Joe,
As probably the guy who's worked on the most online comics at this point in time. Having been a geek for Marvels cyber comics for over two years. Most of them were just reformatted print comics in the sense their pencillers/writers had no knowledge of the medium. So I was coming in and chopping them up trying to make them work online.

I've done it with my own work, the Fenyman story at Lemon Custard. Done for print, when I broke down the pages I found out how much I storytell with a page as a unit, that the final panel will often determine how much of the middle page is designed/plotted. Not having that I edited out a lot of stuff.

With online thinking you have to define your structure more clearly because you don't have that page break to work around. Scenes have to become ended within the work.

Print and online are two different mediums,(but related). Finding out the relationship is an ongoing process. Which is why I'm babbling away here.



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Mark--

I think I understand better what you mean by 'reformatted print.' When a comic designed for printing as a comic book is posted onlline, the result is awkward in a number of ways-- size, the pace of the story, etc. It's a lot like what happened when the first comic books were printed-- they were newspaper comic strips pasted up on comics pages.

Actually the size issue is puzzling to me, because quite a few online comics designed by really competent people nevertheless require all sorts of awkward scrolling in order to see the whole thing.

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Joe Zabel

Ben, I'm not saying people shouldn't animate or use sound in thier work. I'm saying that when they do it is not a comic. It becomes some hybrid or "multimedia " piece.

However, the exercises mentioned above involving scrolling or laying out for the web are comics.

I'll look at work I enjoy if it has animation in it as well...but I won't call it a traditional comic. If you want to use "cybercomic", "multimedia", or whatever else. I'm just bitching about terminology. [img]/resources/ubb/smile.gif[/img]

If people want to do animation to find their audience or whatever, then they should at least call it that.




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Justin Savage
President/Editor/Web-bozo
Sabre's Edge
www.sabresedge.com

Justin--

Not meaning to plug my own previous thread that is sinking, neglected, into the Comicon.com sunset below, but I suggested a kind of extension to the definition of comics in the 'Multimedia Comics' thread below. The distinction is that I include in the definition print comics like Mad Magazine and Acme Novelty Library as well as online comics and a lot of other online phenomena. Check it out!

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Joe Zabel

the funny thing about that is-

that's where the debate about "what is comics" comes in again!

as long as it includes TIME=SPACE or sequence, it's comics. so the stuff online, the stuff on paper, it's COMICS. there doesn't need to be any more distinction than that. figuring out if it's "comics" or a single panel/animated film is more important when dealing with online comics. mark's football strip really teeters on the edge of being strictly animation except for the frames where he has multiple "panels".

i've been itching to get my hands on a copy of flash for just this reason... to experiment with it and find out if it's a viable way to make "comics".

just an opinion, of course! [img]/resources/ubb/smile.gif[/img]

Yes cayetano, you make a good point in bringing up the time/space aspect of comics. While it may be great cartooning, what most of these guys are doing with flash is not comics, they're animated cartoons!

Of course, some argue against the whole time/space definition of comics, granting the term to any work that utilizes the iconography and language associated with comics. But so far those who have come up with definitions besides McCloud's 'temporal map' theory have been too vague for my tastes. Yeah, I know I probably made these points in one of the many earlier McCloud related threads, but I think they're applicable here as well.

Justin Savage also made a good point in his earlier post. If cartoonists wish to express themselves via animation, that's great. Animation is another artform filled with endless possibilities. But don't try to call it comics!

BUT, as a sidenote, online comics can certainly use animation and still be comics. Just as long as the time/space definition applies.

B.C. Bailey
www.huzzy.com