and have really enjoyed it. Since the hosting is free, the only thing I have to worry about is setting aside the time to do it - usually at 2am.
It's really been a good creative outlet, and I've even written a game to go along with it. And though it's not a stand-up great comic, I do have a few fans.
As far as goals, I don't make any money from it, and don't ever really expect to, but I'll keep doing it because I enjoy it.
Yeah, I have a webcomic...
One of the comics in the 24 hour gallery is mine! :D (It's Tabeshounen, hint hint)
Thanks to the Intarweb it's been a lot easier to get publicity for an Australian (or any indie) comic. The article was really focused on web comics, but there's still a great zine/small press scene happening here. Now all we need to do is get more of the female creators (there are a lot!) into the spotlight and everything'll be just peachy.
http://morningstar.curvedspaces.com
I'm doing a graphic novel story, rather than a funnies-style strip.
Updates are a bit erratic at the moment, but I hope to improve on that once I make the move to Keenspace ("any day now"). There's some technical issue with the domain... sigh
Web publishing of comics (or any other creative media, for that matter) is important, because it gives everybody the ability to contribute something to the world, if they want to. This project wouldn't have got off the ground at all, without the option of putting it on the web; there's no way I could afford to self-publish Morningstar in print at this point.
(If you decide to check it out, I'd appreciate receiving any feedback... morningstar at tpg dot com dot au.)
Personally I preffer to flip through my comic books, rather than clicking. That isn't to say I don't like online comic strips, such as Penny-Arcade but that is a strip. The act of fliping back and forth, feeling the paper and smelling a fresh book, noting the differance between new books and old ones. I enjoy it, maybe it's just me.
Here's a shameless plug for my own webcomics website:
Apokalupsis Comics
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
Take some time to visit e-sheep and look at *everything*. Clear your desk first because you'll be there a while.
Prepare to be moved.
And if you're half as impressed as I was, don't forget to throw some pennies in the hat. We need to keep Patrick hard at work, he deserves to make a living at this and it would be our loss if he were to give up cartooning owing to lack of funds.
Richard Stevens has garnered a lot of my respect, and besides -- Clango rules!
Yay, Tabeshounen! This just shows everyone else that you rock Tsuzuki^_^ *plugs webcomic* http://www.kyrn.org/studio/
catgirls and fairies