I know, I know. The internet is full of webcomics. It seems
that anyone who wants to get established as a comics creator draws a comic
strip and shares it on the web.
Nick and I have enough experience between us to be aware
that it doesn’t matter how good you think you are, your fortunes as a writer or
artist lies in the hands of your readers, and with all those other strips
already out there, it’s hard to get anybody’s attention. Having said that, we
thought: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” and decided to give it a go.
SKID AVENUE, as a spin-off strip from
THE REALLY HEAVYGREATCOAT, was first conceived in the traditional 3-frame format. Originally
devised to fit neatly into the ‘funnies’ pages of newspapers, the classic
3-frame format tells the story in three frames (duh), arranged horizontally
left-to-right: the first frame sets up the story and the second develops it.
The third frame is the tricky one: it supplies the punchline for the first two
frames and at the same time provides a cliff-hanger. “To be continued…” In
adventure strips, it’s the frame that will hook readers and bring them back to
the strip, sometimes buying the newspaper just to read it!
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Buck Rogers Daily Comic Strip #1020, 1939. Signed Dick Clakins pencil
and ink
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The 3-frame format also works as a self-contained
story-telling format, where the last frame is the punchline. This is usually
found in comedy strips:
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Andy Capp. Mahoney, Goldsmith and Garnett. |
All these strips traditionally are arranged horizontally.
Nick’s original strip,
THE REALLY HEAVY GREATCOAT, first drawn in 1989, follows
this format. But when Nick and co-creator
JOHN FREEMAN started publishing the
Greatcoat archive on
Tapastic, Nick soon realised there were problems with a
horizontal strip. Although Scott McCloud theorised the internet could
offer an infinite canvas, where the screen would act as a window and strips could
move sequentially in any direction, platforms like
Tapastic, designed to be
readable on smartphones and tablets, more-or-less dictate a vertical format.
Nick was in a quandary. SKID AVENUE was a brand new strip,
and we wanted it to be suitable for as many platforms as possible. Was it
simply a matter of rearranging the frames to run vertically? (easily done in
Photoshop). Would this affect the way the story unfolded? Would the story have
more impact, or less? Would it be better to design the strip to run vertically,
or stick with tradition and just rearrange it for certain platforms?
In the end, we did it all. Nick draws the strip in
traditional horizontal format (“just in case we ever sell the strip to a
newspaper” he says!) but rearranges it to be 3-frame vertical for the
SKID AVENUE website and 4-frame vertical on
Tapastic. It all seems to work equally
well, no matter the format.
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SKID AVENUE Ep. 4 |
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Ep. 4, reconfigured for mobile platforms. |
...So technology pushed us to re-think what we believed was
well-established. For once, you really can teach an old dog new tricks!