PANEL BEATING: ONE POINT OH
Antony Johnston striking fanboys over the head with very big sticks - every month.

The first of anything is always shit.

That's not cynicism, it's just realistic. Look at the first Gutenberg prints; the first music recording; the first computer games. Anything at all. Innovative, yes. Possessed of quality with the benefit of hindsight, no.

And that applies just as much to web comics.

First off, let's face facts; all but a very, very few of the web comics currently in existence are utter crap. The few that aren't outright abominations are passable, and a very few, such as Jenni & Barry Gregory's ABBY'S MENAGERIE, or PopImage's own award-nominated RUST, are actually good. But there's nothing as yet which, were the story told in a print form, would be regarded as anything more than a half-decent comic. Nothing, for example, which would make a Web-savvy but non-comics reader jump for joy and fall in love with the medium.

In fact, I feel confident in saying that it'll be that way for at least the next two years. Anyone expecting a web comic to shake the world of entertainment in that time is going to be sorely disappointed. I'm not entirely certain most web comics will every be anything but awful, but I'm prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.

"Anyone expecting a web comic to shake the world of entertainment in the next two years is going to be sorely disappointed."

Note here that I'm referring to web "comics". That's because there is one type of sequential art which is actually doing quite well within the Web paradigm, and it's the "strip". You know, stuff like CALVIN & HOBBES, GARFIELD and so on. Strips.

And putting aside all considerations of the lack of printing overheads and unlimited potential audience, strips work on the web for the same reason they do in print. Print strips mainly appear in newspapers and magazines. Periodicals. They're short, pithy and generally humourous. The humourous ones are always the most successful, incidentally.

But the main reason they work in such a format is simple; they don't have any continuity. If you "miss" a GARFIELD strip one day, or even read some out of order, your enjoyment is in no way lessened. You only need to remember who the few basic characters are, because they and their situations never change. Simply put, there's no history. And no need for it.

Now look at what most people are trying to do with Web comics (as opposed to strips). Long-running, potentially complex stories, told in a daily or weekly episodic format. Miss one, and it's like skipping page in a print comic -- you're more than likely going to be very confused.

Now sure, these comics are almost all "archived" -- go back and pick up where you left off, read up to the present update. But doesn't that defeat the entire purpose of them being updated regularly?

Very few people have the time (not to mention memory) these days to check a Web site every single day. Even if they did, there's at least 24 hours between each episode -- and the amount of story told in each episode is, by necessity, small.

"I'm not suggesting we should all give up, forget that Web comics ever existed. But we've got a long way to go."

So what you end up with is a majority of people who, through no fault of their own, will simply forget what the hell the story was in the first place, how the story got to where it currently is, or even what the hell happened yesterday.

Not so with strips. With strips, it doesn't matter if you miss a few days. The joke is still set up and paid off in the space of three panels. You still get the laugh. Which is why they work.

Now I'm not suggesting we should all give up and go home, forget that Web comics ever existed. But we've got a long way to go, and it really pains me to see people proclaiming the "death" of print comics in two years, or that Web delivery is "the future of comics." Because they're not ready yet.

(Besides, people said the same thing about "the death of print" when the Web exploded into the public consciousness. This was, and remains, utter bollocks, as any visit to a newsagent or bookstore will prove.)

I also don't mean to denigrate the efforts of people who are ploughing their time and effort into the few good Web comics that exist, because these people are most definitely innovators. Pioneers. Laying very necessary groundwork, and will hopefully be recognised as such.

But we have to face facts -- in two or three years time, those efforts will appear primitive at best. Look at the first examples of computer colouring in comics. Pretty poor compared to what can be done nowadays. The same goes for CG -- see how far we've come since BATMAN: DIGITAL JUSTICE. And so on.

"Don't publish 3 panels a day. Wait until a story arc (or even complete comic) is done, then put the whole thing up."

I'm not even convinced that higher bandwidth and faster delivery systems will improve things, simple because people's attention spans and memory capacities are just not good enough. You can't expect most people to absorb three panels of strip, put it into context with the multitude of previous three-panel strips they've read so far, and then remember all of that again when they come back to read tomorrow's strip. And that's even if people remember to check every day.

For the time being at least, I think there are two solutions to this, both of which lend the whole idea a bit more credibility; complete stories, and illustrated serial prose.

"Complete stories" is obvious. It means holding off on that serialised Web comic. Don't publish 3 panels a day. Wait until a story arc (or even complete comic) is done, then put the whole thing up, so it can be read in one go, in full context. The few decent Web comics I've read have all fallen into this category, and their memories are much clearer in my mind than any of the episodic strips around. Not coincidentally, every Web comic I've conceived myself as a writer has also fallen into this category, because it just makes sense.

"Illustrated serial prose" is even more of a no-brainer; this accepts the serial format for a story, but is told in bandwidth- and attention-friendly prose form, with "spot" illustrations (a recent print example, if you're still confused, would be Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess's STARDUST).

In such a form, the download time is roughly the same, but the amount of story which can be told (and thus read) in one episode is an order of magnitude more than in a "straight" comic -- and if more can be told in context, more will stick in the reader's mind when they come back for the next update. Again, I'm working on such a delivery method for an upcoming project. Time will tell whether I'm right in this.

There's a precedent for this; such prose pieces were the precursor to the modern novel, even in some ways to the comic book, appearing in newspapers and periodicals of past times. Many of Charles Dickens's greatest works were written in such a way. Then, as printing technology became cheaper and more versatile, so the medium mutated, as any storytelling medium will do, constantly.

Which means, no, I don't think such methods are the "killer app" of Web comics. There isn't a killer app yet, and any that will come about are a long way off yet. But they're a start, and one which I think will garner far more interest in non-"funnies" on the Web than the current crop we're presented with.

Antony Johnston, March 2000

Antony Johnston is Reviews Editor of PopImage.

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