with Alasdair Watson.
Sit down, close your mouth, and pay attention.
Apparently I've got to write a bit of blather to promote Rust, the online comic from PopImage that'll be available soon. Fair enough. Rust is written by me, and Daniel Merlin Goodbrey has applied his filthy talents to creating the images for it through various devious means. It's going to be better than anything else out there, because we're clever people, and he's gifted, to boot. It's the story of one of the last angels, in the year 2134 and the horrible things that happen to him. It's an ugly little piece of the weird. You might like it. You might decide you prefer anally raping dead goats. Still, it's coming.
Online comics have been a massive non-event for the last while. Because no one knew quite what to do with them, really. The early attempts at online comics were dismal flops. There was a good reason for this: They weren't doing anything new. All they consisted of were scanned pages from a print comic made available for download online. Crap, basically. No different from a print comic, except that they took forever to load, and were laid out very badly for the screen.
Marvel thought they'd be a bit clever as a next step, and started adding jerky little animations to the comics. That wasn't much cop, either.
Things have come a long way since then.
Oh, wait. No they haven't.
I've seen Jonni Nitro described as an on-line comic, but it owes more to animation techniques than to conventional comics storytelling, I think. It's good stuff, but it's not a comic. No, online comics today still default to the scanned images from print. If you're lucky, they might betray a little understanding of how layouts work on the web. Some of them have even figured out that you can't do superhero comics online, and have stopped even trying to use the conventions of the genre. If you've found a good one, at any rate.
I'll be fair here. Marvel have improved a good bit. Now, they require you to have a (freely available) plug-in for your browser, and the animation is a little slicker. But I've got another column in me about time in comics, and how it works in on-line comics, so I'll come back to what they're doing wrong in a month or two.
However, there's one key thing the web offers as a medium that nothing else out there can currently match, and almost no one has reallypaid attention to it. The web offers interactivity, and while Scott McCloud is trying hard at it, he's the only one I've seen. I know why it is: When a writer writes, he wants to tell his own goddamned story, not let any geek with a mouse and some spare time fuck it out of all recognition. I agree entirely with that.
Rust is my story. It belongs to no one but me and my vodka-addled colleague who makes the pictures. You bastards don't get to decide what happens. But it's closer to being interactive than anything else I've seen.
And Rust is just the start. I am laying my plans, even now. So come and take a look when it debuts in a couple of weeks. It'll be better than spending another half-hour looking for naked pictures of Newt Gingrich, anyway. You won't need a plug in. You won't have to wait half an hour for the pages to download. We're going to do this properly.
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