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Comics Escape a Paper Box and Evolve to the Web
securitas writes "The New York Times' Sarah Boxer takes a look at the evolution of comics from paper to the Internet and asks: 'It's drawn and it's written, but is it still comics?' She cites Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics '...in which he argued that the future of comics is on the Web.' Also cited in the article are Copper by Kazu Kibuishi, found on boltcity.com and The Discovery of Spoons by Alexander Danner and John Barber, found at twentysevenletters.com, as well as several others. The article links to an angry attack by Gary Groth of Fantagraphics against McCloud and his views in Reinventing Comics."
But addressing the point... Whether it's the funnies available on many newspaper sites or indie stuff like pennyarcade.com, I believe that a comic is defined by the narrative format, both in terms of length, and in terms of having "shots" enclosed in panels. The long ones you can call "graphic novels" if you want, but they're still comics in my mind. And whether they're delivered digitally or in print, they're comics.
Where the border blurs, IMO, is when the panels are animated: still being laid out as a comic, but each panel having more action/content than a printed panel could (possibly with sound as well). I think that's the way digital media is breaking down many old formats and (uggghhh, about to use corporate-speak) creating a new paradigm. It's allowing older mediums to evolve and incorporate new elements that, if not breaking them out of old boxes, allow them to push the envelope of what the status-quo would consider their format to be.
Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
The article gets this funny perspective where is hails McCloud for his "vision", and then comes down on him for that vision not being fulfilled.
That "vision" is identifying the need of comics to "go digital", but then argues that those comics that have done so are fruitless, because they either resemble animation, or are still trapped in little boxes.
That seems a little odd to me. For as cool as computers are, they are limited by human perception, and if you are going to accuse any moving animation of being "really more like animated cartoons", and accuse any still comic of being trapped in a box, an limmit your horizons of criticism to that, well, I think you're stuck.
Nowhere does the article mention homestar runner. I'm not a fanboi at all, I haven't seen it in almost 2 years now, but let's be fair: Homestar runner's a "comic" that has really used what technology offers quite well.
I reckon that those comics that embrace the "digital revolution" (not my language, that's from the article, thank you) are those that use the user as part of the comic experience. While the user's input isn't much of Homsestar runner, there certainly is an element of that, and I imagine future online comics that really can offer something new are those that will make the user's experience an increasingly integral part of exposition.
Maybe something like choose your own adventures, maybe something blog-ish where user submissions/comments are included as a vital part of the comic, I dunno. Hell, maybe something where the die-hard users become characters themselves.
*Anyway*, I think the author of the article wasn't thinking too hard about this one. She seemed to have a destination in mind when she started, and didn't make too much of an effort to see where the box v. animation paradigm might be starting to break down.
There are big differences here. The print format has the giant advantage that you tend to see comics other than your "favorites," because you can't help but read those nearby; you may get exposed to lots of artists including a great one or two. I would never have known a damn thing about newspaper comics if I had started reading them online.
But for each individual artist the online format is much more liberating. All of a sudden restrictions on size are completely gone; much more detail can be stuffed into each frame without it being reduced into illegibility. Color can be used every day, not just Sunday, and even the format can be changed in whatever way the artist likes (assuming he is willing to do separate versions of the comic for print and online).
Of course, the online "liberation" requires a new level of discipline from the artist. The truly great newspaper cartoonists were/are great because they can convey either jokes, an entire world, or both through a necessarily very simple and limited medium. Great online cartoonists will have a different set of skills, more akin to those of comic-book creators or even visual artists.
All this leaves aside the question of how much computer assistance is valuable in the daily-comic medium. Most artists use computers extensively these days; to my eye, the most successful are those such as Tom Tomorrow and Aaron McGruder whose styles deliberately showcase electronic techniques and are unafraid to admit it.
From Penny Arcade, one of those comics that actually, you know, pays a living wage to its creators.
If you want to do webcomics as art, then sure, do it the Scott McCloud way, and suffer for your art. If you want to actually make a living at it, i.e. a full time job that allows you the time to do it professionally, then sticking to formats that actually lend themselves to serialisation, syndication or page-by-page paying adverts is probably a better idea than relying on the cloud of fairies to pay your rent.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
IMO, the number one force in changing the world of comics in the last twenty years has been the influence of Bill Waterson. Other comic strip artists (well, the ones who were paying attention) have picked up two things as a result of his strip.
The first is that the strip needs to engage the reader every single day; I think other comic strip artists had known that in the past, but they had forgotten it, and the comic strips of the 1980s were a bland world wherein out of an entire page of comics, with eight or ten strips, the reader hoped to get a chuckle out of one of them. That trend has reversed now, thanks in large part to Waterson.
The second thing, however, is in the long term probably the more important influence of Waterson's work -- not because it's not important to engage the reader every day, but because the other strips would have figured that out anyway. But Waterson was the one who rebelled against the constrained panel layout that the newspapers and syndicates had been enforcing on everyone and experimented with more interesting layouts. This has inspired other strips, and will presumably continue to do so. Most strips still fit in the standard panel layouts, but the door has been opened for other possibilities.
And that's where we come back to topic, because publishing on the web gives comic strip artists the opportunity to do, layout-wise, whatever they want. Some of them are taking advantage of that. This is the beginning of a whole new *kind*, IMO, of comic strip.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.