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A novel is sequential just by the nature of time, so an illustrated novel is too, and so is 17776, especially 17776 because it has a real calendar that makes you wait a while to read. Paintings too are sequential.
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Jan 28, 2021 19:02
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Y'all need Wittgenstein.
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Jan 28, 2021 19:05
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Really happy to see the support for Hitmen fot Destiny!  Trixie Slaughteraxe for President is definitely up there too, although I think I'd have to go for Gunnerkrigg Court as the best webcomic, with K6BD being a very very very close second.
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Jan 28, 2021 19:09
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Bongo Bill posted:Y'all need Wittgenstein.
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Jan 28, 2021 19:23
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HookedOnChthonics posted:Ulysses "Seen" is/was definitely a webcomic (sadly no longer published online, looks like); i challenge you to find continuity in the images in that one with or without words haha hey, hey hold on a minute buster!! i said sequential!! not continuity!! that's two different things! dinosaur comics is a comic because it's a series of images ordered sequentially to tell a narrative (even if its a short joke)! continuity is the maintenance of unbroken action or canon in a sequence within the art itself!! i feel these are two separate things!! e: to be honest i think this is an interesting discussion, after homestuck i had hoped that more people would get wild with their infinite canvases a la 17776 for comics but it never really happened. but i hope it does so that this discussion does become even more blurred and messy, sincerely. comics are a weird evolving medium especially since now they can spill over the "pages"
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Jan 28, 2021 19:39
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FunkyAl posted:Best Webcomic of 2010s? My contenders are, I think: All Night Laundry Nimona Lore Olympus It's very possible I'm missing one or two I absolutely loved though, it's been a long decade. Edit: Maybe put Oh Human Star up there for contention? Edit 2: Oh wait, wait, wait. Best Webcomic of the 2010s is obviously, no contest, It Hurts!! GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Jan 28, 2021 |
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Jan 28, 2021 20:19
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The lack of love of CRISIS ZONE hurts me personally
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Jan 28, 2021 20:25
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World Famous W posted:The lack of love of CRISIS ZONE hurts me personally that was 2020 but all of mm+o was v good
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Jan 28, 2021 20:33
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fun hater posted:hey, hey hold on a minute buster!! i said sequential!! not continuity!! that's two different things! dinosaur comics is a comic because it's a series of images ordered sequentially to tell a narrative (even if its a short joke)! continuity is the maintenance of unbroken action or canon in a sequence within the art itself!! i feel these are two separate things!! Id argue that the only part of 17776 that really makes sense as a "comic" is the very first page, with the use of calendars to indicate the passage of time and how it places the dialog within those calendars reminding me a bunch of some indie comics i read in the 90s whos name escapes me now with like long stretches of obscure / abstract panel art combined with grounded dialog World Famous W posted:The lack of love of CRISIS ZONE hurts me personally i love crisis zone but it is an incredibly 2020 comic, it is very much not of the 2010s
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Jan 28, 2021 20:37
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fun hater posted:hey, hey hold on a minute buster!! i said sequential!! not continuity!! that's two different things! dinosaur comics is a comic because it's a series of images ordered sequentially to tell a narrative (even if its a short joke)! continuity is the maintenance of unbroken action or canon in a sequence within the art itself!! i feel these are two separate things!! Ok so if those are the definitions you're on board with, I'm even more confused what the distinction you're drawing is--I had assumed you had other usages in mind given that you said 17776 does not have sequential images. Homestuck is a webcomic because you advance through a series of consistently-formatted pages with images and text in order. 17776 is not a webcomic because you advance through a series of consistently-formatted pages with images and text in order, but sometimes the text comes before the images? I would strongly encourage you to check out Awful Hospital, which I'm sure you will acknowledge is definitely a webcomic. It broadly uses the Homestuck-style CYOA structure (art and words, usually as separate page elements, representing a moment of story each, advance to the next page with a button) but explores a lot more configurations of those elements--the distribution of meaning between images and text swings wildly page by page to respond to the needs of storytelling. Images are regularly used just "to illustrate the points being made in the text, or to create a visual experience that enhances reading the text." You cannot remove all the text and have it scan as a story or remove all the images and read it as an intelligible story (which I think is true of 17776 as well). Webcomic? Illustrated novel?
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Jan 28, 2021 20:59
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What about Existential Comics?
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Jan 28, 2021 21:09
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I'm going to be that guy and argue audience-interactive / CYOA type setups like Awful Hospital and early Homestuck are closer to games than webcomics (specifically tabletop games or even freeform roleplay, with hundreds to thousands of people running a single character instead of four people running four characters) labels don't really work in the wild new internet frontier and 17776 is ... something new altogether
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Jan 28, 2021 21:34
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i remember when 'hypertext media' was supposed to revolutionize art any day now i guess homestuck counts as one? 17776 too
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Jan 28, 2021 21:46
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HookedOnChthonics posted:Ok so if those are the definitions you're on board with, I'm even more confused what the distinction you're drawing is--I had assumed you had other usages in mind given that you said 17776 does not have sequential images. Homestuck is a webcomic because you advance through a series of consistently-formatted pages with images and text in order. 17776 is not a webcomic because you advance through a series of consistently-formatted pages with images and text in order, but sometimes the text comes before the images? to be clear, i dont think the format consistency of homestuck is essential to it being a comic, because while 99% of it was 1 panel and a huge textbox, there were notable times where it screwed with the format a lot, from flash videos to playing with the css of the site itself. that was just my answer as to what differentiates homestuck from a webnovel: despite its differences, it shares a lot of overlap format-wise with traditional 1 panel captioned gag comics. the order of the text and images is really not crux of it. this is a matter of the, and i say this way too much, framing of the work. its the difference between illustrative and comic work. both can tell a story but the difference is in the presentation. but there's not hard or solid rules that's like "oh a comic must have panels" or speech bubbles or whatever. i think the only thing that differentiates a comic from other types of narrative artwork is the use of multiple images to propel a narrative forward. an illustration or other narrative artwork is typically a single image frozen (even when animated, i hope you know what i mean) in that moment in the narrative. it does not progress past that point without the immediate assistance of another image. but that doesn't mean i think my illustrated copy of alice and wonderland is a comic. 17776 has multiple images, even some right after another, but the images are intended to illustrate the points in the text, not as the propulsion method. sadly there was little i found that i enjoyed about awful hospital. it wasnt to my taste. this is a lot of me navel gazing lol. sorry. ive never had a chance to openly think about this kind of stuff. its challenging and interesting
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Jan 28, 2021 21:51
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OK! Now we're getting somewhere. The core element of comics-ness is in propulsion--the more horsepower per jpeg the more comics-y, I assume? So take a look at this page, where animated gifs orient you to the positions of the characters in space and the actions they are undertaking--then rams a tornado into the middle of the formation and spirits the eye of the camera into the distance, to the spot the ball lands. No iota of velocity for you there? No transportation from one point in the story to the next? It is super challenging and interesting to discuss, which is why precision can help, and testing against counterexamples! Lunatic Sledge posted:I'm going to be that guy and argue audience-interactive / CYOA type setups like Awful Hospital and early Homestuck are closer to games than webcomics (specifically tabletop games or even freeform roleplay, with hundreds to thousands of people running a single character instead of four people running four characters) What makes it a game rather than a comic with a particularly large uncredited writing staff? "Game-ness" certainly has a muuuuuuch deeper academic discourse around it than "comics-ness" (hi again Wittgenstein) so we can maybe lean on that a little; a lot focus on an element of competition that mostly is absent from CYOA comics for instance. For my money, though, to be a game something has to be theoretically repeatable with different outcomes, and have some (even unquantifiable) basis for comparing them. Like if the last page of HS was a joke hi-score screen and it was followed by a fresh page 1 with a new chance to name the kid and see how things go this time. vvvv this is basically it. my definition for a webcomic is any creative project accessed online where the smallest reducible unit of meaning is still visual media. HookedOnChthonics fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Jan 28, 2021 |
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Jan 28, 2021 22:06
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i think there's a spectrum of 'people telling stories on the internet' between fanfiction and video production when judged in terms of how visual the storytelling is, and webcomics are most of the gradient between the two. some webcomics are basically illustrated stories, some get close to multimedia production, but it's webcomics all the way down
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Jan 28, 2021 22:13
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Hmmm, I'll go top 5, in no particular order. And tbh all for different reasons. Kill 6 Billion Demons Feast For A King Gunnerkrigg Court - Got a lot of nostalgia for this, tbh. It keeps going but it doesn't feel weaker for it to me, just that there's more story left. O Human Star - very sweet, emotionally engaging, tight plotting, actually finished and stayed strong the whole time. Gonna throw Mare Internum as a rec along the same lines, tho it gets pretty intense. Homestuck - okay okay okay. We all have opinions. But it was there, okay? It happened. It was interesting. It tried exciting new things. Icarus-like, it flew too close to the sun. But it certainly had an impact! I had like 20 fantrolls.
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Jan 28, 2021 22:20
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HookedOnChthonics posted:^^^ there's no way you're gonna convince me one of the old-mannest of old-man webcoms (esp. now that Schlock Mercenary is over) started any time before 1999 I am genuinely shocked to discover Alethia is from 2019. E: Also please don't make me go dig up Scott McCloud about this, the perfect formal expression of webcomics is questionable online scans of A Week of Kindness captioned like image macros. Sequential art is a lot of things, and not rigorously defined. One could argue that it's the absence of the gutter, and the time/space potential that it expresses, which undermines some works' claim to be 'comics' - or you could argue that single panel comics already lack gutter and therefore that can't be a framework we use (or works that don't have the gutter but find other ways to express time across images). Sequential art is art which structures time, so that the reader finds or imagines a sequence of events from the sequence of images. This means that there are edge cases. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Jan 28, 2021 |
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Jan 28, 2021 22:37
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Oops, good catch--the archive is undated and I discovered it through a channel that implied it was new, but it's been going up since 2015. I'm mostly coming at this from very very (very very very) half-remembered McCloud in this conversation so I hope I'm not butchering it!!
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Jan 28, 2021 22:46
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Given that MSPA and 17776 are mostly just illustrated chat logs theres not much separating them from Jerk City and you can't tell me Jerk City isn't a webcomic.
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Jan 28, 2021 22:51
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I think that, going off of reasonably remembered McCloud (I used his formal analysis in a graduate school presentation about a year and a half ago, so it's relatively fresh) - the 'propulsion' in discussion is the effect of sequential art as structuring time. You can do this in a single panel or multiple, but crucially the comic form usually operates to create a sense of sequence, therefore continuity or causality, by the ordering of the images. The 'gutter' is important because (in modern comics and really in any but very avante-garde comics) the reader is drawn to imagine what occurred between panels, filling in the action. I bounced off 17776, but I will say that I wouldn't class it as a webcomic less because of close formal analysis and more because it has the sort of cultural position of web serial fiction, which is a different tradition, with different reader expectations and genre assumptions on the formal level. Homestuck might be similar? But Homestuck was massively influential on and positioned within webcomics culture, as I understand it. E: Also McCloud is pretty open to the edge cases of comics being hazy and unclear, which is why he prefers the term 'sequential art' for what he's interested in, because it's a broader category containing various other genres besides comics (such as A Week of Kindness).
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Jan 28, 2021 22:59
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HookedOnChthonics posted:OK! Now we're getting somewhere. The core element of comics-ness is in propulsion--the more horsepower per jpeg the more comics-y, I assume? the gifs allow the reader to orient themselves within the narrative physically but i, personally, am struggling to make the leap to connect it to a a feeling of sequential action evoking a narrative, rather than just action indicating where something is located in physical space. i think the images compliment the text as interactive fiction, illustrated, with diagrams and maps. they just feel functionally different to me!
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Jan 28, 2021 23:00
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fun hater posted:the gifs allow the reader to orient themselves within the narrative physically but i, personally, am struggling to make the leap to connect it to a a feeling of sequential action evoking a narrative, rather than just action indicating where something is located in physical space. i think the images compliment the text as interactive fiction, illustrated, with diagrams and maps. they just feel functionally different to me! The use of the images evokes the sequential narrative of a football broadcast using the images non-sequentially. In a real game these replays and stuff are used...meta-sequentially? anti-sequentially? important to understanding the narrative of the game but not at the exact moment of occurrance.
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Jan 28, 2021 23:21
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17776 is close enough to being A Homestuck that I feel like arguing over whether or not it's a webcomic is largely pointless. I am going to officially rule that 17776 and Homestuck and their ilk are webcomics for the purpose of this argument.
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Jan 28, 2021 23:25
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Homestuck specifically isn't really talked about in this thread much because it has its own thread and over time it got really weird with a whole culture surrounding it that is hard to really understand from outside. I fell away from reading it because it was a whole lot of text that I didn't really enjoy reading because I wasn't a fan of the writing in any way. If we're going to get into a definition debate that disqualifies comics for being too heavily text-based, I wouldn't mind slamming subnormality, but I don't really know anything about 17776 to say one way or the other. If you guys have something to say about it other than the debate over whether you can talk about it, why not just talk about it instead.
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Jan 28, 2021 23:50
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SlothfulCobra posted:
but i like talking about webcomic formats and their limitations/the extent to which they can be pushed to their limit before the format becomes muddied and unclear. i think it's an interesting and relevant topic considering the wider breadth of comic formats available online!! tbh one of the most disheartening things about the rise of webtoons in the west is that, while the comics are better formatted for phone scrolling (and that's the point), it makes the focus of the strip very narrow and the ability to innovate within that space hasn't been fully explored (i feel). there's always that terrifying ghost webtoon bongcheon dong ghost horang that used autoscroll in a really neat way (scary warning!!!!) e: im not trying to gatekeep, but sincerely, i never get to talk about this kind of stuff. the art form is weird and expanding and our definitions of what we expect a webcomic to look like has changed so dramatically since it was first introduced, that i a legitimately interested to see where it goes from here.
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Jan 28, 2021 23:59
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fun hater posted:but i like talking about webcomic formats and their limitations/the extent to which they can be pushed to their limit before the format becomes muddied and unclear. i think it's an interesting and relevant topic considering the wider breadth of comic formats available online!! oh yeah the rise of identical formats on identical webspaces becoming the most marketable and easily approachable structure is legit uncomfortable, like I spent years trying to do weird poo poo based on things I learned from other people doing weird poo poo, and I don't like the idea that weird poo poo is becoming ... undoable. It's not just the rise of the webtoon structure, it's the fall of places like Smackjeeves and tools like Project Wonderful, slowly filtering new artists into a convenient phone friendly mold. You can still be creative within that space and tell an amazing story, of course, but someone raised on webtoons making a webtoon for the Webtoons site isn't going to make a Homestuck or a 17776. It stifles experimentation with the format in a medium that I think has only touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of what it could become
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Jan 29, 2021 00:05
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Having just posted all of series 1 and 2 in the CCCC webcomics thread, Spacetrawler is an underrated comic of the 2010s IMO.
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Jan 29, 2021 00:14
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Hostile V posted:Having just posted all of series 1 and 2 in the CCCC webcomics thread, Spacetrawler is an underrated comic of the 2010s IMO. its good, i'd never read it before so ty for posting it!!
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Jan 29, 2021 00:15
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god I forgot how much this dumb comic rules
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Jan 29, 2021 00:22
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Joe Slowboat posted:I think that, going off of reasonably remembered McCloud (I used his formal analysis in a graduate school presentation about a year and a half ago, so it's relatively fresh) - the 'propulsion' in discussion is the effect of sequential art as structuring time. You can do this in a single panel or multiple, but crucially the comic form usually operates to create a sense of sequence, therefore continuity or causality, by the ordering of the images. The 'gutter' is important because (in modern comics and really in any but very avante-garde comics) the reader is drawn to imagine what occurred between panels, filling in the action. And the core takeaway of the infinite canvas idea is that once you're free of the rigid pagination mandated by physical formats, the formal qualities of navigation become a much more important and versatile storytelling tool, right? That the 'next page' button, in whatever form or shape, stops being a concession to physical reality and starts being a deliberate stylistic element. The blank browser screen in between page loads becomes the gutter, and the artist gets a lot more discrete control over how it is deployed. Homestuck's formal innovations are definitely more interesting and more memorable than its plot (and I liked the plot a lot). I still think the coolest thing Hussie did was use web technology to illustrate two different 'theories' of time travel within the same work; the one time in the comic the page is automatically advanced for you is also incredible for the amount of memorable meaning it ekes out of a simple url redirect flash element. It's also the only webcomic I can think of that uses leitmotif.
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Jan 29, 2021 00:41
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Acebuckeye13 posted:god I forgot how much this dumb comic rules My favorite "recent" comic is easily Bad Machinery. Scary-go-Round was a comic I ran into by accident years ago and followed religiously to the end, and at first I wasn't sure what to make of a new cast of kids. The Mystery kids won me over, and I liked the resulting stories even more than I had SGR, and I'm on board for just about anything Allison throws our way. Circus Windows is a real treat! I loathe the fishman, but I'm sure that's why Desmond stays around.
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Jan 29, 2021 01:01
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Bell_ posted:The Dr. McNinja comic really stuck its landing If I had to choose a favorite moment in Dr. McNinja (aside from the last page, because drat, that's just not fair), it'd be either the end of Why a Gorilla? or The child delights in violence.
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Jan 29, 2021 01:25
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Bell_ posted:The Dr. McNinja comic really stuck its landing, but Operation Punch Dracula was still my favorite story he told. Operation Punch Dracula is the high point of McNinja, no contest. And involved the use of a single gif page with animation, which I think is unique in the history of the comic! Weirdly on topic for the other discussion.
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Jan 29, 2021 01:29
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Lunatic Sledge posted:oh yeah the rise of identical formats on identical webspaces becoming the most marketable and easily approachable structure is legit uncomfortable, like I spent years trying to do weird poo poo based on things I learned from other people doing weird poo poo, and I don't like the idea that weird poo poo is becoming ... undoable. It's not just the rise of the webtoon structure, it's the fall of places like Smackjeeves and tools like Project Wonderful, slowly filtering new artists into a convenient phone friendly mold. You can still be creative within that space and tell an amazing story, of course, but someone raised on webtoons making a webtoon for the Webtoons site isn't going to make a Homestuck or a 17776. It stifles experimentation with the format in a medium that I think has only touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of what it could become 99.99999% of everyone isn't gonna make a 17776 and they sure as poo poo weren't doing it in whatever nostalgic fantasy of the Geocities internet where weirdo niche stuff had frankly far less of a shot at finding an audience than it does today yeah there's a Webcomics Industry now and its products are as homogenized and dull as any other market-optimized artform but it's easier than ever for someone with an actual creative inclination to do whatever bizarre rear end poo poo they feel like and get it out there, whereas if the dudes doing mobile-first isekai for Webtoons had gotten into the medium a decade or two ago they woulda just been making more of the ten hojillion two-gamers-on-a-couch comics anyway while 17776 is worlds better than any webcomic ever written that's more to do with the quality of the writing and content of the ideas in the narrative than because it did anything with visual storytelling district managers hadn't been doing with Powerpoint for decades A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 03:59
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:99.99999% of everyone isn't gonna make a 17776 and they sure as poo poo weren't doing it in whatever nostalgic fantasy of Geocities internet where weirdo niche stuff had a shot at frankly far less popular success than it does today sure they were. kid radd was 2002 and it was mind blowing for the time. when i am king was 2001. and mspa was 2007! people like to play and push in the spaces they're given when that have enough time to experiment. i will never subscribe to the idea that people only innovate when theres money on the table. people need to eat, but this is a more multifaceted well than presented. i widh people had the opputunity at all to even have that space, but its been paved over with very corporate hosting, aesthetics and forced adherence to templates. e: if anything weirdo stuff got around faster on the geocities internet because it was smaller and there was less poo poo to look at in general fun hater fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 04:21
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yeah people can and do still make sprite comics that investigate what if videogames were, like, real, man. The Man isn't stopping those so inclined now, even less so than he's stopping them from making Crow Cillers or near-indecipherable MSPaint theosophist animal DragonballZ or that one guy's intensely perverted comic slash multimedia dissertation on Oblivion catgirls, which are largely possible right now due to poo poo like Patreon that didn't exist to make being a high-effort independent comics weirdo sustainable back in the day. If you have to issue a disclaimer that 'it was mind blowing for the time' and 'there was less to look at back then' like someone would say about bearbaiting in the Dark Ages that is kinda an implicit admission that the time, then, was not exactly a lost creative golden age
A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Jan 29, 2021 |
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Jan 29, 2021 04:29
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webtoon went global like six years ago, what are you even trying to convey edit: the other things I mentioned--PW and Smackjeeves going down--were also in the last five years
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Jan 29, 2021 04:43
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i think its cool that in 2002 a guy was making something technically impressive, even if the content isnt to my taste. this is a fun fact, but in the early 2000s, people could do less things with the internet and computers, so things from that era might not seem as impressive now lol. there were, of course, a million great webcomics from the early 2000s (a lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible, gunnerkrigg, digger, achewood, scary go round, perry bible fellowship, lackidaisy cats, etc) but im talking about format!! writing quality aside!! my overall point is that i think it sucks that, for example, webtoons has minimum panel requirements if you want to be partnered through them and i think its hard to argue that doesnt stifle creativity lol. e: lol did you lose the conviction to inexplicably say "yikes" to me while i was typing.
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Jan 29, 2021 04:44
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Lunatic Sledge posted:webtoon went global like six years ago, what are you even trying to convey oh word, sorry to lump you in with the mouthbreathers who'd speak for the indefensible trash of ten years ago rather than the true webcomics glory days of precisely seven years ago
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Jan 29, 2021 04:46
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