Classic Da Blog

Webcomics’ Identity Crisis, Part III: Rethinking Reinventing Comics, Part One: The Finite Infinite Canvas (And a Brief History of Webcomics)

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Read Part I and Part II of this series.

As it turned out, I have much more to say about two particular aspects of Reinventing Comics than any others (much like Scott McCloud), and as a result I’ve reframed my discussion from how I was going to frame it around Reinventing itself. For how boneheaded Scott McCloud can seem at times, he actually got more right than wrong in Reinventing when it came to digital comics, including the first of his three digital revolutions. Although it seems to be mostly used as an excuse for laziness at the moment, there’s no doubt that digital production of comics is everywhere, and is evident in all sorts of strips from PartiallyClips to Dinosaur Comics to sprite comics. And there are even some comics, namely 3-D comics, that have used computer tools as more than a time-saving measure. (Oddly, Diesel Sweeties would also fall in this category, due to the amount of work it must have taken R. Stevens to make those characters.) So for all his faults, McCloud got a lot right.

Except for, well, the meat of his latter two revolutions.

In 2005, Scott McCloud gave a talk at TED, which, thanks to showing up in the StumbleUpon demo, was my very first Random Internet Discovery. That talk was only reposted last month, which naturally has prompted a whole new round of debate on McCloud and his ideas. At webcomics.com, one particular aspect of McCloud’s talk attracted attention: his reference to and exploration of the infinite canvas, touching off a debate on how and why the infinite canvas hasn’t achieved the penetration McCloud predicted. (IMPORTANT NOTE: As I posted yesterday, webcomics.com is currently down. If and when it returns in full, I will add a link to the post in question to this post. Unless it happens a week from today or later, I will NOT give any announcement when I do so; you will need to check this page on a regular basis, or else when webcomics.com comes back up. Which I sincerely hope is before I have to put up Part V…)

Although I read all of Reinventing, I always intended to focus all my attention on the last half (and skipping over some relevant elements in the first in the process). I’m probably going to cover ground many others have trod before; the Comics Worth Reading blog calls the second half “outdated and silly to today’s readers” even as he endorses the first half. (McCloud, incidentially, seems to have forgotten what made Understanding so groundbreaking, and relies a lot on what the earlier book called “word-specific” and “duo-specific” combinations, such that I find myself wondering why he couldn’t have just written it as an essay, other that then we’d be deprived of his sudden bank of icons for media and his revolutions, an obsession far more developed and incorporated than in Understanding.) My analysis will be drawn not only from Reinventing, but also from McCloud’s later sequel webcomic, I Can’t Stop Thinking! (which barely kept the thoughts of Reinventing a smidgen more up-to-date, only lasting into 2001 in six installments), subsequent essays, and the TED talk (although it starts out talking about innovation in general and turns into a retread of Understanding until about the ten-minute mark, and even then turns into a retread of Reinventing for the most part).

The concept of the infinite canvas is one of two major developments that McCloud is known for in Reinventing, and not only does he focus on it to the exclusion of all else that could be done with the medium in a web environment, he seems to disdain one of the others – multimedia comics – as either dolled-up print comics in an electronic environment, or trying to do something that film, and eventually virtual reality, could do far better – if not crossing over to one of those realms. (His words on hypertext comics seem to indicate he would moan at an idea I have that I think is truly groundbreaking, if a bit inspired by something that already exists.) That Comics Worth Reading review thinks it should be interpreted as a mere suggestion that McCloud got a little too enthusiastic about, one among many, but some of McCloud’s actions since the publication of Reinventing suggest otherwise. McCloud’s enthusiasm for the infinite canvas devolves from his philosophy of the core concept of comics, its Platonic “form” if you will, and ironically, in the process he arguably completely abandons his definition of comics from Understanding Comics, as we’ll see.

(I actually agree with him on multimedia in that it starts turning comics into some other medium. It also abandons the one thing McCloud saw as late as Reinventing as the great thing about comics – that anyone can make them – and if it doesn’t it makes it no longer unique, and opens more media to “everyone”. But, again as we’ll see, McCloud starts including multimedia comics in the notion of the infinite canvas.)

He starts his journey into the infinite canvas, however, with the evidence he presented in Understanding that comics is older than the written word, and that it can be traced to the oldest cave-paintings, through the ancient Egyptians and Romans, up through Mesoamerica and the European Middle Ages, and through numerous then-unrecognized “comics artists” to the present day. In Reinventing, McCloud notes that until the European invention of printing, comics were presented in a single line stretched out as long as possible using whatever means was possible to keep it going, whether it be zig-zagging along a huge wall, spiraling up a column or just having a really long scroll. From this McCloud devises the notion of a horizontal infinite canvas, a single unbroken line of panels stretching out as far as anyone can imagine, what one might call the “ideal” infinite canvas. The “horizontal” canvas implies the “vertical” canvas as well, although that’s less conducive to creating a single, unbroken string of panels. (Still, McCloud did I Can’t Stop Thinking! as a vertical infinite canvas with “trails” connecting panels that wander all over the page.) McCloud also suggested a “staircase” that’s a combination of the two.

Plenty of people have pointed out the problem with the scrolling infinite canvas: that the problem is in the scrolling, which can be hasslesome to people without mouse wheels; even with a wheel, it’s rarely well-adapted to horizontal scrolling. (A vertical canvas is more doable in this context.) One of those people is McCloud himself in an episode of ICST! (ICST itself, incidentially, also points to another issue, that it can send people going in nonintuitive directions.) But the issue McCloud saw involved technological limits, like “herky-jerky image redraws”, that appear to have mostly faded, making vertical scrolling more viable now than it was in 2000. As for the problems with horizontal scrolling, they presume the only way to scroll is with the arrow keys, mouse wheel, or scroll bars. If the comic is a straight-up image, or a series of straight-up images, on a regular web page, then yes, those are the only ways to scroll. But that’s not what McCloud was talking about (and if you’ve already listened to the TED talk, you know that).

This is what McCloud was talking about.

You can make infinite-canvas comics using PNG images on a regular web page, but Flash, Java, and similar applets open up the possibility of merely clicking to move to the next panel, and a more intuitive click-and-drag interface across the page. McCloud suggests a number of ideas that would never work without some kind of applet to handle it (given current technology), and going far beyond what most people think of when they hear of the “infinite canvas”, such as packing comics into a “cube”, arranging comics in three dimensions and forcing the reader to “turn”, “circular narratives” (first proposed in Understanding but technically not directly tied in to the infinite canvas until TED), and instituting a high level of interactivity, even as a way of introducing sound and motion – indeed, when McCloud speaks of the “infinite canvas” it almost seems like he wants webcomics to become a completely separate medium. (Note: In ICST! McCloud seems to separate sound, motion, interactivity, and “the various blessings of hypertext” from “an expanded canvas” but also notes “I think some applications of these features are more promising than others”.)

Some of his ideas completely go against most notions of what “comics” are, not the least of which is McCloud’s own Understanding definition, “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence”. For example, the notion of going from one panel to the next by “zooming in” on the previous panel (or other forms of viewing one panel at a time) may seem to violate “juxtaposed”, which McCloud used to mean “side-by-side”. McCloud introduced this word originally to distinguish comics from animation, which is also displayed one “panel” at a time, but isn’t presented as discrete panels, but as a continuous experience. Unfortunately, the distinction McCloud presents isn’t that, but rather, he now sees comics as a “temporal map” where moving through space is moving through time, which muddies the waters.

In truth, though, just about every medium has a shot at getting blurred with every other medium in the new medium of the Internet (and computers in general) that can display any and all of them. Ultimately, just about every medium can be distilled into a few core elements, and within their place in the resulting matrix, they can ultimately become the same medium. (McCloud, in fact, touches on this issue.) For example, movies and television have very few elements that they don’t hold in common; they both share the combination within them of a visual aspect and a sonic aspect, of sound and images. Similarly, print books have no sound and no images, and comics (and paintings) lie at the intersection of images but no sound. As silent films have a problem in that they too can be considered a combination of images and no sound, we must add a third item to the visual axis, the concept of the moving image. Thus, movies and television share between them the combination of moving images and sound, silent movies have moving images and no sound, but comics have only static images and no sound. (Implied are axes for the other senses.)

Just about any medium through the first two millenia of the common era could be placed within the resulting matrix, thus explaining certain connections. For example, music and radio programs both fit where no images meet sound, thus explaining music’s presence on radio. Even video games, with their emphasis on interactivity, combine moving images with sound and are thus often played on televisions. We also see other theoretical media that might not have been explored. For example, I wonder what the intersection of static images with sound would be? (Perhaps kids’ books or greeting cards with built-in sound devices?) The theater is problematic, as it theoretically combines moving images with sound, but most theater afictionados would tell you that a movie or TV reproduction of a performance does not cover the whole performance – and not even necessarily because of a presence capturing the other senses, but a role in the “interactivity” scale as well. And about the only thing that can be reliably said about board and card games (and maybe even particpator sports) is that they include interactivity… but unless it’s like Calvinball and the rules are made up by the players, does it even have that? (Answer: Yes, if video games do.)

But the Internet can play all of these to some extent or another, and even beyond the Web’s current hypertext-based environment (which is best suited to static images with no sound, and even more, no images with no sound, thus establishing our first connection), programs installed on computers can have almost limitless possibilities. Text can institute images and sound as important parts, or even become part of an image. A comic can break into motion and sound and become more like a film. Video in the traditional sense can become interactive and 3-D, capable of moving on your command. All media could, indeed have to, become more interactive. The distinctions between media could become less important if they are ultimately part of one uber-medium.

But there is also a hint in Reinventing of part of why the infinite canvas hasn’t caught on even with the idea of using Flash or Java: McCloud predicts that, even outside comics, “spatial models” would take their place alongside hypertext as a means of organizing information. And… they haven’t, nearly a decade in, despite most of the bandwidth barriers falling away. This is partly because, for whatever virtues it may have, a “spatial model” requires enough work on the basic concept to become, essentially, art (regardless of your definition), and at that point the person’s attention becomes focused on the model itself, as a piece of art, than on what it contains, making it too distracting for utilitarian purposes. It could be used for artistic purposes, but it’s then subject to the same reasons infinite canvas hasn’t caught on in comics. (The closest McCloud seems to come to any specifics on the use of “spatial models” for information is an icon of a book, which would be more gimmicky than anything else when compared to hypertext. Perhaps McCloud has a “game world” in mind, such as the modern-day Second Life? Certainly a part of ICST! seems to imply such.)

But I think there’s a bigger factor in play here: Webcomic revenue models work best on a periodical basis.

Read that paragraph again, because the rest of these two parts hinge on it.

When considering McCloud’s views, it’s important to remember that he was coming from a comic book background. It was the singular form of the comic book that McCloud imagined translating to the infinite canvas, no longer having to contort their stories to the confines of the page, but flowing in one continuous stream (or several) from beginning to end. But webcomics have evolved under a comic strip model, what McCloud called “a marriage of convenience between newspapers and comics”, and that model has little use for the infinite canvas. If it’s a gag-a-day strip, all you really need is to deliver your punchline and run, and dolling it up with weird shapes or stretching it out too long becomes too distracting to the message. If you’re a strip with a lot of drama and continuity, and you start down the infinite canvas path, then unless you’re delivering a complete story in a single strip, the place where you decide to cut it off and release the next part is mostly arbitrary, determined mostly by your desire to keep the audience in suspense. (Remember this distinction; it will become important again later.)

It’s possible to break up a long story into “chapters” and publish it on the infinite canvas, breaking a story into bite-size digestible chunks while also making sure your audience has a reason to come back for the next part of the story, but either you create several separate “chapters” that are meant to be read as one story, yet aren’t because they’re arbitrarily separated (McCloud explores the potential ideas behind this in ICST! ), or you have to keep dynamically updating the one canvas, and not only point people to where the new addition is, but – and this is an issue with any substantially long canvas – also provide a longer-term way for people to mark their place.

(I know the old “drama v. gag” conundrum is arbitrary, and as early as Understanding Comics McCloud suggested that comics were capable of a wide variety of genres. ICST! uses the infinite canvas well, for example. I’m using that conundrum, though, to illustrate that in any genre, it all breaks down to one of three schemes: short one-offs, installments of a larger story, and the same larger story completed. The first is unaffected by the infinite canvas, and apply the second to an infinite canvas and there’s little reason for it not to become the third.)

Therefore the infinite canvas works best when it contains a complete story within itself – but how do you make money off of it? Forcing people to subscribe isn’t the answer, because when something is released one time and that’s it, there’s nothing to subscribe to. Similarly, people have no incentive to donate to something once they’ve already read it and have no reason to believe their donation will result in anything more. Most self-sufficient webcomics today sell merchandising, but it’s difficult to merchandise a single, solitary work – especially if it utilizes the infinite canvas (the whole point of which, as McCloud sees it, is to defeat the potential for selling a print version of the work) and especially if it’s sufficiently artsy in its use of the infinite canvas. (In some forms you could sell a real-world version of the comic itself, if, say, a comic packed into a cube were reproducible in real life, but you’re back to the defeating-the-point problem.) Advertising’s doable but unless you can make a sufficient event out of the release, don’t expect to make a living off it – and even then, no matter how big the launch is, you get that one-time infusion of money and that’s it.

Perhaps we could modify the subscription idea, and put the comic behind a paywall? Since not everyone clicks on an advertisement (the vast majority don’t, in fact), let alone buys what’s advertised, and many actively resent even non-intrusive ads like I have, you’re probably always going to make significantly more money from a paywall anyway. (The ad rate for the Sandsday-only ad box rarely gets above a cent a day; since I average five page views a day, if I could charge a single solitary cent for the strip I’d be quadrupling my income! McCloud himself covers these and other problems with advertising in ICST! .) But again, no matter how popular your initial comic may be, no matter if thousands or even millions of people enjoy it, if it’s released one time and then you’re done with it, you get that one-time infusion of money and that’s it. Whatever income you get from it past that initial spurt is damn near zero. That’s no way to make a living. Any medium, indeed any product, will ideally make you money and keep you alive best if your customers have to keep coming back to it. This is okay in film where people make a substantial amount of money on each picture and quite a bit of side money from endorsement deals. It’s even okay in print books to an extent – but in both cases both industries are still fond of series of films and series of books.

It’s possible to make sequels and trilogies, but there’s a reason why webcomics have evolved under a comic strip model to this point, with very, very few emulating the comic book model.

Pete Abrams, creator of Sluggy Freelance, tried to get into the comic book industry at first without success. Eventually he took up a job at a web design company, and started Sluggy as a “creative outlet”. Why did he make it as a strip instead of any sort of graphic novel form? In a 2002 interview, Abrams attributed it to, really, the problems I’ve just described: the full-length comic book format doesn’t lend itself to repeat visitors on the Internet. (Abrams’ solution to that problem was to hammer out something really quick and throw it up, which he decided lent itself better to a comic strip format.)

Abrams was the exception, not the rule, in the early days of webcomics, although his example is illustrative of just some of the obstacles to getting an actual original comic book on the web in those early days. New media, and new forms of that media, are rarely founded by people who set out to do so. The Scott McClouds of the world are few and far between. Most media evolve over time, and grow organically, as the proverbial million monkeys on a million typewriters so often tend to cluster accidentally, as though drawn by gravity. Someone invented film, but no one person invented the movie. Someone invented the television, but no one person invented the TV show. For someone to decide to put a full-length comic book on the web before Reinventing would have involved the conscious decision to explore the possibility of doing so. Even before Reinventing, there were such “comic books” littering the web and some even explored the infinite canvas, but as if to prove the point, most were done by these sort of artistes that explicitly set out to explore the new world.

The comic book format is rather rigidly defined by the ways and means of print. Change the size of the paper, no matter what the reason, and you change the shape and form of the resulting comic. Remove a sheet from the book (if doing traditional fold-in-half-and-staple-binding) and you’ve removed four pages of comics or ads, and that changes the shape of the story. By contrast, the comic strip format is far more organic than McCloud gives it credit for. It’s really just a really short version of the ancient comics McCloud is so in love with, and it appeals to our desire for a good joke easily. When the Internet came along, the comic book could have slid right in to the Internet (and indeed, by 2001 Marvel was putting select numbers of its comics, including, for a time, the entire Ultimate line, on the Web, which played a role in getting me into comic books), but it would need to undergo one heck of a mutation to really stretch its legs in the new format, and those mutations rarely happen easily or quickly. The comic book was at home on the printed page and much less at home on the Web page. (Indeed, from the very beginning Marvel’s online comics were in Flash, not hypertext or even PDF – though I suspect that was for security concerns.)

But comic strips could be picked up right out of the newspaper and plopped onto the Web page and look almost indistinguishable from their print counterparts. (Anyone who’s been here since December knows that I thought User Friendly was a print comic at first.) Combine that with the Internet’s tendency to draw itself to humor and it’s easy to see why most of the early pioneers of webcomics were people like Illiad: they just wanted to make their friends laugh at their funny jokes. In fact, this is still a driving force behind webcomic, or even web site, creation. (See: Morgan-Mar, David; and outside webcomics but still within the community, Solomon, John.)

There’s another factor at work here. Although it’s always been difficult, it has always been at least possible to write, draw, publish, and distribute comic books yourself. (McCloud explains one really simple way to do so in Reinventing Comics.) While comic books are more suited for the page than the screen, when considered alone, comic strips are actually more suited for the screen than the page. It’s in this sense that comic strips were “a marriage of convenience between newspapers and comics”, because simply trying to distribute a strip as a single narrow sheet of paper… well, there are few paper makers who make paper that size. Comic books could adapt easily to any size paper; comic strips either were stuck in a special format or, in the case of Sunday strips, had to take on the comic book form. That made it a lot harder to distribute without the help of a newspaper, which meant comic strip artists were far more at the mercy of a newspaper or syndicate.

As webcomics caught on and as success stories like Scott Kurtz or Gabe and Tycho started springing up, aspiring comic strip artists, long chafing under heavy creative control and small panel sizes and all else that came with comic strips, became drawn to the web like moths to a flame. For a while there was an explosion of new comics following the comic strip format, but at first few comic book authors saw an opening. They still had a chance at either self-publishing or at least some measure of creative control from publishers of all sizes. What few dramatic strips existed were almost exclusively former gag-a-day strips that had undergone Cerebus Syndrome. Although I don’t recall reading anything from him that would confirm this, I get the feeling that the reason Rich Burlew originally made The Order of the Stick a full-page comic in 2003, despite its initial gag-a-day nature, was to allow himself freedom to roam and engage in large panel layouts. (Look at the very first panel of the first strip.) As before, when it came to webcomics, the comic book format was the major application of the infinite canvas.

By 2005, the game changed; in the same month Gunnerkrigg Court launched and Girl Genius moved to the web. They and OOTS are the major examples of true comic book style storytelling I can think of on the web today. Comic books finally found an expression on the web, and it wasn’t McCloud’s infinite canvas (though in OOTS and a lesser extent Sluggy there is an element of infinite canvas in at least some installments), it was the hypertext-based system McCloud disdained, which turned out to work fairly well. That full-page hypertext system allowed creators to entice readers to keep coming back for the next installment (with the added bonus of ongoing, well-developing plot threads to help ensure it), and still allowed the creation of a later print version for ideal capitalization. And the game may finally be changing and forcing aspiring comic book writers and artists to consider a move to the web, for reasons I’ll get to – along with an expansion on how comic books manifest themselves on the Web – in Part V.

Could it have happened differently? Could it still happen differently, as the developments discussed in Part V play out? Could the infinite canvas still work? Suppose there were people out there who decided to move the comic book format to the web and released full stories on an infinite canvas. Suppose they actually managed to do so in a way that was more than just experimental, and decided to make a series of these complete stories. Would the webcomics community find out about them and pimp them? My bet is, “Not unless Scott McCloud does.” While there are some parts that may be open to it, by and large the webcomic community is woefully unprepared to handle comics that are released one time and then that’s it, infinite canvas or no. Quite a few aspects of the webcomic community, like ranking sites like Topwebcomics or “tool” sites like Komix, seem to presume that your comic is a continuing comic that releases at least once a week, once a month at least, and not in a complete story all at once. (Da Blog, I freely admit, falls into this category, with my rule that I never review comics that have ended, and an all-at-once comic never really “begins” in the first place.)

I left open a loophole earlier when discussing revenue models. Suppose you decide you’re going to release multiple completed comics in a series on an infinite canvas, maybe once a month or once a year, and put them behind a paywall – akin to the price you pay when you buy a comic book or graphic novel at the comic book store or bookstore. Theoretically, there’s no reason why that can’t allow you to live, at least on modest means, in the span between releases, or even, with a lot of hard work, become the comic equivalent of JK Rowling with the infinite canvas on your side. This is the allure of “micropayments”, the other one of McCloud’s major innovations that Reinventing is remembered for, and the one presented first – and it, like the more minor innovations, is actually pretty close to fruition. Micropayment systems allow transfer of money to be cost-effective even if all you paid was a penny or two, and McCloud proposed that they would work more like cash where the seller doesn’t get nailed with an additional flat-rate charge on the transaction.

(The idea is alluring enough that a recent wave of speculation that micropayments could be used to save newspapers, and a very recent appearance by McCloud’s fellow micropayment advocate Walter Isaacson on The Daily Show, has crept it into the news on its own right, in a far broader sense than the relatively small world of webcomics, far more recently. In one sense, I actually lucked out with my delays, if only because Part IV can get the “my comments on the news” label!)

Although it sells what McCloud calls “eyeballs” rather than “bits”, and it allows deposits of $5 or more and withdrawls of $10 or more (outside of the buying and selling going on within the system itself), Project Wonderful (which runs the advertising on this site) runs much like this, and it’s telling that it has its origins in the webcomic field. (Micropayments are distinguished from subscription services in that subscriptions charge based on time, and micropayments based on each time you access the product. Arguably, that disqualifies PW from technically being a micropayment service – and qualifies most other advertising services.) Several other businesses, indeed, have sprung up to carry out micropayments for actual content as well; it’s pretty much the norm in MMORPGs to some extent, and it’s arguably the bread and butter of services such as iTunes, which allow song purchases for about a dollar each. PayPal is rarely used as an actual paywall, and I’m not certain how much like “cash” it really acts, but it still comes pretty close to having the mechanism for micropayments, if not the reality (and many webcomics do use it as a donation scheme). So to some extent or another, micropayments have arrived.

So why aren’t webcomics using them? Especially considering McCloud, so much of an eminent and dominant thinker in the webcomics field, predicted they would?

I’ll answer that question – and that answer’s implications for journalism’s consideration of micropayments – in Part IV tomorrow.

For once, NOT a notice of the latest delay to the next webcomic post!

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Tomorrow’s strip isn’t done yet, and I’m not leaving campus (which I need to do in order to work on it) until I have this damned post (really an essay) done. So the strip might be posted awfully late for a Thursday night (Friday strip).

That post WILL be given a post date of February 12, but for many of you it will technically be Friday when you have the first chance to read it. I’m thinking Part IV will come out at 8 PM to compensate.

Delays, delays, nothing but delays…

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You may get Part III of “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” tonight, but I spent much of today goofing off and I’d like to make sure I have all the latest info. It’s probably just as well if it gets bumped to tomorrow, because the site that did much to kick off this whole mess appears to have fallen to the same fate as Buzzcomix, at least for the time being. Sounds like you should stay far, far away from Panelbox. (Important: I’m not quite sure if Buzzcomix was running on Panelbox, but the error screen looks the same. Also, despite Panelbox showing up in the URL of the error screen, it appears the site in question, judging by the happenings from Twitter feeds of the proprietors, technically works off a different host. Also, it appears the problem with this particular site was simply running over its bandwidth threshhold.)

UPDATE: I have made a decision. Part III is coming, well, today, Thursday. Part IV is coming tomorrow (Friday), and Part V is coming Tuesday and will double as the monthly OOTS post. Part VI will come Wednesday or a week from today, and I’ll have an epilogue to the whole series a week from Friday. Parts V and VI will become far removed from their context, and I’d prefer to have released them today and tomorrow, but it’s become unavoidable. To allow maintenance of cohesiveness, all parts of the series will be given the “comic book” label, even though Part VI has little to do with comic books.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week a day early… technically

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I’m working as hard as I can to wrap up the next two parts of my webcomic series by the time I head home tonight. I can see the end coming, I’m starting to formulate what I’m going to do in this reorg, and if I don’t get the first of the two posted tonight, you’ll get two tomorrow. (I guess if you’re on the East Coast, you’re getting two tomorrow anyway.)

Until then, proceed to destroy your eyes.

Last time I do this, honest!

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Still working on the next part of the “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series – I may have to reorganize it a little, as it’s focusing on two topics (as Reinventing Comics’ discussion of webcomics does) and my thoughts on them are tightly related, whereas before I was organizing my thoughts in list form on topics I doubt I’ll come back to. I am setting a goal to post it on Tuesday, but at this point the delays have gotten rather distracting, haven’t they?

Meanwhile, I’m totally falling behind on finding a real job…

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So obviously a new part of my ongoing series didn’t go up today (yesterday, from the perspective of when you read this), but it will definitely go up over the weekend. Obviously getting immersed in the ideas of Scott McCloud is one of the larger projects I’ve undertaken on Da Blog thus far, although today the major problem was when Order of the Stick updated and I spent a hefty amount of time catching up on the forums, which were down for an unforeseen span the last time the strip updated. Honestly, figuring out what McCloud actually means has left me so disillusioned with the state of webcomics now that I’m actually starting to develop more of an appreciation for the position of one John Solomon. But that’s neither here nor there.

Starting next week, the Saturday Sandsday could update as early as 9:15 PM PT the Friday before, because of the possibility of actually getting sleep in if I post the strip, and thus go to bed, early enough.

In retrospect, this probably could have been predicted. Also, kinda cool web site. Like a bonus RID.

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So I am planning on releasing two parts of the “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series tomorrow (Friday), but to make up for today, not Tuesday. I probably should just give up and make it a Monday-Wednesday-Friday series, but new developments keep coming in the areas I’m planning on getting to. Doing the requisite reading-up and research on Scott McCloud’s views is the hardest part.

I bought Reinventing Comics today, but I’m not happy about it. It was the only copy left at the store (the third time I’ve been to this particular Barnes and Noble), so I was antsy about stealing it from someone else who might want to buy it; I didn’t have much use for it as a continuing resource (though I may refer back to it on later projects); and I didn’t like frittering away an entire $25 gift card on it. (Now that I’ve been reading it, I have another problem: the paper, unlike my copy of Understanding Comics, is really cheap and dehydrates my hands. This is not worth the same price as Understanding.) I ain’t returning it at this point, but at some point I probably will sell it. HarperPerennial’s own site was the only place online with any interior items from the book, and only bits and pieces of it at that; at this point, given the point of the second part of the book, McCloud should consider just making the whole book available from his own web site for free or at least a reduced price.

Komix! has been one of my more consistent advertisers (it’s at least bid on all three of my square boxes), and I finally decided to check it out this week. It’s a “webcomics aggregator” that allows one to “subscribe” to one’s favorite webcomics; I was attracted to its RSS function, and signed up because of the wording of the description in the FAQ, and then realized that the RSS-feed was comic specific and I didn’t need to subscribe to read each comic’s feed, only to track my current progress through the archives. Which, from an RSS perspective, seems kinda pointless.

But while this obviously makes it easier to keep track of the RSS-free strips I’m preparing to review (and could provide Sandsday with a stopgap RSS feed down the line), strips like 8-Bit Theater and Sluggy Freelance aren’t quite off the hook, because Komix makes a point of adding one new tracked strip every day and the number of tracked strips it has indicate it’s maybe less than a year old. Oh, and “there’s nothing else quite like this out there” (though I doubt that; this site serves a similar if not identical purpose). Sluggy especially gets little to no slack because there is no archive page for today’s strip (only the front page), which means Komix is perpetually a day behind.

(Komix also goes so far as to have discussion boards for “every comic and strip”, which positively scares me…)

Looks like if I AM going to make up for Tuesday, tomorrow’s potential "split posts" may be my best shot.

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Incidentially, do you want to know what happened on Monday?

Something I’ve been agonizing over for months?

Something with big-time impact on Da Blog and the web site?

I FINALLY GOT MY OLD FILES FROM MY OLD USB DRIVE BACK!!!

That only took, what, four months? But they’re ALL there, too.

This has impact on the 100 Greatest Movies Project, my street sign gallery, my plans for the lead-up to my birthday, and much more, that will start playing out after the “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series is over.

(Also coming up at that time? I need to do my monthly OOTS post – which may be part of the series – AND there’s something happening – or NOT happening, rather – at Ctrl+Alt+Del that’s worthy of attention.)

Webcomics’ Identity Crisis, Part II: A Brief History of Comics

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Blog note: The new “comic books” tag is also getting applied to Monday’s Part I. Today’s discussion will actually have more to do with comic books than webcomics. Part III will tie it all back in with webcomics. Also note that this part is almost entirely based on memory and you should consult “real” sources; even Wikipedia is more reliable than this post.

For much of the twentieth century in the United States, comics had two major forms of distribution: the comic strip, usually printed on a daily basis in the newspaper, and the comic book, distributed as an entire magazine and until the 1970s or so appearing on newsstands alongside “real” magazines. During the 1990s a third distribution avenue arose: the webcomic, distributed (as the name implies) on the web.

For many in the print comic field this may seem almost blasphemous, or at least it would have seemed such a decade ago. To compare the twaddle being released on the web by people who aren’t good enough to make it in “real” print comics, to the likes of Peanuts and Watchmen? But for reasons I’ll return to for the rest of this series, there are some very good reasons to rate comics on the web on the same level as comics in the newspaper and comics in magazines, if only because they are using the same art form.

The modern comic strip was born late in the nineteenth century, though it had been evolving long before that in the form of editorial cartoons. (I don’t count editorial cartoons as anything other than a subset of comic strips.) Somewhat arbitrarily, most histories of comics as a medium begin with Richard Felton Outcault’s “The Yellow Kid”, a key figure in the New York newspaper wars between the World (owned by Joseph Pulitzer) and the Journal (owned by William Randolph Hearst), getting his start at the former and eventually swiped away for the latter. (Those two papers went through various permutations before merging in 1966 and folding in 1967.) The Kid was – at least in America – one of the first continuing characters in comics, his feature one of the first ongoing fictional comic features, and most importantly, his move from the World to the Journal demonstrated the value a comic strip could have to a paper at a time when there were still more papers in a given market than you could shake a stick at. (Really, the newspaper industry has been dying for a long time, well before the Internet came along.)

So new comics popped up all over the country in newspapers desperate to stoke sales, including The Katzenjammer Kids, which introduced the sequential format and broke what we consider the “comic strip” away from the editorial cartoon altogether, and Mutt and Jeff, which was such a hit in San Francisco (where it had also made a move from one paper to another, Hearst-owned paper) it was picked up for syndication and seen all over the country. Naturally, other highlights of the comic strips swiftly made the move to national distribution. (Note: I don’t know if M&J was the first comic strip to be syndicated, or even the one that started the trend. That’s a startlingly under-studied part of comics history. But Wikipedia does say that its creator was “the first big celebrity of the comics industry”, so that’s why I’m singling it out.)

Early comic strips were either what we would call “gag-a-day” today, or in rarer cases (like Little Nemo in Slumberland and Krazy Kat), travels through bizarre landscapes. During the 1920s both types gave way to the adventure comic, spearheaded by comics such as Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon, which could tell a continuing story day by day for months at a time. As these were even better at drawing people’s eyes to newspapers, since people had to come back to see what happened next, soon adventure strips were all the rage in comics.

Not long after the first comic strips came the first comic strip collections, which took a bunch of daily strips from a certain period of time and bound them all together in a book. As the story goes, someone at the Eastern Color printing company got the bright idea to take several different comics and publish a few of each in a single book. After experiments in distributing the books through mail-in coupon programs and department stores, in 1934 Famous Funnies first appeared on newsstands, and the modern comic book was born. It wasn’t long before people got the bright idea to include new material in the comic books, and before long someone by the name of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson brought in several people to create enough new material to fill an entire comic book without a single reprint, called New Fun. Thus was born the company now known as DC Comics.

I should point out that in these early days in the mid-30s, comic books were not that different from where webcomics is now. The full page of the comic book was the original infinite canvas; every month you had the full page that was then the standard for Sunday strips, without any additional daily strips to muck up the waterworks. What’s more, you could tell a story for several pages at a time (usually six to eight) every month, partly making up for the lack of storytelling over the course of the week, or at least on a weekly basis. On the other hand, having your work distributed in the likes of New Fun or its successors New Comics (later New Adventure Comics and then just Adventure Comics) or Detective Comics was considered the fate of those who couldn’t get work in real newspaper comic strips.

Such was what initially happened to the proposed comic strip from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster about an alien from another planet who ran around fighting crime in an outlandish costume while maintaining a mild-mannered secret identity as a newspaper reporter. Unable to get a newspaper or syndicate to bite on the fantastic premise, they took their creation to DC, and even there it sat in the slush pile until an editor noticed it and made it the lead feature in the first issue of the company’s latest title, Action Comics. Almost instantly, Superman was a runaway success that spawned hordes of other costumed crime fighters (including no small number at DC itself), and helped comic books climb out of the shadows of their newspaper cousins. (And ironically, led to Siegel and Shuster getting the comic strip gig they’d wanted all along.)

With adventure strips taking readers to lushly drawn faraway places and battles with pirates and evil overlords in the newspapers, and costumed crime fighters becoming an outlet for readers’ fantasies and beating up the boogeymen of the day (initially corrupt businessmen, later Nazis) in the (cheap as all get out) comic books, this was the period known as the Golden Age of Comics.

But while World War II helped bring comics’ popularity to even higher heights by giving its heroes easy villains to fight, it also helped mark the beginning of the end of the Golden Age, thanks to wartime restrictions on paper – though the changes continued later into the 1940s. Newspapers reduced the size of comic strips and replaced the full-page Sunday strip with a half-page; syndicates introduced a format that allowed Sunday strips to be reduced even further, by mandating that the first two panels be easily removed (resulting in a strip taking up one-third of a page) and mandatory panel borders be drawn that allowed the entire strip, including first two panels, to take up two lines on a fourth of the page. Ideally, if every panel was roughly square, the strip could even be run down the side. Many strips also suffered the indignation of mandatory panel borders on daily strips that forced every strip to be four square panels that could be rearranged. This effectively killed the adventure strips that thrived on freedom to roam and giving a sense of wonder, though most of the big ones stuck around, some into the present day. In 1950, Peanuts started, and would ultimately point the way forward for comic strips; gag-a-day comics proliferated on the comics pages and do so to this day.

As for comic books, the end of World War II – even with the rise of communism – meant superheroes were no longer in the cultural zeitgeist, and most of them quietly fell away. Comic books entered the only real period in their history where superheroes were not the most popular genre, as crime, romance, and horror comics started dominating newsstands. One company, EC Comics, got rich with horror comics such as the original Tales from the Crypt, but their stories helped bring the whole party to a halt, with the 1954 publication of Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, which charged comic books with corrupting the youth and leading them to delinquency, including the disturbing images in EC’s horror comics and perhaps the first glimpse of the modern-day Internet meme that Batman and Robin might be homosexuals. Threatened with Senate action, the comics industry devised a ridiculously restrictive code of censorship known as the Comics Code, and announced that any comic had to be approved by the Comics Code Authority and receive a sticker indicating such on its cover if it wanted newsstands’ trust that no objectionable material was in there.

The whole thing drove EC out of business with the exception of Mad, which switched to becoming technically a regular old magazine and became one of the cultural touchstones of the 1960s. Left without virtually anything to publish that would pass Comics Code muster, comic books, led by DC, ran back to superheroes, which offered simple good-vs.-evil morality tales that were easier to pass the Comics Code’s bar. At first, this meant DC and no one else. But one of the imitators of the original Golden Age run, which had stumbled along at the edge of bankruptcy and had become reliant on DC for its distribution, suddenly hit a run of successes with deconstructions of the superhero like the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, and the modern Marvel Comics was born. This period also saw the first birth pangs of modern geeky comics fandom, who saw fit to label this era the Silver Age. (Because you can’t just call it the second Golden Age, you have to show off how deep your knowledge of Greek mythology is…)

The Comics Code left mainstream comic books ridiculously ill-positioned to capitalize on the cultural turmoil of the 1960s. (Thanks to politically charged strips like Pogo, comic strips were slightly better prepared.) It also created a market for “underground” independent “comix” that were free from the Code’s draconian rules and were thus free to cover a wider array of subject matter. American mainstream comic books did not overcome the Code and catch up to American culture until the early 1970s, when Marvel, tasked by the US government to create some anti-drug issues of Spider-Man, saw them rejected by the Authority for daring to even mention drugs. Marvel released the issues without Code approval, and the Authority was left with egg on its face. DC also broke new ground with a series teaming conservative superhero Green Lantern with liberal Green Arrow in an examination of all the problems America faced. The Code was forced to revise its guidelines, and by the early part of this decade even Marvel had dropped the Code entirely.

(Note: Many in comic book fandom use the term “Bronze Age” to describe comics published after a number of shifts around 1969-1973. I think the spot that’s closest in spirit to the division of the Golden and Silver Ages, at least in terms of overall industry sales and the popularity of superheroes, is a decline in sales related to an ongoing recession and the shift in distribution paradigms below, in the mid-to-late 70s.)

Later in the 70s, comics were effectively forced off newsstands and into stores devoted to selling only comic books. Comics left the newsstand distribution system and moved to what became known as the “direct market”, originally used to describe a middleman-free system where comic shop owners bought their comics direct from the publisher. After a period of declining sales, what was left of comics fandom had effectively been thinned out to an almost exclusively geek crowd. Eventually the middleman-free system would evolve into a system involving a number of comics-specific distribution companies, eventually thinned out to one with an effective monopoly on mainstream comics distribution, Diamond Comic Distributors.

The new comic shops were places of superhero fandom (DC and Marvel, often now written by people raised on Silver Age comics), by superhero fandom (think the “Comic Book Guy” on The Simpsons), and for superhero fandom. Nonetheless, if you had a comic book and you wanted to be distributed, until this decade the comic shops were the way to go. Some in the business worked on the concept of the “graphic novel”, attempting to liberate the comic book from its magazine origins and write longer works in comic form, helping to inspire things like Understanding Comics. Despite the ghettoization of comics, they enjoyed a brief resurgence in the 1990s as a fad linked to stories of the high prices commanded by classic Golden Age comics, bringing hordes of people into the comic book stores looking to buy a retirement fund. Ignoring rules of supply and demand, Marvel and DC resorted to all sorts of ridiculous gimmicks to sell massive numbers of comics – then the bottom fell out and took the comics industry down so hard Marvel declared bankruptcy.

By the mid-to-late 90s, when comics started appearing on the web, both of the existing types of comics were either in ongoing or entering states of flux. The comic strip has not changed much from the example set by Peanuts of simple, gag-a-day storylines; daily newspaper comic strips with ongoing storylines are the exception and not the rule. Part of the vitriol directed at Garfield is that it is perceived as further imbecilizing the comics pages by encouraging easy-pitch formulaic premises produced in assembly line manner. Comics such as Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes attempted to raise the quality of the comics pages, but little real change has happened.

And it’s getting worse. What comics have anything even approaching being memorable since the 1989 start of Dilbert? The Boondocks? Maybe critically-acclaimed “quirky” strips like Pearls Before Swine or Get Fuzzy? So many of the comics lining the comics pages these days seem to just be unmemorable copies of one another over and over. Imagine what an impact Penny Arcade might have had in newspapers, how different it might have been just by rising above the sea of mediocrity – or maybe it would have been lost in the shuffle and never had anywhere near the impact it did. Or both. Newspapers have always relied on comics as a way to sell newspapers, but just as the Internet started challenging their dominion in this decade, the comics they had always carried could be found on the web as well, and most of them aren’t worth reading anyway. Comics can’t save newspapers this time.

At the same time, the distribution system of comic books in place for 30 years is starting to crack. Graphic novels and collections of the monthly comics (and even the monthly comics themselves) have started to crack bookstores (if slowly), and the rising popularity of Japanese manga since the 90s have turned bookstores into a primary place to get the comics. I’ll expand on that later in the series in Part III or IV with a discussion of a recent development at Diamond with potential for great impact on webcomics. For now know this: old monthly comic books increasingly look like relics from a bygone era.

Between these developments, by 2020 webcomics could be the only first-run distribution mechanism for comics that I mentioned at the start of this post, and one of two with graphic novels. Figuring out what to do with that possibility looming is part of the point of this series.

Then there’s all the issues of creator control and creator’s rights that afflicts both comic strips and comic books. In addition to all the size and layout constraints, comic strips are a very regimented world where you are basically a hired hand and take a lot of guff from syndicates who are afraid of potentially offending anyone, and where the syndicate reaps most of the benefits of your work. The rights of the creator has been a big issue since at least the 70s, and in the 80s and 90s some cartoonists such as Bill Watterson made inroads on creative and financial control of their work (oddly, Jim Davis of all people had a lot of success with the latter), but Eric Burns(-White) suggested back in 2004 that they may have actually hurt the cause of creator’s rights in the long run, simply because they ended their strips after only ten years or so instead of continuing for decades, meaning they sent the message that giving cartoonists what they wanted wasn’t worth the trouble. One may surmise the flip side of this: wannabe edgy cartoonists going to the web instead. (Of course, only two years later Diesel Sweeties was distributed to newspapers by United Features in a deal that meant little more than a little extra work for R. Stevens, who merely wrote a parallel strip – a sign of just how far in the dumper newspapers had already fallen.)

In comic books, the problem is more with the creators of Golden Age properties and the like; you may have heard about the legal troubles DC has had with Siegel, Shuster, and their estates over various Superman rights since the 70s. Comic book writers and artists are even more hired hands in superhero comics, effectively writing what amounts to fanfic. Once again people have been pushing for more control over what they create, and early in the 90s several superstar Marvel artists left to form their own company, Image, that would serve merely as a publishing platform for comics owned by their creators. The problem, as we’ll get to later, is that only a few publishers are able to make inroads in Diamond’s catalog and while financial success isn’t exactly a sane goal in traditional American monthly comic books at all, it’s pretty much a fool’s errand if you don’t work for DC or Marvel (meaning you make superhero comics), and hard to even get started (harder now – again, for reasons we’ll get to) if you don’t align yourself with one of a handful of other companies, maybe five or so, and that includes DC and Marvel.

So that’s another reason we could be left with webcomics and graphic novels by 2020: an artist (here used as a broad term) would be insane to deal with the antiquated ways of old.

This part would serve as a great lead-in to the first current topic that inspired this series. But first, we need to take a detour through Scott McCloud’s vision of webcomics to figure out where we are and where we could be going. And as I write this, I’m not sure which I’m going to do first, and I may do them simultaneously.