Man, I've been waiting to write my latest Robot 6 column, a consideration of the formal properties of Blaise Larmee's hands down stunning webcomic 2001, for ever. In case you don't know, that comic is one of the most important things to come out in a while, a big swath of new territory claimed for comics. There really isn't anything else out there like it, and since it's really just one big uninterrupted sequence, I was thrilled to discuss the whole long thing on those terms. What else can I say? Read the comic if you haven't, then read my take on it. Starts like this:
The webcomics medium itself forces the artist to confront choices that the printed page does not. The most obvious as well as the most important is just that, the lack of a page. In print, everything a cartoonist does has to hang around the page, the non-negotiable single unit, the contributing part of the whole. Unless the work in question is a Sunday page-style one sheet (pretty much a dead form in comics, honestly), it has to deal with those splits, the spaces between pages. One of the most special and unique things about comics is how it can present multiple story moments for simultaneous viewing with paneled pages, but that simultaneity only extends until the end of the page. Pages break things up by the very nature of what they are. The internet, on the other hand, is an endless visual landscape, the page turn as foreign to it as any other print-specific concern. Some webcomics betray their ties to print by imposing page turns on the reader. Blaise Larmee’s 2001 does not. Read more
2 comments:
It's nice that you linked this. More people should support this sort of approach.
Most webcomics types (with large audiences that Blaise Larmee could benefit from) ignore this sort of work for... having more than four panels with a fart joke at the end best I can tell by their attitudes.
yah most webcomics i see are just awful, but the avant-garde is REALLY interesting. It's like an amplification of the situation in print comics, but I don't really see any interesting "mainstream" webcomics work...
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