Depth

[scarfman]

Over at The Hero of Three Faces, the new season has started with a big change in format: all cartoons' panels are presented one per screen. It's not something I'll ever do at Arthur, King of Time and Space because it'd bung up the Archive Binge RSS feed. And if you continue to read The Hero of Three Faces here on my LJ instead of at the actual The Hero of Three Faces site, the formatting will be adjusted to the standard vertical strips of panels (in some cases requiring alternate versions of some panels). But I'm writing about it here because there've never been newsposts at The Hero of Three Faces; and, besides, what excites me about this change is a webcomics thing instead of a fanfiction thing.

Webcartoonists picked up pretty early on the idea called "infinite canvas" - which term I believe was coined by Scott McCloud - which basically means, on a webpage, you can create art of however much height and width you want; and then, if it's bigger than the reader's screen, the reader scrolls back and forth. But neither Damonk's experimental, fourth-wall abusing Naught Framed (where I personally first encountered panel-per-page comics, not that I could find one to link to), nor this piece that I linked to when it was new, were both a regular feature and regularly took advantage of not infinite canvas' height or width but of what I think of as infinite canvas' depth (Scott McCloud seems to think the same thing, and I think he'd know).

That this format in combination with a regularly-appearing feature is something new is a point I'm stressing, because I think it's a genuinely important development in cartooning. Of course webcomic culture will take no notice, because the Hero of Three Faces cartoons themselves are fanfiction (and proud of it), and moreover are done in the dreaded MSPaint, and in an inconsequential art style (not my opinion). Someone else will come up with the idea independently for a regular webcomic concept of their own, probably doing it up fancy in Flash and Photoshop instead of HTML and MSPaint, and be remembered as the first. But I'll know and so will you. (Unless someone already has, and I'm already the one who unknowingly came up with it second. If you know of an example, tell me.)

But the real reason I'm excited is, this works as a reasonable approximation of animated web presentations; without what an actual animation program would require in the way of paid software investment, time/learning curve, and necessity for producing a soundtrack. Plus it's always irritated me to do frameless, beyond-the-fourth-wall comic strips of more than one panel on one screen because it destroys the illusion that the character's just standing there on the screen without a panel. But primarily, the new format at The Hero of Three Faces will just generally simulate motion better in a medium where there actually isn't any; will better simulate motion pictures, the origin medium of most of these characters, in comics. If the cartoons I've already worked up during the summer hiatus represent a trend, The Hero of Three Faces is going to get more cinematic. And possibly less prolific, because these take time.