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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
Comics are in the intarweb now?
sheesh... what next? Places where you can buy stuff?
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
First, lets take newspaper comics, in terms of format - typical 3-panel blurb except for Sundays. To be honest, there's really no real difference between having them in print on the newspaper or having them online - neither method of distribution makes a difference in this implicitly limited format. Though it would be nice to see Penny Arcade in the Union Tribune.
On the other hand, I believe having real comic books published online would be a boon for the industry. I have a good friend that runs a comic shop, and I frequent it regularly - I'm quite possibly the youngest customer (16) that my friend has. Everyone who shops there is either a 'Comic-Book-Guy'esque collector or some old dude reminiscing about his kid days. Paper comics are great things, but their manner of distribution towards the audience (teenagers, younger kids) is out of touch with this generation.
The future of the narrative comic with real storylines and interesting people has to be online - that's where you'll find your waiting audience. Webcomics for the most part don't have stale and old plots, nor do they have coughed up variants of the same characters. If DC/Marvel had a decent online presence and started making original comics again, Keenspot and the rest of the webcomic industry would be hard-pressed.
If you can change the media from print to web and still call it a comic, why not from print to big screen? Personally, if i can't feel the shitty paper, and smell that shitty ink, it aint no comic. Don't get me wrong, I'm no luddite; I read more ebooks than printed, for the last several years. I'd just prefer a new moniker for the online comics. Hey, here's a catchy one that the kids'll love -- E comic!
I am not left-handed, either!
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.
I'm not surprised to see this article here, but if you click here you'll find a good disection of the piece. Here's a small snippet that summarises the post:
Boxer's research would barely qualify for a Freshman Comp essay, much less a piece of journalism in a newspaper of record. She seems to have drawn her information off of several Comics Journal articles, read Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, and looked at the Web Cartoonists Choice Awards.
Well, at least she dipped her toe into webcomics before declaring it a failed experiment.
I found that blog post (yes! It's a blog post! Oh noes!) much more interesting (and informative as well as correct) then the actual news paper article itself.
There is a new genre of comics appearing that are both digital and portable like this outstanding one that's specifically aims at the Sony PSP. Some of them (like this one) are also have a Creative Commons license so readers are positively encouraged to remix it.
most of the webcomics i've read aren't remotely funny, interesting or worth the webspace
You're right. this is so derivative unlike those original paper comics. And yet, you read them. They must be doing something right.
how many fucking comics do we need about, some loser with some stupid talking furry animal. along with all those stupid chars that you couldn't care less about?
Oh I agree I don't know how anyone could care about these characters
of course don't forget the utter lack of good artwork for most of them Agreed. These hacks should be shot for the good of man-kind.
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.
Mod me down -5 Offtopic Idiot, but it took me 3 or 4 readings of that sentence to figure out what the hell he's is talking about, an I'm still not sure.
Short of Marvel's dotComics, which are usually 6 month old storylines set into flash. There are not alot of comic books online. DC has some cheesy lame-ass scroll all over to read comic thing on their site and there's always torrents and the CBR program but I find it miserable reading comics on a screen. The article seems to be more about web comic strips which are in no way new or news. Moving to E - comics or whatever is NOT a good idea financially for comic book companies because already they are free and I think that's the ONLY way anybody would be willing to be subjected to that experience.
To define a comic, as I believe the article is suggesting, as a sequence of drawings, constrained by length/other matters, is the same thing as saying a poem is only a poem if it is iambic pentameter. Really, I think Mrs. Boxor (writer) has her head on backwards if she's trying to define a comic and say that web comics arn't so much comics, and I hope somebody slaps sense into her, if at all possible.
Yes.
Where are the media getting their reporters these days? Rejects from beauty school?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Possibly one of the greatest webcomics since the inception of webcomics is Dinosaur Comics.
Strictly speaking, it's not a comic, because the art never changes. It's identical day in, day out, and that's completely intentional. Read a few, and you'll agree with me that it is quite a comic regardless of how it is not a stereotypical comic.
Everyone should read Leisure Town ( http://www.leisuretown.com/ ). I am saying this because I totally love that comic. It's one of those things that manages to be amazingly stupid and mindboggling intelligent at the same time. It's fantasticly cheezy and infinitely stylish. It tackles both serious and lightweight issues. I does contain both good and great artwork. For an example of the latter, read "The Dog Mess" (Wasn't this called "The Dog Messiah" previously? Is my mind playing tricks on me?)
The story "What do people do all day" contains a joke so potent that I've pretty much been telling it two times a month since I first read it. It single handedly got me beaten up in the bathroom of the bar "99 bottles" in Santa Cruz. Or perhaps it had a little help from some of those 99 bottles, but I don't think I could have done it without the help from the joke.
If I'm not mistaken, the creator of Leisure Town is also the original author of "the Dilbert Hole", which I found amazingly funny. The strips can be found in the fantastic "A Comedy Crisis" on the Leisure Town site, although the script is played out by bunnies instead of Dilberts.
Leisure Town caters to all audiences, both wankers and techheads. You owe it to yourself to check it out, because chances are you are in fact both.
And while I'm at it, fanboying and meat puppeting, I need to shamelessly plug my own creation, the GladHeads. You can find it here: http://www.pacheads.com/
...isn't paper still better for comics? I pick up Dilbert in my mail box every morning, but thats because its a 3 pane comic that takes less than 20 secs to read. I couldn't imagine sitting down to read a graphic novel in front of my PC anymore than I could imagine sitting down in front of a PC to read a book. I know some die hards can do it, but I'm not one of them.
The paper interface rocks. Zero eye strain, intuitive, future proof, pretty cheap and very portable. Its rubbish at animation and sound, and the searching facility can only be described as rudimentry (even with a good index). Its also renewable and recyclable.
The only reason I can see artists moving from print to html to because of startup cost and creative control. All power to them - thats what the digital revolution is all about! But with that come piracy and constant struggle to figure out a way to make people pay for something which is percieved as free. I'd probably be more inclined to subscribe to a comic site than a news site, but I'm also more tollerant of advertising surrounding information as opposed art.
Can you imagine reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance only to be forced to click through an advert for OCC after every page?
Comics should be affordable to young, imaginative minds, and should be accessible as such. The web sucks for that as, however much you try, you can't just stick your pocket money in your PC and get a comic out. Even if we give children credit cards thats still a bad deal for artists, as cards are rubbish for micropayments. We shall see...
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Next week:
Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem takes a look at the evolution of newspapers from paper to the Internet and asks: 'It's investigated and it's written, but is it still newspapers?'
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Okay, guys, it's time to test our company's newest product..
Let's turn the Simplificator to level 1!
Everyone knows that when a new area of business opens up, lots of exaggerated claims are made -- and then later it's easy to see that those claims were just propaganda and have nothing to do with what actually happened.
Hmm, good -- but not simple enough! Let's crank up the power a bit and turn to level TEN!
Whenever a new world opens up, some pompous twits will sound off about it, but the clamor dies down and is forgotten in time.
Short and to the point! Now, let's put on our goggles and lead coats, and turn it UP TO ELEVEN!
Scott McCloud is a pretentious idiot, but the comics business will carry on regardless. Duh.
Hooray for the Simplificator! It cut to the very heart of the discourse -- and the only damage was some trivial radiation leaking!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
That sentence struck me as fairly amusing.
We started drawing our comic (link below) over a year ago, put it exclusively on the internet, and (oddly enough) grew such a devoted and wonderful audience, that we're printing a "best-of" collection this fall. We went from internet to paper.
So in a way, I guess we're the opposite of what Sarah Boxer calls "evolution" And I'd wager we're not the only ones.
StupidChildren...the reason jesus is crying
Theres also lots to read about the creative process, which has relavance to us hackers, hew shows it as a multly level thing. Where you can focus on details, form, structure etc.
Overall one of the best books I've read.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
web comics have been around for years. Comics like PennyArcade and Ctrl+Alt+Del are pretty successful and have strong followings. I would have to say that the New York Times is running this is story several years to late.
I check it daily and have several of the books in print. It's a great example of how well comic strips can work online; in fact the books actually feel like they are lacking in comparison to the web site.
What I'm really waiting for is the digital comic as invented by Tom Hank in Big, all those years ago. I don't know about the rest of you, but it made me drool at the time. So, my powerbook is a bit bigger, but I can pretend.
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.
http://www.questionablecontent.net/
e =1
http://www.dieselsweeties.com/
http://www.catandgirl.com/
http://www.vgcats.com/comics/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php
http://www.megatokyo.com/index.php?strip_id=631
http://www.bobandgeorge.com/Archive/Apr04.php?dat
There must be a way to just "slip" these into the discussion, but why bother? What's the good of an article ranting about webcomics without finding new, good web comics?
The ______ Agenda