Comic strips

[rowyn]

I was discussing web comics with a friend, and he mentioned that he had a subconcious bias for strips that were in color. It wasn't that he consciously looked at black and white strips and said "ew!" -- but he found that most of the strips he wound up reading were in color.

I haven't noticed this bias in myself. In fact, one of the comics I read daily -- GPF -- went to color and I didn't even notice. (Happened sometime in 2002 or 2003, I guess). Out of the 21 strips I regularly follow, nine are in color. But most of those were in b&w when I started reading them, so color didn't have an impact on my decision.

Perhaps more interestingly: I only read a handful of strips where I know the creator's sole income is from the strip. Those would be: Megatokyo, PVP, Sluggy Freelance, and User Friendly. None of those run daily color strips (though the last three do Sunday color).

But this has been on my mind, so I thought I'd do a little poll on it and a couple of questions. For variety, I'll fill out my own poll this time. :)


[Poll #245608]

Comments

Re: Art and Writing

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

Oh! One other Pet Peeve on my list:

Deus Ex Machina endings in a serious setting.

If the main character suddenly wakes up and it was all a dream, it's bad.

Similarly, if the captain shouting an order in technobabble suddenly makes The Borg go away, it's bad.

If the romantic triangle is solved by suddenly finding out that
one of the guys is her twin brother separated at birth, it's bad.

There are so many variations to this it's rediculous.

The only people I've ever seen do something good with a Deus Ex Machina ending were Gilbert & Sullivan. But, you can't take Gilbert & Sullivan seriously anyway, so I can deal with that. :)

Re: Art and Writing

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Amen to the above. Heaven help me if I fall to such resolutions as that! =P

Hmm. So easy to come up with a big long list of specific things that are BAD about webcomics. Much harder to come up with specifics about what's good, it seems. =/

Re: Art and Writing

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, the above criticisms on writing are hardly restricted to webcomics. Actually, none of the above come from webcomics, but from Star Trek and Star Wars.

There are plenty of poorly written webcomics, but there are good ones as well.

The main thing about web comics is that the Artist has no editor or anything hanging over his or her head, saying "No, you can't do that."

But, that means the freedom to do intelligent things, and the freedom to be stupid.

So, you get well written stuff that's high above the lowest common denominator, and you get puerile sexual fantasies and scatological humor.

Given freedom, some will stretch it up to the stars and some will bury it in the filth. But, it's a mistake to say that it's all filth.

Scott