The second “issue” of Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon’s Sugarshock! is up now for your free online viewing. First one’s here. This is all part of Dark Horse’s new Dark Horse Presents experiment on MySpace, and I’m going to go ahead and call it unsavory. The works themselves are great, but the Web just isn’t the place for long form comics. (Comic strips work great.) Whenever I read anything online, I’m usually in “skim” mode. It’s already very easy to skim comics when reading them in physical form. You just read the words and skip over the pictures once you have the general idea of what’s going on. In doing that, you’re missing a lot of the work, like watching TV with the picture turned off. Online, it’s even easier to do this, with your finger on the scroll wheel. I’d even go so far as to say that this movement by Dark Horse will weaken people’s impressions of the comic book format. Get them used to skimming comics on the web in 30 seconds each and they’ll start to think of comics as something not substantial, not worth spending money on. The webcomic strip works great because it’s designed to be read in under a minute, and you can put one out a few times a week.
Whedon and Moon’s work is good, though. I’d like to see it printed.