Sincerest Apologies: The last two weeks have convinced me that Pestilence and Murphy are poker buddies. I manage to go seven months without ditching even one day of class because of sickness, and then the week before I have not one, not two, but four separate pieces of assessment I get struck down by illness. The throbbing headache stopped around Saturday and I regained my normal (if admittedly limited) ability to focus on Sunday... just in time to throw myself into that assessment I just mentioned. I apologise for not updating the liveblog over the past two weeks, but life is a bitch sometimes. You get used to it. The sickness I just mentioned means that I haven’t really had the time or ability to read any new webcomics, although I’ve found quite a few more that I want to read, so I’m going to give you an entry on webcomics in general, rather than any one in particular. I’m sorry to say that this will probably be my only entry for the week since by some damned turn of fate I am still sick even after two and a half weeks, and I haven’t read anything recently enough to talk about it. I should be back to two or three updates per week next week though. In the meantime, enjoy.
Speaking very, very generally, there are three kinds of webcomics: Gag-a-Day, Plot Driven and a third kind which lies somewhere in between. It's probably easier to visualise it as a scale with Gag-a-Day on the far left and Plot Driven on the far right, although I don’t believe that to be the most accurate of analogies.
In the interest of honesty, I have to admit that I am very heavily biased towards the plot driven end of the scale. As I said oh so long ago, “Gag-a-days really aren’t my style”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them, they’re just not my cup of tea. Neither is tea for that matter (can’t stand the stuff, so I have no idea why I like that phrase so much). It’s simply a matter of personal taste and what you want out of a webcomic. That said, there are a few gag-a-days I like, they just don’t grab my attention or imagination the way a well written plot does.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with those two terms that I keep throwing around (gag-a-day and plot driven), allow me to elaborate. A gag-a-day webcomic is one entirely comprised of self-sustained, individual strips. The strips share things like characters, settings, back story etc., but you could read strip #180 without ever having read strip #1 or strip #179 and still understand what’s going on. This means that there is generally no overarching plot, extremely limited character development (if any) and that each strip is essentially a joke, told in a visual format (hence the name). Whatever kind of comedy it is, it is always, with virtually no exceptions, comedy.
Now compare this to the plot driven approach. In a plot driven webcomic, each strip builds upon the ones that came before it. Ignoring any potential fillers, strip #2 builds upon strip #1; strip #4 builds on #3, #2 and #1; strip #100 would build on #99, #98, #97, and so on until you got all the way back to #1. The point being that this kind of webcomic focuses on telling a story, whereas a gag-a-day is telling a joke. They are noted for, nay defined by, their plots, which are usually comprised of one very long overarching plot which overlays everything and numerous shorter arcs which contain all the action and character development. One of the key differences between these two kinds of comic is that plot-driven comics aren't limited to comedy. That’s not to say they can’t be comedy, just they can also be action, adventure, horror, mystery, romance, fantasy and any other genre you care to name.
Having just read the two passages above, you might (quite reasonably) have come to the conclusion that the two are mutually exclusive. That is not the case. In fact, it is quite common for the two to overlap, although doing it well is another matter. This is usually achieved in one of two ways (although there are others). The first is by using very short arcs, usually less than ten strips, with every strip ending in some kind of joke. Each of these arcs builds upon the last, but is also independent enough that while arc #3 builds on #1 and #2, it does not rely on the reader having actually read them. The other is to follow the plot driven format, but make each strip self contained enough to have a joke, punch line, message or whatever it is you’re trying to get across. This generally (but not always) means that each individual strip is longer, since to make them both self contained and part of a larger plot usually requires each to contain more information than a standard, run of the mill gag-a-day.
When done well, this gives you the best of both worlds. You have the stand alone chunks that make gag-a-days so popular and convenient (even if the chunks are larger) while still getting the story telling experience and flexibility of a plot-driven webcomic. Where gag-a-days exist within a world, and contains characters, mixing it with the plot driven approach lets you create the world and build the characters. Where any given page of a plot driven comic is only a small part of a much larger whole, creating that hybrid of plot driven/gag-a-day makes each individual page more entertaining, more self sufficient. Of course, it is also much, much easier to do badly, but I won’t go into that.
I suppose a better way to think of the two extremes is the relationship between forests and trees. A gag-a-day is like seeing a hundred similar, but individually distinct trees, each with its own attributes entirely independent of those around it. A plot driven comic would be like seeing a large forest, defined by its size, climate, location, wildlife, etc.
I, personally (as in this is my own goddamned opinion and thus you can feel free to disagree with me) prefer the plot driven approach. Why I prefer it is both very simple and very difficult to fully put into words. It’s just that I’m not interested in tiny, bite-sized pieces. I’m not the kind of guy that breaks my chocolate bars into the tiny squares it’s made of; I eat huge chunks of it at a time. And no, I cannot have "just one chip". That’s bloody unnatural. I like to see the world being built, the characters growing and changing, the back story coming to the fore, the plot developing. It's a very difficult concept to communicate verbally or by the written word, but that kind of deep, plot centred story just appeals to me so much more than the one off jokes of gag-a-days that there can be no meaningful comparison (for me).
I need examples to work with here so if you’re still having difficulty understanding the different types, have a look at these: XKCD is a textbook example of a pure gag-a-day, Taiki (ignore the fangirlish squees, they’re definitely not mine) is an amazing example of plot driven and Sandra And Woo demonstrates the hybrid done right.
I find XKCD funny. Occasionally. I’ll look at it every four or five months and then move on. It remains in my conscious thoughts for about a minute, and is then lost to some new, more interesting train of thought. Taiki on the other hand, I check twice every week for each new strip and even though each isn’t a self contained story in and of itself, it stays with me longer because it grabs my attention and invokes my imagination. Sure, it only takes me a minute to actually read the page, but I’ll spend the next two hours thinking of how it fits into the plot, how it changes the way I think of the characters, where the plot might go from here and what amazing twists and turns could be ahead. I hope that the difference between those two reactions is clear enough. Sandra and Woo, falls square in the middle of those two reactions. I find it infinitely more enjoyable than XKCD because there is that sense of doing something and having been somewhere, but each part is self contained enough that it lacks the depth of more plot orientated works that really gets my brain going.
Well I’ll be damned if that isn’t the longest entry to date. Probably enough to qualify as a rant, don’t you think? :) I’m interested to see which type other people like and why (if you can communicate it better than I can) so feel free to tell me in the comments below.
Sorry for the two week schedule slip and as always, thanks for reading!
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