oversimplified

It occurred to me that one difference between comic book pages and comic strips is the location of the climactic event. In a comic book page, it’s placed in the last panel in order to get you to turn the page (or buy the next issue). Comic strips put it in the second to last panel, with payoff in the last panel.

Maybe what really occurred to me is that there is something inherently wrong with the way serial comics on the web are being presented. Showing the most recent comic makes sense for comic strips with little continuity, but trying to tell a story with a regularly updated comic makes for a certain uneasiness when you land on a site and read the most recent part of the story with no context at all, then if you’re even interested based on that page you may or may not go to the trouble of starting at the beginning. Also, visiting the site with each update is less satisfying to me than waiting until the story is complete and then reading the whole thing.

With that, I’m looking critically at what I’m doing here, trying to figure out how to keep the site dynamic without disrupting the continuity.

I’m taking a couple of weeks off to work on this comic a bit. For some reason this is turning into a “story” instead of “a bunch of random junk”. Which, for me, is, generally, what happens.

Most comic sites throw up a comic every few days; but if there is a story going on, does it really make sense to only read a few panels of a story at a time? And if you miss a few days, the first comic you see when you return to the site will probably ruin the story, and you click back a few more and suddenly you’re reading the story backwards.

So I’m trying to figure out a better way. My comic journal, for example, kind of lives on its own, and there’s an easy link to start from the beginning (it’s over there on the right).

Anyway, I’m working on it. Please stand by.