YET ANOTHER WEBCOMIC

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!

Buck Rogers Daily Comic Strip #1020, 1939. Signed Dick Clakins pencil and ink

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:

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.

SKID AVENUE Ep. 4

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!