Digital Is Not New

Digital Comics are nothing new. What is being done with digital comics is… sadly nothing new.

YukYuk from Chad Frick was my first real introduction to web comics or cartoons. His vision of the web as an interactive way to deliver his bizarre visions helped create some of the technologies we take for granted today. When we first started interactive animations the software was not made for what we were doing yet. Chad used Macromedia Director and its online friend of Shockwave to produce his animations.

For those of you playing the home game, the reason your Flash file publishes with its SWF extension, is for ShockWave Flash. Before Flash came around people made interactive files using Director, which is now all but gone. While I’m on the note, GIF stands for Graphics Interlaced Format. GRaphics. Its not like JIF the peanut butter, its a GIF. GRapich. If you say Jraphic… then its a JIF. But its wrong.

Ok. So. What have we learned already? The web has had comics and cartoons designed for it, since it began.

Yet we still have ‘web’ comics, that are simply just page turners. Sure, its a story written by someone who writes a paper comic, and the art is professionally done, but most web comics today are simply just that. A comic on the web. Paginated in the traditional way, with no consideration to the medium.

An quick search for ‘web comic’ and clicking on pretty much every link presented shows this. Its just a page of a comic, with a button to click more when you are done reading. Marvel and DC are right there among the most obscure. Static images with a ‘next’ button or a swipe bringing the next ‘page’ of the book.

Comics on the web are NOT in their infancy. They have been around since the web really got going. In 2000, DC made a bold cross venture with OnStar, putting the system into the Batmobile via a campaign of commercials and online adventures. I was lucky enough to work on these webisodes, but they are now gone and forgotten. 11 years ago, and they offered voice, animation and games. Webisode 1 shows the idea of audience involvement and using animation and sound, albiet very basic, to enhance the experience. This was made 11 years ago, before broadband and in AS1 (TellTarget my coding friends, TellTarget).

So where do web comics stand today? Sadly they seem to be a page with an image, linked to another page, or at their best, a panel of a page linked to another panel of a page. Choose your own adventure books were more interesting, and interactive than a lot of todays web comics.

The beauty and power of the web is that it makes it possible for almost anyone to create and share content. This can be a great boon for the diversity among web comics, while conversely creating a large pool of mediocre content to sift through. I would love to see more innovation in the way web comics are being delivered, not just in their range of creative topics. Use the interactive medium of the web to your advantage and really push what is being done.

Digital comics are the current buzz among major publishers, yet they are simply digital versions of the print books, offered at the same price. They have the possibility to be so much more if some extra effort is put in during the creation of the books. I challenge not only Marvel and DC, but all web comic creators to use the power of the web. Show me what you can do, beyond just a next button.