(I swear I’ve written a post like this before, but I can’t find one that’s recent at least, so here goes.)
Here are the webcomics I’m reading these days:
As with all things, I’m sure there are tons of great strips I’m not reading, so I’d love suggestions.
explodingdog seems to have recently added an RSS feed. fantastic
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.
Dark Horse recently announced Dark Horse Presents, an initiative to produce short serialized comic books for MySpace. The first, Sugarshock, written by Joss Whedon no less, appeared yesterday. It’s good, but the computer screen just isn’t the right format. Newsarama syndicates one page of Powers each day. It’s one of my all time favorite comic books, but it wasn’t designed as a daily, so the pacing doesn’t work. You can’t get a whole page onscreen at once, so you can’t appreciate the artist’s layout properly, unless you shrink it down to a point where you can’t read the lettering (try Marvel’s digital comics on a 17” monitor). Marvel used to have a method where you could click on each panel and it would pop up and zoom in, but I’d imagine that took a fair amount of effort for their web team to craft, and it still meant you had to see isolated panels of what were drawn to be one whole page.
The web is just built for the short format. YouTube videos are great if they’re a minute or two long, but you don’t ever want to watch a full-length movie at your computer. Short news articles and blog posts, good, long, researched pieces or novels, bad.
What does work very well on the web is the comic strip. I regularly read PvP, Penny Arcade, XKCD, Boy on a Stick and Slither, VG Cats, The Perry Bible Fellowship, and Marmaduke (sorta). The traditional comic strip format works so nicely on the web. You can read a strip without scrolling. A funny strip is easy to email to people. You don’t need sound to enjoy them at work. And comic strips expose a true talent for compressing a story into a few small panels. If you want to tell a five-part story, each day’s installment still has to be funny. That takes real skill.
This isn’t to say that the web is perfect for comic strips. Few webcomic sites provide good indices of their archives. Try going back and finding a particular Penny Arcade strip you remember finding funny. Ideally each page would tag its strips by subject matter for easy reference down the road. And all that lettering on each strip is just part of the image, so Google can’t index the scripts. Still, as digital distribution of comic books continues to be a hot topic amongst the big publishers, and with DC launching its own online service soon, I’d like to see more attention paid to the comic strip than the longer form book. No matter how you try to shoehorn it in, you’re always going to want to read a full-length book in your hands, printed on paper. The strip, on the other hand, loses nothing in its conversion to pixels.
I’ve been vocal when asked about my opinion of Penny Arcade. PvP boiled it down pretty well a few years ago. I certainly don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with knowing your audience and skipping the background introduction, but really, it’s like a leader paragraph would kill them somtimes. Regardless, I had the theory that I thought they were brilliant occasionally, and either unfunny or inaccessible the rest of the time, so I decided to put it to the test. I read every single comic they’ve published, and picked out the ones I thought there were funny. Anything rating above a three on the chuckle-meter made the cut. Here you go:
I think my initial goal in the project was the prove they only had like five funny comic strips, and their vast popularity was all a fluke born out of getting into the game when the world needed a webcomic about video games, but thirty strips is a lot, even if they’ve beeing doing it for years. Much like my slow progress through The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, it’s neat to see how their art and writing changed over the years.
My gripe about webcomics in general is that they exist on the web, but they don’t take much advantage of it. You can’t search for old comics easily. They’re not usually arranged by category. Finding an old strip, unless you get lucky and a blogger wrote a post about it, is just as hard as flipping through old newspapers is — you go day-by-day until you find the right one or get sick of the project. They could solve this pretty easily by using a content management system (Movable Type could easily be rigged to do webcomics) and putting the text of the strip in a field that you hide with CSS so that search engines could still have an idea of what a given strip is about.
Edit: a few others that did not quite make the cut: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Edit: okay, I’ve grown to like this one: Liar’s Day.
