Webcomics

Hervé St-Louis's Johnny Bullet is an action comic strip about a 1970s professional drag racer and his adventures on and off the race track. Read Johnny Bullet in French, if you're feeling adventurous.
After you've read those, don't forget to read about our collective insight on Web and digital comics.

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By Hervé St-Louis, December 27, 2014.



Webcomics started at almost the same time as the Web gained wide appeal with the public. For many creators, webcomics allow them to express themselves without print publishing hurdles. For others it is an opportunity to connect with a new readership. Webcomics publishing and its business models are not set in stone yet. It is the one area of the comic book industry where growth, changes and experimentation are the most visible.

Comics are vehicles that share information. This information is semantic or visual. For years, the medium transporting this information from the mind of cartoonists to readers was paper. Comics as artifacts also became documents. What people in the 1930s called comics were the visual gags in comic strips appearing in newspapers. When publishers compiled these gags in book collections they became comic books.

As collectors elevated comic books to a greater cultural realm, they became fetishes. Fetishes are documents. The comic book as a cultural artifact became more important than the actual comic therein. Wacky ads, letters’ pages, indicia, and covers make comic book fetishes. Protective media, like bags and backing boards protect comics as documents.

Webcomics and then digital comics focus on the information by mediating electronic contents. Webcomics let viewers sample comics without the artifact apparatus and thus without fetishes. It’s no longer about the bags, the comic book boxes, the special cover edition. The focus is on the material within the comic. Digital comics are also documents. The tablet and phone devices they appear in are the new mediated vehicles of information. But the fetishisation of the document is secondary to the experience they provide.

Storytelling challenges occur in electronic forms of information. Tricks such as cliffhangers, closure and the ability to skip a page or to refer to a previous one change. Smart Web and digital cartoonists know to take advantage of these as storytelling methods to grab readers. Unfortunately, these new mediated electronic storytelling tricks are not quite understood by current cartoonists. Paradigms cartoonists used for comic books still dominate Web and digital comics. For example, does one need a comic book cover or a vertical page layout in an electronic comic? No. So why do cartoonists still create Web and digital comics this way?

The highest area of growth related with Web and digital comics has been readership. Many people read electronic comics. The most pressing problem is finding a way to document the many comics that appear everyday. Without the fetishisation of comics, there are fewer barriers to what creators can create and offer to readers.

Last Updated: November 10, 2023 - 14:53