Author: Derik Badman

Over at his "Neuf et demi" blog French comics theorist Thierry Groensteen just posted (what I believe is) an excerpt about webcomics from his forthcoming (in 2011) book on comics (a follow-up to his Systeme de la bande dessinée, translated as The System of Comics (UP Mississippi, 2007)). It's a mixture of clichéed anti-screen-reading objections and some more astute observations about the difference between reading comics online and reading them in print. Here's a quick summary with commentary.

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My co-guest blogger Scott Story (a pseudonym of some kind, surely) posted yesterday with some tips about long form comics on the web. While his advice has some merit for certain types of webcomics, I'm not at all in agreement that they are general rules or even good rules.

Some of his tips are all too focused on a webcomic that is based on the single episode/strip/page as the primary structure of the narrative. This is the traditional model that so many webcomics seem to work from, the comic strip model. Scott suggests each episodes have a "beat" and a "cliffhanger" the same type of advice you see in action when you read classic comic strips, particular those in the adventure genre: Roy Crane, Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff, etc. But I don't think this applies to webcomics working in more of a "graphic novel" mode where the work is considered as a single story/book not an series of episodes. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few webcomics that work in this latter mode, such as Family Man or Finder.

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(web to print, print to web, part 3)

I wrote about one of Jed McGowan's webcomics at ComixTalk back in September of 2008. After that he started posting a longer comic (which at the time he called "Bluesy Face") to his website that was an intriguing and slightly abstract mystery that had a wonderful visual style using light blue and grey screentones. (I wrote a bit about it here.) McGowan won a Xeric award for the finished work and now it is being published with the title Lone Pine. He has a pretty long preview up at his site.

McGowan recently posted some photos from the printers as his book was being printed. As of November the book will be available, distributed by AdHouse. And just today he added images of some test prints, pages that have been printed on twice.

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Comics in my Google Reader "Webcomics" folder between Monday night and Tuesday night (or thereabouts):

This must be my lucky day as far as online comics discoveries goes. Brian Chippendale's new webcomic "Puke Force" has it's first eight strips up at the Picturebox site. It's about what you'd expect from Chippendale's work if you've read Ninja. Thought the art is less dense that a lot of Ninja, the ubiquitous marks that almost define Chippendale's work is still to be found, as well as his might-as-well-be-trademarked snaking panel reading path.

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Contents of Webcomics Folder in Google Reader for Monday: 1 episode of Lewis Trondheim's Les Petits Riens, 1 episode of John Allison's Bad Machinery (Note to John if he's reading this: Do you realize the only place your name appears on your home page is in the copyright notice at the bottom?), Yeast Hoist #1 by Ron Regé Jr..

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Hello, I'm the forgotten guest blogger this week. My name's Derik Badman, long time readers may remember the column I wrote here for awhile. I also blog regular at my site Madinkbeard, where you can also find my comics (web and print), which lately have mostly been short and experimental/abstract/non-narrative/poetic.

I'm a structure guy, so I thought I'd give myself a theme or two to work with this week. I decided "web-to-print, print-to-web" would be an interesting topic to discuss, as I feel like I've seen an increasing number of works that transition one way or the other that aren't simply "printed book is made from webcomics series."

Not sure what else I'll write about. Perhaps just a run through the daily contents of my "Webcomics" folder in Google Reader.

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