Been reading some webcomics. DICK TRACY dailies and Sundays from 2012-2013 by Joe Staton and Mike Collins at gocomics.com/dicktracy, and EVIL INC. from 2006 (mostly daily) by Brad Guigar at evil-inc.com/archive/.

Yes, the pages are slow to load because of all the annoying ads. That's entirely by design. You get something for free, but you either get it in small, "wait-for-it" measured doses, or you decide it's worth paying for a "hurry-it-up" digital download collection. They're really meant to be read as they're posted, one per day. If you do it that way, you bookmark the page, and once a day you're in, you're out, you move on. I'm convinced that's entirely the right model for digital comics. Digital floppy singles are not. There's no incentive to buy those unless you're already a fan of them through prior reading, but there's no free bait, no lure to get you hooked. Online is free but slow, not conducive to immersive reading. If the comic you're reading hooks you, and starts reeling you in as a reader, you are a fish on a line, fighting the desire to read these webcomics faster, without annoying ads and waiting for pages to load, so you break down and spend a few bucks for a digitally-downloaded collection, or a few bucks more for a print copy. Or you're fine with the casual "read-a-few-then-call-it-quits-for-now" experience.

Haven't been able to get into any webcomics. It feels like they're making it up as they go along. I prefer strong narratives. Like someone writes a page then passes it onto someone else and so on. It's too disjointed for me even when I read a bunch of days at once.

Quote from: irishmoxie on July 27, 2017, 07:35:56 PM
Haven't been able to get into any webcomics. It feels like they're making it up as they go along. I prefer strong narratives. Like someone writes a page then passes it onto someone else and so on. It's too disjointed for me even when I read a bunch of days at once.

That's because the rhythm of the daily (or X-times weekly) strip is a different discipline -- they're really not meant to be read in clumps. Each strip has to deliver something as a single unit, but to the degree that there's continuity there is some overlap where information gets repeated. There's nothing stopping someone from serializing a regular comic book story one-page-a-day, but you don't really get anything out of reading them that way. Regular comic books aren't written that way at all, so they usually read terribly that way, one page a day.

Daily strip continuities can have strong narratives if the story is planned and paced out in advance, but they still have to perform the double duty of delivering something with each daily strip. Because the reading experience is cheap (or free) and casual, the storyline has a chance to gradually draw a reader in and involve them in a more serious way. Regular comic books don't do that because there's no casual reading phase before committing your $3-4 for a 20-page chapter. You just roll the dice based on someone else's reviews and take a gamble, but the same criticism applies to serialized periodical comic books versus original graphic novels that are meant to be read as a complete unit, not in chapter installments. Stories have to be structured somewhat differently to be broken down into regular 20-page chapters where the reader doesn't get to move on to the next chapter until a month later.

Innumerable interviews with creators prove that the "making it up as you go along" principle largely applies to most series fiction (regardless of the frequency of publication) as well as to daily strips. It varies greatly from creator to creator, but many reveal that the story they set out to tell took unexpected turns over time during the process of writing and drawing that were never planned. Letting a story evolve organically during the process of working to a deadline can sometimes produce fortuitous results, and sometimes not. Some creators prefer to hold themselves to a well-organized structure of pre-planned story beats, while others have no more than a very general sense of direction and certain ideas they want to incorporate, and they prefer to let the story unfold during the actual scripting/drawing phase with more spontaneity. We often read anecdotes about characters "writing themselves" or continuities taking twists different that what the author originally had in mind, in the process of creating them.

Historically speaking (ignoring the current popularity of archival hardcover reprints) daily strips were always subjected to an editing process to read better when reprinted in a collected format. Panels were dropped to eliminate redundancies (or sometimes added, or the art was extended in an existing panel) or resized, text captions were dropped or added, dialogue in balloons sometimes altered. That's exactly what Brad Guigar does with his print collections of the EVIL INC. ANNUAL REPORT to make the story flow smoother in collected format.

The problem with serialized periodical comic books (whether in digital or print form) is the question of how do you get someone who's never read the comic to gamble $3-4 on it? If you're familiar with the creator(s') previous body of work, that's one thing, or if the characters are at least familiar to some degree, even if the particular story or creative team isn't. Then there are reviews. But there's still no means of mass exposure to create a desire for the product, a fact compounded when the creative team and/or characters are unfamiliar to the consumer. There's no "try before you buy", and even worse, you have to be looking for the comic (in a comic shop or online) in the first place. Webcomics share the latter problem to the degree of -- how do you discover them in the first place?, but once you do, at least you get to take it for a trial spin. It's a real problem with only about 2000 or so comic book stores in North America, and it's one of the things FCBD and Halloween ComicFest are trying to address, but those "free trial" comics are only available a couple of days a year out of 365, and not every series gets a freebie issue. Archie Comics has digital freebies, which is really helpful in conjunction with a small group of characters that share a "house style" of art and writing. The wider comics market has a real diversity of styles in art, writing and story concepts, but since comics aren't cheap, that makes blind sampling too risky for most consumers.

Dedicated comic shops and the non-returnable direct market came into existence as a haven for the cognoscenti, the experienced and pre-sold buyer, typically a knowledgeable reader/collector with distinct (if narrow) preferences and tastes who was willing to devote significant effort to the hobby. Once the mass-distributed, cheap & disposable comic book withdrew from exposure to the public in the retail establishments of the wider culture, casual readership of comics was decimated and the comics publishing industry changed in ways that made the medium less accessible and less welcoming to newcomers, particularly with the shrinking of the market for all-ages comics, which the comics publishing industry depended on for the seeding of the next generation of comic book consumers. The more typical neophyte entering the world of comics reading/collecting today is likely to need some sort of older or more experienced relative or friend as a mentor/guide if it's going to turn out to be more than a passing interest.

Quote from: irishmoxie on July 27, 2017, 07:35:56 PM
Haven't been able to get into any webcomics. It feels like they're making it up as they go along. I prefer strong narratives. Like someone writes a page then passes it onto someone else and so on. It's too disjointed for me even when I read a bunch of days at once.

Two that you might want to take a look at: Flipside, and Sandra and Woo. Very good, longstanding web comics to me. There's also GPF....

Quote from: SAGG on July 28, 2017, 06:31:07 PM
Very good, longstanding web comics to me. There's also GPF....

GPF?   Link?


As an aside, by FAR the biggest issue that I have with digital comics is that the basic page dimensions of a floppy comic were never designed for reading in a digital format. The default "real estate" of a true digital comic is the landscape-mode page/screen, the same as computer and television monitors. Print format comics are exactly the opposite, using portrait mode "display" for their page composition, so any page composition that stacks tiers of panels taller than they are wide is automatically crap by definition for reading on a monitor display. Tablets can compensate for portrait mode, but any screen display that is smaller diagonally than a standard-format floppy comic is automatically inferior. Desktop monitors can display the portrait mode page if they're at least as tall as a standard floppy, but either there's a lot of wasted screen real estate or the display needs to be 2 pages side by side. Either way the two formats are just plain incompatible for dividing into panels in such a way that they'll still read left-to-right, up-to-down in both the portrait and landscape format unless you adopt a very rigid, unvarying grid of same-sized rectangular panels that can be stacked in different ways for either format. I don't want wasted screen real estate, I don't want a 2-column (2 side-by-side pages) screen, and I don't want to pan, scroll or zoom the page, either -- just a single click or swipe to go on to the next page. The basic default layout of the single page is incompatible between the two mediums of floppy print comic and digital comic. Digital comics' natural analog to print comics is the Sunday newspaper comics section half-page format. There's nothing you can do with older comic book art that's just being scanned in the digital age, but newer comics being created now need to fit a landscape page format before I'll adopt them. In short, my disdain of digital comics is based on the fact that they are virtual "fake" floppy comics -- comics which were never created by design for their native display format, the landscape-mode monitor. Until that changes they'll always be inferior to comics that were designed for the printed page, and the only real use I'll have for digital comics are for those comics I essentially cannot get by any other means: webcomics, English-language scanslations of manga not otherwise available in English, and older public domain comics which would be prohibitively expensive (if you could even find them) to collect as back issues.

GPF    http://www.gpf-comics.com


Moving on to the rest of the DC titles and then I'll be almost up to date.  Just the Free Comic Book Day titles and what has accumulated in the last couple of weeks will be left.


Astro City
Everafter
Frostbite
Red Thorn
Unfollow
Flintstones
Future Quest
Scooby Doo (several titles)
Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77

Quote from: rusty on July 29, 2017, 09:51:10 AM
GPF    http://www.gpf-comics.com


Moving on to the rest of the DC titles and then I'll be almost up to date.  Just the Free Comic Book Day titles and what has accumulated in the last couple of weeks will be left.


Astro City
Everafter
Frostbite
Red Thorn
Unfollow
Flintstones
Future Quest
Scooby Doo (several titles)
Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77

Thanks Rusty. After all of that, you still have time to read webcomics as well? I suppose it helps that you don't have to work during school vacations. Did you get Batman '66 Meets the Legion?

I actually don't read any webcomics at this time, though I'd heard of GPF.  I have purchased a few kickstarter collections of webcomics such as The Meek, Sorcery 101 and Widdershins.


I did buy the Batman '66/Legion comic, but haven't read it yet.  That will be part of the catch up with comics that have come in over the past couple of weeks.  I usually get caught up with comics shortly before going back to school.  I also have a ton of manga volumes and graphic novels/trades that I"m way behind on and won't be caught up on any time soon.

Quote from: rusty on July 29, 2017, 12:33:48 PM
I actually don't read any webcomics at this time, though I'd heard of GPF.  I have purchased a few kickstarter collections of webcomics such as The Meek, Sorcery 101 and Widdershins.


I did buy the Batman '66/Legion comic, but haven't read it yet.  That will be part of the catch up with comics that have come in over the past couple of weeks.  I usually get caught up with comics shortly before going back to school.  I also have a ton of manga volumes and graphic novels/trades that I"m way behind on and won't be caught up on any time soon.

Yes, thank you for providing the GPF link as well. I'm just now getting here.....

7/28-7/30:
ARCHIE'S FUNHOUSE BACK-TO-SCHOOL ANNUAL #27
THE SEARCHERS TP VOL 02: APOSTLES OF MERCY
TIME LINCOLN: FATE OF THE UNION TP
TRUMP VS. TIME LINCOLN #1 (one-shot)
VALERIAN: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION HC VOL 01

I haven't read any in a while because I'm coloring a lot so today I will read.

I read these books for 12 minutes each
Betty & Veronica Jumbo Comics Digest #242 & #247
Jughead - Volume #2
Invincible- Volume #12- Still Standing
Blankets
And I finished Last Look

Today, August 1st:
STREET FIGHTER SWIMSUIT SPECIAL 2017 (one-shot)
LOBSTER JOHNSON: MANGEKYO (one-shot)
PROJECT SUPERPOWERS: HERO KILLERS #3
SUPER SECRET ROBOT CLUB #1
GALAKTIKON #1 (of 6)
HILLBILLY #7 - in 3-D! (glasses not included)
NEW GODS SPECIAL #1 (one-shot)
LOONEY TUNES #238
STAR TREK: WAYPOINT #6 (of 6)
PREDATOR HUNTERS #4 (of 5)

I'll read in a while.

GHOST STATION ZERO #1 (of 4)
SLASHER #3
JOHN CARPENTER'S TALES OF SCIENCE FICTION: VAULT #1 (of 3)
QUEEN EMERALDAS HC GN VOL 01