A slate of innovate web projects open new doors for comic-book artists.
Longtime attendees of Comic-Con most likely have fond memories of hunting through bins of back issues or finding a favorite new mini-comic or graphic novel while browsing through small press booths or Artists Alley.
But the world of comics, like all print media, has been irrevocably changed by the Internet. While comic-book publishing had always had a low barrier to entry for publishers, the internet has made it possible for anyone to create and post their own comic online, opening up the field to a diverse and increasingly innovative range of new talents, genres and storytelling.
For all their similarities, however, print comics and web comics are not the same.
‘You have different expectations from a computer than from a book. The computer is interactive and engaging. You expect it to play video, have animated graphics, talk to your friends, multitask,’ says Elan’ Rodger Trinidad, creator of Speak No Evil, one of five nominees for Best Digital Comic at this year’s Will Eisner Comic-Book Industry Awards. ‘This is why the most successful web comics are in a daily strip format’if the content isn’t interactive then people want it short.’
BodyWorld
The ease with which comics can be published online also allows a lot of material that likely would have never succeeded in print to find an audience. ‘It’s cheap and accessible for anyone to publish a comic on the web, whereas print projects require some combination of connections, money and talent,’ says Eliza Frye, creator of the Eisner-nominated The Lady’s Murder.
Publishing comics on the web also poses creative challenges, both for artists looking to break out of the confines of working in print and those looking for success in both media.
‘I’d become too much of a formalist, thinking about page-turns and facing pages,’ says Dash Shaw, a cartoonist who works in both print (Bottomless Belly Button) and online (the Eisner-nominated BodyWorld). ‘I wanted to move out of that and the Internet is a place where there wouldn’t be a single page or facing pages.’
Shaw ended up creating BodyWorld as a long page of strips that the reader scrolls through. ‘I formatted it for the web, in the long scroll, thinking that I was utilizing the computer format, but the truth is that it re-formatted into a book very easily’It’s going to be a vertical-oriented book,’ says Shaw.
Trinidad has added elements to his comics that only the web would allow. He uses rollover images, an ‘infinite canvas’ (i.e., an extremely large web page the reader scrolls through to see a series of images) and, in his current project, God’, hyperlinks that connect the viewer to a musical reference. ‘A character is singing a song and, comics being a visual medium, songs don’t translate well. But the hyperlinks are of three different performances of the same song,’ says Trinidad.
The potential of web comics also has attracted some of the traditional players in the comic-book field. Marvel Comics decided to bring its vast catalog of back issues to the web, making more than 6,000 classic and current comics available through its Digital Comics Unlimited subscription service. ‘No matter how many comics we’ve sold over the years, there will always be someone out there who has not experienced the first moment Spider-Man put on the uniform or the first appearance of Wolverine,’ says John Dokes, VP of sales and marketing at Marvel. ‘Those moments still hold up today and they are exciting a new generation of fans.’
Speak No Evil
By the end of the year, Marvel also will have created about 50 original digital comics’many of which will also appear in print sometime after their online debut.
Going a completely different route is DC Comics, which debuted in fall 2007 an online site called Zuda Comics. Zuda solicits original web comics from readers and then hosts a monthly competition in which readers vote on their favorites. The winners are given a paid contract to produce more episodes of the comic for the site.
Ron Perazza, who serves as editorial director of Zuda, says the concept came out of internal discussions about how to best use the technology of the Internet to tell stories. ‘It’s a new platform and it has unique aspects to it. For example, it’s horizontal, not vertical and there’s no reason necessarily to be beholden to a vertical format,’ says Perazza. ‘So the idea was, let’s create content that’s best viewed on the web, let’s use the unique aspects of this technology to tell stories.’
The wide-open potential of the web also makes it an ideal home for print comics looking for a higher profile than can be found in a lot of comic book stores.
Carla Speed McNeil stopped publishing individual issues of her science-fiction comic Finder once sales hit a plateau and began serializing it online. ‘As long as even a few more people continued to pick it up each time, I was content to keep publishing issues,’ she says. ‘After they went flat for a year, I knew they weren’t doing their job anymore.’
Finder
McNeil continues to collect Finder, also one of this year’s Eisner nominees, into graphic novel form, but says the ease of web serialization has been good for her workload and for the book. ‘I know the reader is getting better books out of my going to the web,’ she says.
But the Internet offers the potential to change the comics-reading experience even further, with the potential to add sound and motion. Adding such elements raises the question of whether such projects could still be called comics, or if they would just enter the realm of limited animation.
Experiments are already under way, the most obvious being the Watchmen Motion Comic, which took the artwork of the original comic and added limited motion, sound effects, music and an actor who read the dialogue like an audio book. The series was distributed chapter by chapter on iTunes and then as a DVD release. Fan reaction was mixed, but it’s not stopped the experimentation. Marvel has released a trailer for a motion comic adapting the Joss Whedon and John Cassaday run on Astonishing X-Men, as well as a Spider-Woman motion comic, though it has yet to release any details on the project.
The real question however is whether moving images are still comics. The answer may be yes, but most think the killer app has yet to be found.
‘There is a great possibility for web comics to incorporate all kinds of elements unique to the medium such as animation, social networking and user interaction, but I have yet to come across many that are taking advantage of these options,’ says Frye.
‘In all honesty, I’ve yet to see it done in any way that wasn’t inimical to the suspension of mood,’ agrees McNeil.
The Eisner Award nominees for Best Digital Comic
* BodyWorld, by Dash Shaw, www.dashshaw.com
* Finder, by Carla Speed McNeil, www.shadowlinecomics.com/webcomics/#/finder
* The Lady’s Murder, by Eliza Frye, theladysmurder.elizafrye.com
* Speak No Evil, by Elan’ Rodger Trinidad, www.theoryofeverythingcomics.com/SNE
* Vs. by Alexis Sottile & Joe Infurnari, www.smithmag.net/nextdoorneighbor/2008/12/08/story-18
Other sites
* Zuda Comics, www.zudacomics.com
* Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, marvel.com/digitalcomics
