I really feel like I could crawl into a dark hole and never come back out right now.
Too tired and too lacking in caffeine to actually think straight right now. C's been working long days; our never-ending insect problem has been, well, not ending; my mental health has recently not been the pinacle of triumph and achievment that past therapists and my parents would have you believe; and my column has continually been late/behind-schedule for little over a month now. In all of this hecticness, I still wade through a see of headlines featuring atrocious foreign-policy fueled by racism to further abate racism, and celebrities making themselves look like asses. Still, the RSS feed world does have much to offer me in the form of webcomix.
The new line-up for Act-I-Vate's "Wave 3" is finally up, after months of teasing anticipation. One such contributor seems to be a random myspace friend of mine, Jenn Tong. I took a look at some of her work on her myspace and livejournal profiles, and it really is quite remarkable stuff. I look foward to what she has to offer to Act-I-Vate.
The thing about webcomics is that, because of the intermitent nature of publication, and because the artists involved are most likely not getting paid for their work, it makes it a completely different kind of reading experience. It's hard to sit down and read a story in comprehsible bits like a print comic, and it's even harder to go back after it's all been published to sit down and re-read the whole thing as a complete story. Most of my favorite stuff being hosted by WebComicsNation does allow this. But because it is a paid hosting service with no real community basis (no links, hard to find links to it, etc.), it is hard to find something that you would actually like in a mirad of shit. I blame this on two things: 1) the very base design of the site leaves much of the artists personality out of the presentation, which is an arena which webcomics have the potential to really excel in; 2) most artists, save for maybe Roger Langridge, really just use the service as an image hosting service, presenting the images, out of order on personal blogs - something you could easily do with a service like Flickr or something, rather than proport that WebComicsNation can serve as an actual hub of any sort to this burgeoning medium. Scott McCloud is clever enough to use his websites own server to this end, allowing you to read work that you can pay for or can view for free, as opposed to WebComicsNation's either/or accounts (I may be wrong; I have yet to see someone either both free or payable webcomics through a single webcomicsnation profile).
One of the beautiful things about webcomics is that it makes work so accesible for everyone without having to go through the publishing process which requires comics to be a saleable commodity in some sense. This allows artists, of all sorts, to publicly present their work to any one as art for arts sake. In the realm of comics and cartooning, this allows the cartoonist to visually explore things that were only really previously explored on a self-published mini-comics level. And while the occassional independant publisher's anthology project may allow a cartoonist to reach a wider audience, it in no way compares to the scope of internet publishing.
That being said, as someone who is attracted to the writing process of comics, and someone who enjoys writing comic scripts in his own time, I have to say that the medium of webcomix really is the artists domain. Unfourtunately, both internet publishing, and many bigger, artistry-focused, small press publishers see comics as a primarily visual medium, leaving little room for a comic writer who cannot draw wishing to explore ideas within both of these formats' scopes. This has it's draw backs. Few webcomics read as great stories. Most of the more acclaimed "literary" aspects that comics have attained in the past few decades are completely devoid, leaving the webcomic to be relegated to either gag strips or surrealist (visual) art work. Don't get me wrong. I love this stuff, and not all comics have to have a discernable narrative flow. But I just wonder if the advantages of such a medium are also it's weaknesses.
One day, I'd like to do a webcomic. I wish I could draw, but I can't. I can write...sort of. You tell me. I've been writing since I was 8, but I stopped drawing somewhere around 11. I wish I had never stopped. The thing about webcomics that fascinates me is the artists willingness to explore new ideas simply because they may or may not be interesting, with "story" being a secondary concern. I wish there were some way to blend these two thing into one cohesive mindmelting work, but as I said before, the role of the comic-writer in the sphere of webcomics has been relegated to postings on various message boards. I guess that's a place to start.
