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Cat Garza

Tristan Farnon

"Shooting Stars"

Demian5

Patrick Farley

Broken Saints

Justine Shaw

James Kochalka

Roger Langridge

Jim Zubkavich

Bridging to the Future

Cat Garza

Zabel:

Cat Garza's Magic Inkwell started off as a series of homages to George Herriman, often using Herriman's imagery and techniques, and in general channeling his surrealistic tendencies in short visual poems about loneliness, heartache, and inspiration. Cat's signature symbol of a winged, disembodied heart appeared in the series' sixth installment.

From the first, Cat's strips were well rendered and often densely illustrated. They varied a great deal in style and narrative strategy. In "dingbat the prophet," he adopted a Crumb-esque approach. In another installment he poked fun at McCloud's Understanding Comics. Some, like this one were exercises in pure color.

It was on or around the twentieth installment that Garza began to experiment directly and radically with the possibilities of electronic media. "suddenly the clarity that this is a world of pure light and imagination" he announces, with a series of variations on an image, some flashing, some swirling, some breaking up into patterns.

Cat's experiments were deliberately pushing the envelope, like those in Argon Zark. But they were quite different in character. For one thing, Cat was always engaged in deeply personal work-- his comics weren't just about having fun, they were philosophical inquiries and observations of the world around him. And there was a more subtle difference-- Parker's comics were embellished and enhanced by animation and other effects, but Cat tended more to move the effects to front and center, to make the comic ABOUT the featured effect.

Another difference was that, without the effects, Argon Zark was a traditionally rendered, relatively conventional adventure strip. But Cat's non-animated strips were just as radical as his animated ones. Take for instance this installment, which takes apart an earlier strip and reconstructs it with affectations that disrupt the continuity. Clearly, Garza didn't need electronics to create startling and baffling effects!

Also, Garza was more openly engaged not only in experimenting, but in understanding his experiments, and creating with them a polemic and an artistic credo. In this strip he's quite explicit:

"The juxtaposition of images and words provides a powerful means of communication... the innovations of technology do not replace the traditional process but can be utilized to enhance it... the ultimate goal is to combine the formal aesthetics with the instrumentation of mass culture in order to formalize an exciting new means of self expression... this modern world has the benefit of ages of hindsight to draw upon... to harness this is to produce the new art..."

I really love this installment. It expresses, better than any other comic I've seen, the excitement and irrepressible glee of a daring artist discovering new, unheard of possibilities.

Godek:

What impresses me about Cat Garza's early work is how quickly he adapted to the capabilities of the technology and how "at home" he seems on the web. More than any other cartoonist he was exploring this new form and all the new possibilities therein. His work with infinite canvases is both impressive as an effort and necessary for the technique's development. But he's also advanced much more than that, dabbling in most every technological aspect; applying sound, animation, and the unique properties of color on the web and really justifying their use in a comics format.

Joe, you drew a comparison to Argon Zark. It's true that next to Garza, Charlie Parker's experiments seem more gimmicky and less integral to the form as whole. It was also commented in the last roundtable that Parker's work feeling dated in this respect. But Garza's work has held up much better. If anything, it still seems ahead of it's time. Even today there are so few people actively exploring the intrinsic qualities of webcomic form as Garza does.

Now, formal experimentation - while it does rock my boat - can often come of as either gimmicky ("Gee, lookit this!") or cold and distant. For the most part Garza avoids these pitfalls. While being experimental and formally inventive, he also manages to put some of the most warm, personal, and emotionally arresting comics on the web.

Partly that's because of his subject matter, but it's also due to his skills at"pure" cartooning. What a visceral image, the heart ripping from his chest and flying away, leaving an empty shell behind. Simple and direct, deeply personal and yet universal. That's just good cartooning.

Kahn:

Touching on what Tym said about formalistic experimentation for its own sake, as it pertains to Cat Garza:

I've been keeping an eye on Cat ever since he started his newer Magic Inkwell series. After discussing Cat's stuff with a colleague of mine, I came to an interesting position... I'm far more interested in what he's doing than what he's making.

Music is integral to my life. If I'm awake, there's about a 90% chance I'm listening to music. Whether at home or on the go, I keep a soundtrack to my life.

So I pay attention to Cat's work with Musical Comics. It's a style of comic that is definitely worth pursuing, because so much of life is already linked with music on a profound level. So why not comics?

Since its inception, his latest Magic Inkwell series has taken many forms. It's been a very experimental process, and viewing the archives makes that quite evident. Not all of his experiments have been a success. But with every attempt he gets a bit closer to blending comics and music together efficiently. And that in turn gets the rest of us a bit closer to having a solid standard for making Musical Comics.

Normally, I'm not at all interested in viewing formal experimentation. I'm fully aware of how important it is to the growth of the medium, how titillating it can be for some folks, yadda yadda. Most of the time, I just don't like it. It doesn't move me. I'm not that guy.

But Cat's one of the few exceptions I make. Maybe it's the music thing, I don't know. But what I do know is that I definitely want to see what he comes up with next.

Zabel:

One of the things that sets Cat apart is that he's acquired a very distinct public persona. We feel that we know his personality, partly through his comics, partly through what he's written in blogs and message boards. That's true, of course, for any cartoonist who socializes and interacts with fans and other artists; but Cat comes across more strongly, and as a consequence has become something of a legend.

He may have been one of the first to announce his own wedding through his comics, something that's not exactly practical for print cartoonists. We all know about his affection for the herb. And we all have encountered Cat's ardent ideological stances.

Cat kind of reminds me of PvP creator Scott Kurtz; he's kind of the underground webcomics equivalent of Kurtz, a creator whose persona sometimes eclipses his own artwork. As a matter of fact, the two artists had a legendary feud on the Comicon.com message board about the legitimacy and worth of alternative comics, and then followed it up with a joint Comixpedia interview (part 1; part 2). In a way, that legendary feud had a second act; when Cat was the lead-in for a promotional trailer for the film Adventures In Digital Comics, both Kurtz and Penny Arcade creators Tycho and Gabe reacted with furious indignation.

For his ideals as well as his artwork, Cat has gained an affectionate and loyal following. Neal Von Flue, for instance, created one of his early hypercomics as an homage to Cat. And when I organized a jam comic tribute to Cat, there was no lack of voluteers!

Tristan Farnon

Campbell:

Why aren't there a million Tristan Farnons on the Web? Oh, yeah: because what Tristan does is freakin' HARD.

Not that that scares off everyone. In fact, Tristan probably pioneered something I call "object-oriented" cartooning, 2-D images built from three-dimensional figures and sets rather than one image at a time. Another examples would be the all-is-Lego Irregular Webcomic!

Like the underground comix of the 1970s, Farnon's Leisure Town rubs its hands together in fiendish glee as it juxtaposes the imagery of innocence with American culture's degraded, depressed and thoroughly effed-up side. Farnon's one of the few webcartoonists who consistently shows people on the edge (and over the edge) of poverty and various other kinds of ruin. His vision becomes oppressive in large doses, but even now it's refreshingly unique.

Zabel:

What is it about the web that inspires so many radical departures in style? You've got Brian Clevinger and the other sprite cartoonists; you've got Ryan North using the same artwork over and over 'til the end of eternity.

I don't think Farnon actually pioneered the style he used. For instance, there was a series, "Roger" by D. Locquet and Souchu in the 1977 May and August issues of Heavy Metal, that was composed of photos of G. I. Joe and other action figures. But Farnon's funky animals work extremely well for the purpose, and he's certainly taken the technique further than anyone else.

I find it hard to get past this Comics Journal interview Jordan Crane had with Farnon, in which the artist describes his incredibly difficult technique. Leisure Town is truly the Fitzcarraldo of webcomics!

Alexander Danner:

Speaking of the Heavy Metal G. I. Joe comic, Toyfare Magazine has had a similar feature for years, mainly starring Marvel Superheroes. It was originally called "Twisted Mego Theatre," after the action figure manufacturer. A little quick research reveals that it was later renamed "Twisted Toyfare Theatre," in a bold move to make it less nostalgic and more promotable. They even released an anthology book a couple of years ago.

Stylistically, though, this is more akin to Alien Loves Predator than to Leisuretown.

Campbell:

WIZARD and TOYFARE do a good job with their toys on white backgrounds, but when they get away from that it's just embarrassing. Maybe it's because this style of artwork is just friggin' hard to control. But maybe the palette of realistic onscreen colors (light-based, not pigment-based) invites us into the reading experience more effectively than those in print, when what's depicted is a relatively photo-realistic object. I'm still working on a theory of why exactly this should be so, but that's my hypothesis.

Zabel:

Effective photo-comics aren't necessarily hard to create. But they aren't a shortcut either. For them to be effective the artist has to be extremely talented-- just like with any other kind of comics.

Farnon described his technique to some extent in his interview. These are not photo-comics so much as photo-collage comics. Farnon composits many different elements in Photoshop, sometimes using up to 300 layers in his development image.

From his description, it sounds like he has a miniature studio that he uses to pose the toy figures, probably with adjustable lighting. As a point of pride, each appearance of a character is a new photograph. The toy characters are cut and pasted onto the backgrounds, mostly photographs Farnon has taken out in the field.

If you examine the comics closely, you'll see that the toy characters cast shadows on things, and often have reflections in the tile floors and other shiny surfaces. Farnon creates these shadows and reflections in Photoshop, and I must say he does a remarkable job. Oftentimes he uses an effect where faint shadows are cast in several different directions from the same figure! When I first saw Farnon's work years ago, I was convinced that he had jumbo-size toys and had actually arranged them in the hallways and other locations where he took his photos. It's still hard to believe he doesn't do it that way.

The technique is really eye-catching, because it's so unusual and well done. I think it may overshadown the other things Farnon does well, however-- he's an extremely unconventional storyteller (his layout decisions are often perplexing but always fascinating). And he has one of the most caustically cynical attitudes I've ever encountered in a cartoonist. He reminds me of Robert Williams, Chris Ware, or Joe Matt.

Garrity:

I saw Scott McCloud give a presentation on Farnon a few years back, and he did indeed have a little studio space set up, with multiple lights and strings for posing the characters. If I remember correctly, the figures were photographed against a white background, then combined with backgrounds and other elements.

Alexander Danner:

Mr. Campbell, sir, I think you're right that the online versions of this particular comic form invite a richer reading experience than the print forms, but I think it has less to do with the color palettes and more to do with an aesthetic contrast. This kind of comic tends to have a junk shop aesthetic, where, at least at the outset, there's winking undertone of "look what I found in my basement!" It's easy to view these comics as disposable art since they're literally composed from junk. It doesn't help that this stuff looks a lot easier to do than it really is.

In print, this sort of comic has primarily appeared in magazines, and most magazines are intended to be disposable. Toyfare in particular is certainly a disposable magazine. So, running the already disposable-looking comic in a clearly disposable magazine reinforces the idea that this isn't something to spend a whole lot of time on. Read it quick, have a chuckle, and toss it in the trash. Much of Mego Theatre's humor derives from "Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk are unlikely roommates!" type stuff, which reinforces the idea.

In putting the comic online, though, Farnon created an illusion of permanence that this sort of work had rarely before. (An illusion he later shattered by taking the comic down, but that's probably beside the point.) Permanence allows and encourages a more leisurely read. Archives encourage re-reading. This is all very much in contrast to the work's junk shop aesthetic, which is part of what makes it intriguing in the first place. That he then turns this aesthetic toward exploring the unspeakable tackiness of life is what makes the whole thing come together thematically.

[Editor's note: More on Tristan Farnon here.]

"Shooting Stars"

Zabel:

I wanted to segue from Tristan Farnon into a pet topic of mine, webcomics one-hit-wonders and shooting stars. Farnon's website was taken down for a substantial length of time. Fortunately he restored the site recently, though I don't think he updates any more. His long absence is a reminder that web-publishing is never permanent, and the landmark works of today can be fading memories tomorrow.

There's also a pattern of promising talents premiering with great pomp and circumstances, only to vanish from the web when they realize there's no easy money to be made. Stan Lee's forays into the web have been mercifully short, but sometimes we witness shooting stars who we actually miss when they're gone.

David Gaddis has got to be the poster-child of webcomics shooting stars. His comic Piercing is one of the most-linked-to comics in the history of the medium. It seems to inhabit almost every collection of indy/artcomic links. McCloud used it in I Can't Stop Thinking as an example of why people should be willing to pay for webcomics. People keep discovering it years after its publication (ARTBOMB in 2004, for instance.)

But it's JUST ONE STORY! And not even that long-- ten pages. And sure, it's very nicely rendered and cleverly written, but it's really not all that special-- like one of the better entries in Heavy Metal Magazine or the late great Negative Burn.

For all the adulation, Gaddis has never yet produced another webcomic.

Considering how many people viewed Piercing and liked it, Gaddis may have had an influence on webcomics history wholly out of proportion to his output. He may have popularized the idea of quality webcomics to a degree we cannot measure. But he's also become a symbol of something else-- talent uncultivated, and promise unfulfilled.

Campbell:

In 2001, Scott McCloud introduced five webcomics artists at a San Diego Comic-Con panel, calling them "Generation Zero"-- the first stirrings of what he considered the online revolution. Yeah, it was a pretty late announcement, but lots of people listened who had not heard of online comics before then-- most notably, the Comics Journal.

So who were these fabulous five?

David Gaddis, Tristan Farnon, Demian5, Patrick Farley and Cat Garza.

Patrick slowly dried up afterward. Demian5 has just now come out with his second work. And Cat? Magic Inkwell hiatused just six months after the Con, and he's just recently brought it back on Webcomics Nation.

One wonders if the stress of being named as an artistic standard-bearer had anything to do with these artists' relative inactivity after this career highlight.

In Garza's case, he really does seem to just be getting started. He is finally beginning to outgrow the obvious influences of Disney, Herriman and underground comix. His fusion of comics and music is like no other, and now he's using it to build a world-- a hallucinatory, is-it-real-or-is-it-a-music-video world, but a world nonetheless. I'm tempted to say his really great work is just around the corner-- but NO PRESSURE, CAT! No... pressure.

Burns:

Couldn't one say as easily that those five, even more than most, produce work to an aesthetic standard instead of to meet a financial or commercial goal? Which isn't to say they don't want to make money.

However, in a world where artistic production is expected daily (particularly in Webcomics), couldn't it be said that Gaddis, Farnon, Demian5, Farley and Garza are far more interested in artistic breakthroughs and aesthetic pursuit than the grind of the clock?

I'm not sure they're truly "one-hit wonders" or "inactive," so much as they're taking their time in all stages of the creative process.

Or, I could be wrong. But hey, I'm a romantic sort of person. I want to believe.

Garrity:

Strangely, David Gaddis hasn't produced much print work since "Piercing," either. He's still part of the comics community here in the Bay Area, but I'm not sure what he's working on right now.

Zabel:

It's really stunning to consider those five together and realize that all five of them have suffered from various degrees of inactivity since that event. I think both T and Eric are right about them, to some degree.

Another factor is that the success and recognition may have channeled their attention away from webcomics. Farley did something for Wired, as I recall. Maybe that's what's consumed the attention of the some of the others-- upgrading their portfolios and making the rounds, maybe getting some decent-paying work for commercial accounts, or hitting up the galleries.

Balder:

It seems to me that there are some early successes out there which made a big splash and then, for various reasons, petered out. This is a subject on which to step very lightly, as the emotions and egos of those involved tend to be a bit shredded.

I see 3Dave of Dog Complex who declined a syndication deal to work his dream job at Microsoft, but who continues his comic almost strictly for his own enjoyment. It updates on a when-I-can-get-to-it schedule. It's still very good.

Another one whose webcomic activities seem to be in a state of half- life decay is Tauhid Bondia.

There's Aeire, who ended Queen of Wands at a baffling moment. It was like watching a three-stage Moon rocket blow up at the end of the second stage. I don't know her plans, if any.

The point is, with these examples you've got proven A-list talent. They all quit or scaled back for reasons other than "my comic isn't good enough." They all had gotten a certain degree of recognition from fans and peers, they were pack leaders and category killers, and then dropped out or dropped way back.

It's one thing when a mediocre comic plays out its lifespan and departs, but when a really good comic does it, I think webcomics is poorer for it. I miss all of these comics as regular reads. They were all top notch entertainment.

Campbell:

I'd argue that Aeire ended QoW at just the right moment. It's right in the title: this is a comic about a woman in an environment. When she leaves the environment, the story has come to its conclusion.

Balder:

I don't mean she ended it at the wrong time in the storyline. I mean, the comic had not lived out its natural lifespan in the webcomics world. It was doing very, very well and just getting more popular. Killing a comic that isn't going anywhere is one thing. Killing a comic that's had more fans than it did the day before every day for a couple years running is what I don't get.

Alexander Danner:

I have to disagree. When it comes to building an audience, the only thing worse than getting no readers at all is getting so popular for one particular comic that your readers won't let you do something else. You have to kill it before you get to that point, or you'll be stuck doing it for the rest of your life. Look what happened to Jeffrey Rowland -- he ended Wigu to try out a new idea with WIGU-TV. It was so unpopular with his established readers that he had to drop it after only a couple of weeks and go back to something more familiar.

I had a job once that I quit just a few weeks before I was due for a nice raise, even though I had nothing else lined up. I did it because I knew if I stayed long enough to get that raise, it'd just make it all the harder to quit afterward. It's the same thing to me. Sometimes you have to cut yourself off before you get comfortable, or else you'll get stuck.

Burns:

I thought it was a really good -- and utterly cool -- move.

Aerie had a story she wanted to tell. It had an evolution to follow. That evolution ended, and Aerie finished the comic.

The idea of a specific story running to a specific conclusion is one I think we need more of in webcomics, not less. A popular comic ending when the creator intended rather than bowing to pressure to keep it going strongly reinforces that behavior.

Zabel:

One of my favorites of the Shooting Stars is Scott Gilbert. His True Artist Tales was a comic strip that ran in alternative weekly newspapers, but it had much larger distribution through the World Wide Web. Neither a "first" nor a particularly influential artist, Gilbert's massive archive retains a very strong distinction in my mind because of the very high quality of the work. He has a subtle and sophisticated noir style that's one of the web's all-time best.

Another very notable Shooting Star is the anthology site USS Catastrophe which showcased familiar alternative comics names like Rene Rege, John Porcellino, and Renee French, as well as soon-to-be-celebrated newcomers like Kevin Huizenga. Catastrophe was well-known in indy comics circles, and enough of a cause célèbre that when Serializer.net premiered, one of the remarks on the TCJ forum compared it unfavorably to Catastrophe.

Catastrophe published some highly unusual experiments, a few with innovative approaches that have never been replicated, such as Rege's flipbook The Montclairian and Ted May and Warren Craghead's extremely weird flash comic "the legend of the prowling paw."

I don't know what happened to these folks, but I suspect that webcomics was just a lark for them, and they were more caught up in getting seen in print. If you follow the links to the artists sites, you'll see comics catalogs and some great sample pages, but not much in the way of real webcomics-webcomics. I think most of them have found a comfy couch in Drawn and Quarterly's living room, or on the back porch of Top Shelf Comics.

Demian5

Zabel:

Demian5's When I Am King is best known, it seems, as the comic that really put infinite canvas on the map. It's done almost entirely in a side-scrolling layout, and with a graphic design that emphasizes it's horizontal composition. It's storytelling often makes use of the scrolling motion to create dramatic effects-- like the scene where the trio of orgiasts look to the right, and we scroll over to see an enormous horde of bees.

Demian5 also made frequent use of animations. Many of these were quite funny, though they sometimes seemed random and arbitrary.

When I Am King is also notable for what it lacks-- words. It's one of the longest wordless comics in the history of webcomics.

Mime poses an interesting challenge for the artist, because all action, ideas and motivations must be conveyed in a purely visual fashion. In When I Am King, this is done by entering a world of simple, elemental imagery-- flowers, soldiers, a king and his beast of burden. And of course those bees.

Demian5's style suggests a children's book artist. He uses simple, streamlined, round shapes, and bright, happy colors in an idealized Egyptian fantasy world. His characters and animals are cute and endearing. But his narrative undercuts that innocence with subtle finesse, and you don't have to get too far into it before you realize the story is strictly for adults.

(In fact, it seems quite apparent that When I Am King is an homage to a kids comics classic, The Little King by Otto Soglow. Like Soglow's beloved series, Demian5's comic features a small, stout monarch; and Soglow was also a master of pantomime comics. Demian5's work even has a similar two-dimensional quality to the artwork.)

The overarching topic of When I Am King is sexual embarrassment. The central plot involves the king losing his loincloth to the jaws of his pet camel, rendering him naked below the waist, his genitals swinging in the air. This leads to several adventures in which he strives to cloth himself, and in one episode, being chased through the street by children.

The comic delves unabashedly into a humiliating coprophilic episode, (apparently voiced by the children) in which the King wipes feces all over himself. The epilog also features a scatological twist. After a somewhat sensuous propinquity, the love-struck camel presents his anus to the king, and it puckers with a singularly disturbing animated effect. The king proceeds with what appears to be a profane act, but which turns out to have a more innocent intent.

The other, parallel plotline in the story also involves humiliation, as a pair of courtesans flirt with two guards, then go off with the better-endowed of the two, leaving the other behind to fume.

The work strikes me as a bit immature in draftsmanship and design (particularly awkward is an Elvis character who figures in one sequence). The storyline comes across as an extended exercise in snickering. But as a whole the production is quite impressive, and definitely set a high standard for infinite canvas comics to follow. It's not a comic you're likely to forget.

William G:

I do agree with the idea that sexual themes are quite strong in the comic, but I never got the idea that sex itself is a bad thing worthy of punishment like your typical Hollywood film always suggests.

It seemed to me that the characters who used sexuality as a way to humiliate others, like the courtesans and the well-hung guard, were punished for it. In the end, all three of them were eaten by bees. As well, the children, while not really doing anything sexual (Thank god!) did abuse the king for his nudity, and one of them wound up getting eaten for it.

Our big gay camel was left quite content and found a new "friend" in the ill-equipped guard, and the king suffered no troubles from his digging around for his royal miniskirt.

The approach to sex in the comic seems rather, for lack of a better word, "European" to me. It's far more mature and matter of fact about the topic than it would be in the hands of anyone in North America.

One thing I found great about Demain5's approach to infinite/ expanded canvas was how he really showed the best approaches to it. One thing that stuck out to me was how clicking the next button opened a new frame within the same browser window. Then you would be alternating between the two frames as you read the chapter. Between that, and his use of CG art and animation, he really embraced the technology of the time. And he did what all good pioneers do by showing everyone what was just over the horizon, and how they could forge their own paths.

As for his draftsmanship, I'm going to have to disagree. For as long as I can remember, I was always told that one of the greatest challenges for a comic artist is being able to convey the story without a need for words. He met this challenge, and then he kicked it around a bit, and then he finally planted a huge flag with his face on it in the back of it's head.

Campbell:

I don't have too much to add to Joe's assessment. Seems like this is one of the first webcomics with a distinctly foreign [from a U.S. perspective] sensibility. LITTLE GAMERS hails from Sweden but you wouldn't necessarily know it from reading ten of the strips; the freedom from American taboos in WIAK is pretty self-evident.

Zabel:

I wanted to follow up a little on what Bill said about Demian5's use of Infinite Canvas.

This is really what distinguishes When I Am King, and it's a very ambitious, multi-faceted exercise in the technique. The business about having new panels open up with the next page of the narrative seems a bit awkward to me, and technically a little bit buggy, but otherwise the comic is a very polished work.

Overall, the narrative comes across as intentionally slow-moving. It is, after all, a burlesque of children's books, and the gentle pace of the narrative is in keeping with that tradition.

One sequence in particular really works well at this pace-- the first scene with the guards, where the shorter guard has a stern, macho expression on his face, and the other guard notices and tries to imitate it. A really Chaplinesque tour de force, that.

But overall, the pace becomes rather tedious. It seems like that bee is chasing the King for a decade, and by the time the King is running in the street from the gang of children, I begin to lose my patience.

For the most part, this is an issue of Demian5's choice of subject and stylistic quirks. But I wonder how much of it is a result of the use of infinite canvas.

Compare the story to Tristan Farnon's Rhapsody in Yellow, for instance. Like WIAK, it is a burlesque of children's stories, and it too is told in pantomime style. But it moves along at a much more rapid and natural pace. And maybe this is because Rhapsody in Yellow is presented in finite, bounded pages.

Why? Because of how the human mind receives information.

Try reading this, for instance:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

--from http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/

It's certainly conceivable that a comics reader perceives a sequence of panels the same way a reader perceives a word-- that the panels are understood as a group rather than individually, one after the other. In fact, John Barber writes about this idea in his Masters thesis, The Phenomenon of Multiple Dialectics in Comics Layout.

If reading multiple panels simultaneously is the normal mode of comics reading, then it follows that Infinite Canvas is an impediment to normal reading-- because a portion of the panels in a sequence are always hidden from view.

It's kind of like reading this sentence: Embeddedspacesareanimportant visualaidinreadingcomprehension. You may be able to read it, but it is laborious and unnatural, because the digestible chunks of data (like the bounded pages of a traditional comics narrative) have been replaced by a continuous stream.

Stevenson:

How much of that tendency is conditioning rather than digestibility? With words, Joe's point is clear. With comic panels, I think it is less so because at some level, we're still dealing with digestible chunks. They're just not the size chunks we were used to on the internet. I have a similar experience moving from, say, PvP to Gossamer Commons, though to a different degree and for different chunking reasons (words rather than pictures). Did ancient Greeks, with whole sentences full of words running together, find the written word too laborious to digest (er, the ones who could read, that is)?

There's also that notion of time willingness. I've only rarely turned to the internet for longer reads of anything, more so now than ever, but at the time "When I Was King" came out, it was more substantial and challenging, at least visually, than any other web pages I was looking at. As a point of comparison, by the time I got to Patrick Farley's long side scrolls, I was much more willing to invest. (How much later if at all did those long side scrolls come out? For me it was at least a year between my discovery of the two and my initial experience was very different.)

Godek:

I think conditioning does play some part in the reading. When you come from three or four panel gag strips (like so many webcomics) which you can take in at one shot to a multipanel, scrolling canvas it can be a lot to get used to. Couple that with the new physical mechanics of scrolling (ergonomics?) it can turn a lot of people off. (I think this much has been discussed at Websnark).

I don't think it's the same kind of thing that Joe's talking about, though. He mentioned John Barber's thesis on multiple dialectics. Barber's paper acknowledged that we take in more than we're initially conscious of and that fact can be exploited in a comics layout. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it has to. That might be the case if we were looking at "King" as a whole (extremely long) canvas, but we see it in chunks through our scrolling "window." I think Demian5 knew what he was doing with the "window-on-the-canvas" thing, as evidenced in the scenes that reveal themselves a little bit at a time through the scrolling (like that orgiasts and bee swarm scene). And the separation by punctuation is taken care of by the page breaks.

I think the real problem with conditioning is more a matter of the pacing. As Joe said, When I am King is much more deliberately paced than many comics and maybe we're just used to quicker storytelling. Personally I found "King" to be excellently (and somewhat refreshingly) paced, but I'm a bit slower than most people anyway.

Zabel:

I agree that it's related to conditioning, but where does the conditioning come from? When children are taught to read, they aren't taught to look at the first and last letter and to perceive the rest of the letters randomly. If that happens, as the Cambridge study suggests, then it's because of conditioning that takes place in the subconscious mind. The brain learns the most efficient ways of storing information and comprehending it, and conditions itself to function accordingly.

In other words, the conditioning involved in literacy may not have come from the culture, and so it may not be something that the culture can amend.

The same is probably true of comics. Whatever habits people have developed in comics reading may be quite difficult to change. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but it's important to recognize likely sources of resistance.

Garrity:

"When I Am King" might be the first great webcomic. Demian5 deploys a vast range of Web-friendly tools and styles, from expanded canvas scrolls and embedded animation to 3D imaging and a color palate that makes full, graceful use of digital display. Some of his techniques are surprising and ingenious: parallel scenes are shown in parallel scrolls, one on top of the other, with separate scrollbars (allowing for a climactic moment in Chapter Three, when each of the parallel scrolls ends in an animated, frantic running figure). Others are so quietly effective they almost pass notice: the long horizontal scroll is just a natural layout for recapping the action across the story's minimal landscape. There are also a lot of non-Web-specific innovations at work, most notably the comic's consistently clever approach to silent storytelling. On one page, for example, we scroll past a series of round panels in which the king is doing various disgusting and embarrassing things... and then scroll on to discover that these panels are actually "speech" balloons, coming from a group of children taunting the king. The gag plays on the interchangeability of dialogue and image in comics, and it's a wickedly effective use of the expanded canvas to boot.

Endlessly inventive layout aside, the art is beautiful. The flat, simple shapes and warm, bright, organic colors are perfectly suited to the screen while evoking the feel of ancient Egyptian art. The dream sequences in Chapter 4 include some particularly stunning moments.

And it's funny. What makes "When I Am King" really amazing is the humor, charm, and unexpected depth of the story. It isn't just a stylistic exercise; it's a fun, vibrant comic and a hell of a read. Demian5 possesses that peculiarly European ability to pivot from mannered introspection to outrageously bawdy humor in the space of a gutter. How can you not admire a groundbreaking, cutting-edge art comic full of whimsical humor and observations on the universal human condition that also features a man sticking his fist up a camel's ass? You cannot. "When I Am King" is a showcase of the possibilities of the webcomics form, but, more important, it's a great comic.

Patrick Farley

Campbell:

There are three faiths-- Islam, Eastern religion in general and paganism-- and one income bracket-- borderline impoverished-- that have two things in common. One, they are all greatly underrepresented in webcomics in general. Two, at electric sheep comix, Patrick Farley has done great work concerning all of them.

While the rest of us plied pop-culture riffs, Patrick was showing webcomics what a really unfettered imagination in science fiction and fantasy could do. His more ambitious stories approach the best that the genre has to offer in the modern day. His artistic expression of the online comic showed a similar imagination-- he was one of the few early creators to take Scott McCloud's ideas and actually push them further. He mimicked Google and AIM interfaces before it was trendy.

His recent lack of production is an utter travesty. I've tried throwing money at him to get him started up again; I miss his work that much. But sometimes the candle that burns twice as bright et cetera.

Garrity:

Although Patrick Farley has done incredible things to push more or less every boundary in webcomics, my favorite of his comics remains the early, unpolished, decidedly low-tech "The Guy I Almost Was." The story of a would-be cyberpioneer discovering that everything in Omni magazine is bullshit brilliantly mocks the very themes and memes that would become staples in Farley's work: starry-eyed futurism, left-wing radicalism, altered states, the rejection of Christian morality in favor of Eastern religious values (or the warm and fuzzy New Age version thereof), the transformative power of technology. (And oh, the dialogue. The dialogue is priceless: "And then we'd drop acid and have 12-hour tantric sex, after which she'd tutor me in Video Toaster and give me a job as creative director of her upstart smart-drink company.") One of Farley's most recent stories, "Delta Thrives," is essentially a straight-faced depiction of exactly the type of high-tech, free-love utopia mocked in "Guy."

It's this wry sense of perspective, this ability to deflate not only his targets but his own ideals, that makes Farley such a remarkable talent. He thinks big: "The Spiders" is a massively ambitious alternate-reality epic that plays with every geegaw in the hyperlinked digital toolbox, "Delta Thrives" probes the mysteries of birth and death via one of the longest, densest horizontal scrolls in webcomics, and "Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything" builds from an apparently simple political satire to a flamboyantly grotesque apocalyptic nightmare. But, as big as his thoughts and his canvas get, he doesn't lose touch with his humanity and humor.

Farley has been pretty much off the map for the past year; after finishing "Delta Thrives" and the first three chapters of "The Spiders," he put e-sheep.com on hiatus. In January '05 he and Justine Shaw posted the first page of their new comic, "The Mother of All Bombs," on e-sheep. Both Farley and Shaw have been sorely missed, and I'm really looking forward to their collaboration.

Campbell:

Quite insightful. I hadn't thought of "Guy" that way, but you're right. "Barracuda" is another such mockery (and another one I wish he'd finish, because BOY does it have third-act potential).

Zabel:

I absolutely agree about The Guy I Almost Was! It reveals a side of recent cultural history that I was hardly even aware of, and it discusses it in a way that nobody else has. It's a friggin' masterpiece!!

My other big favorite Farley story is Overheard at the Rave. It's a very touching and profound piece, I never get tired of reading it.

I wrote a few other comments about Farley in this Examiner review.

Garrity:

As a girl who grew up reading old Omni magazines and sci-fi paperbacks filched from my computer-techie uncle's basement, I find many, many passages in The Guy I Almost Was painfully hilarious. Also good is the bit at the end where the hero contemplates becoming a technology-hating hipster with a 1950s wardrobe (startup cost: about $500).

Kahn:

Reading Delta Thrives definitely gave me the biggest mindfuck that I had ever received from a webcomic. It had everything. Infinite canvas, subtle animation, creatively complex use of HTML... What was assembled was something only the computers and/or the web can give us.

Above all else the piece has strength. It's strong art. The kind of artistic stuff that growls and frightens away the common passerby, and only allows those who are truly adventurous in their artistic consumption to come close. Or the Infinite Canvas naysayers (like myself), who might actually put down their "Death to the right-scroll!" signs and give it a chance (like myself).

And it was good. It was challenging. It was colorful. It was deep. It was entrancing. It was coherent. It was good.

There were whales fucking. Artistically.

Only the web.

Burns:

The other side of Patrick Farley's success, to my mind, is how right he does the things that so many consider to be cutting edge technologically in webcomics. Let's stop and consider:

- He uses Flash in Apocomon and other works, telling a story with interactivity and accents, where the limited animation forms special effects -- grace notes tinkling around our senses as we read. You never get the feeling the Flash is superfluous or tacked on. He is using the medium to its fullest extent in every example and every panel.

- He uses horizontal expanded canvas in works like Delta Thrives, and uses it brilliantly and beautifully. The story truly becomes the immersive experience that "infinite" canvas promises. Each scene in the comic merges into the next, with some truly well laid out composition giving the reader more to look at and a natural progression to follow.

- He uses 3D rendering technology to create lush, full landscapes and characters, creating a sense of exaggerated realism. At the same time, these don't look like screenshots from Square Enix games -- this is fine art, rendered with the same attention not only to detail but the gestalt of his imagery formed together, fore- and background, meant to be seen in glorious stillness and capable of being looked at time and again.

- He uses full on micropayments to sell his work, and he does so in a way that lets the work hook the reader and then, for just a pinch of cash, give them more. I don't know if this model has been successful for him or not, but its implementation has been as successful as anyone's.

This is quite a hat trick to consider. Many, many artists dabble in the above, and all too often it feels like the point of their work is that experimentation. "I'm doing infinite canvas! Sidescroll! Scroll scroll scroll!" "I'm using Flash! Listen to the doorbell sound as you click next! Look, limited motion! I'm cutting edge! I'm going to stick a coaxial cable in a girl's eye socket!"

Sorry, the last comment was beneath me.

The difference with Farley is he's using the tools to tell stories, in a ways no other methods could convey. Apocomon couldn't be done nearly as effectively with static imagery -- what is subtle would become blatant. What is balanced would become overwhelming. Delta Thrives couldn't be done nearly as effectively in 2D or traditional drawing. And yet if you look at the Spiders, you see he's got the same facility with traditional drawing, and can bring that toolset to bear when he needs to.

Many artists strive to break down new barriers in art, using technology to do things that can't be done any other way. I respect that. I honestly do.

But Patrick Farley's the one who seems to be saying "here's the art I want to create. What tools will get me there?" And when he finds those tools he masters them, but always with the innovations in service to the art, not the art in service to innovation.

Kahn:

Eric's nailed it. I ranted recently about my ire with experimental art and film, and Farley's a prime example of the experimental artist type that I approve of and appreciate: The kind that figures out the story he wants to tell, then experiments to get the effect he wants. Rather than figure out what experiments he wants to make and then just call it a story.

Godek:

I want to take issue with you guys on the good experiment/bad experiment idea, I really do. It seems to me you guys are ignoring a hugely important school of thought due to a preference for basic storytelling. Formal exploration for the sake of formal exploration is not only rife and crackling with the excitement of possibility, it's also vastly important to the overall growth of the medium. Form is a valid and equally important subject for the content of a strip as a storyline is. You guys seem to want to gloss over that and I really do want to take issue.

But I won't. I won't because in the case of Patrick Farley, you guys are dead on.

Farley is a masterful storyteller and he knows how to manipulate the medium to this end. He knows when to pull out the guns (Delta..., Spiders) and when to leave it understated (Guy..., Overheard at The Rave). Most of all he knows his medium. I like that each and every one of Farley's strips in no way resembles anything that could or should be seen in print.

Farley knows how to tell a story and Farley knows the web and I agree with you guys.

Dammit...

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