Man. I remember finishing McCloud's Reinventing Comics, and thinking that the internet were about to explode, and that webcomics were going to be the next big thing (bigger than Brittney).

Here we are a few years later, and even Scott has sort of faded in and out (at least in terms of web presence). Where is the revolution? We've seen the introduction of Bitpass, and the introduction of webcomics subscriptions services, but things only seem marginally different.

I have definitely noiced a shift in quality - an awareness of audience that was lacking in some early webcomics - but I don't see that many people pushing the envelope. Not really.

I wonder if it has anything to do with technology? Maybe we might all be creating the comic of the future, but the most of the darn tools we use are intended to create these two dimensional page-like things on a computer screen, and so we do what we can with what we have.

The other possibility is that there was no revolution. It was all a myth, and we've just been feeling the vibrations of that first earth-shattering "kaboom". Maybe there is no infinite canvas.

Personally, I think that most people simply haven't wrapped their head around the fact that there is no canvas at all. All the pixels you see before you are really only points of light, and there is no page (web or other). There is no canvas. We still draw pictures, and we still marry them to words, but those are actions, and the actions themselves are not comics. They are acts of creation. What is created in the case of webcomics, however, is something intangible. We can see them, but we can't touch them.

One of the things that fascinates me about artists working in CG, is that there is no artifact that they can point to afterwards to say "this is a comic". They can direct you to a URL on the world wide web, and you can read what they've put there, but essentially you are reading something which does not exist in any tangible way beyond the experience of reading it.

That's the main problem with making money from webcomics. We are attached to the idea of paying for things we can hold in our hand. I think that's probably what scares music people so much... if music becomes something that you listen to, but not something you can physically hold in your hand (in the shape of a compact disc, cassette tape, or LP), what are you paying for?...

We're paying for the experience. And if the experience is what is really valuable, then all those silly pieces of paper and plastic that distributors try to pass off as music are really just separating us from the actual experience.

Don't get me wrong. I love print comics. I am a graphic novel hound, and I love the physicallity of books, but there is a shift in our culture right now away from things you can hold, or fold, or stack, towards experiences. When that bit of evolution trickles down to comics (which I think it's begun to), then maybe we will see people "paying" webcomics artists for the "experience" of sharing in someone else's unique vision.

Until that gets into high gear - and I think we may have a while to wait yet - I just hope that enough people will stay keen, and continue to poke holes in the canvas until we can see clear through to the other side.

Maybe we should get JustinPie and Eric Millikin in here, and have them duke it out. what do you think?

So, I thought I would start a thread over here in the Coffee Haus before I got too carried away.

A few other people on the board seem to have read Scott Morse's Baefoot Serpent recently, so I thought this might be a good place kick back and discuss.

First up, it's beautiful. The Kurosawa pages at the beginning and the end of the book are truly stunning, and leave little doubt that Morse is somewhat more highbrow then your average dodler, but I'm not convinced that they work as sandwich boards for the story in between. Sure, I know that they draw your attention to Kurosawa and his work, and by extension set up the story about the grieving family, but it still feels tacked on to me. Maybe it's because I feel as though Morse feels he has to spell out the symbolism so that people won't miss it. It just seems patronizing, and a little forced.

The story itself, about a little girl and her family coping with the suicide of her older brother, is beautifully laid out in wide-angle fashion, and there are lots of little nods and winks to Kurosawa's body of work. I think I would have been happier if Morse has let us firgure it out for ourelves, or maybe interspersed the other story through this one somehow. Instead I feel as though we are gettign the "golden book" version of the life of a great film-maker, with a sweet and rather hopeful story sandwiched in between.

Beyond my gripe about the somewhat dijointed elements, I loved it. I have quite a few Morse books, but this is the first one in awhile that I have had to go back and re-read so many times. There's a lot in here, and it's probably one of the densest books he's ever done. It has the heft of a novel, though it's hardly any thicker than an Archie Digest. Where a picture is worth a thousand words, Morse seems to have learned that many pictures stack up well against many thousands of words.

Morse relies heavily on what's going on inside the "frame" (not unlike Kurosawa), and keeps text to a minimum. The result is something like watching a well-made foreign film, where the subtitles beneath may elaborate on the action, but they're not always necessary.

This might have worked beautifully on the web if Morse had stacked his panels so that one would dissolve into the next. I don't know that Morse has any intrest in webcomics, but I would be quite jazzed to see what the man could accomplish with a little technology.

As an aside, I picked up Morse's Southpaw at the same time as I picked up this book, and though it also has depth to it, you can tell that there is something about this particular project, and about Kurosawa no doubt, that really grabs Morse, and pushes him to do things. I hope he does more projects like this in the future.

Other People's Stories is a site that features "other people's stories." Currently, the website is featuring a webcomic by Dan Zettwoch, based on a series of blog entries by Jason Shiga.

Today, November 19, marks the second anniversary of that online piece of joy, Gluemeat. As it enters its third year, it's actually rather incredible that it has made it this far, and most would even go as far as to say "Huh?" However, most secondary and unimportant countries (like Belgium or Iceland) are pleased with the news. So much so that they intend to ask their respective populations have three meals today to mark the celebrations.

Case Yorke has underscored the event with a brand-spanking new web design and has even had the gall to begin a re-issue of his dusty old 2000-2001 doodle Aren't We Real, annotated with comments to help explain (read: defuse) his intentions.

Gluemeat is a tri-weekly comic updated Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, while the re-issue of Aren't We Real happens every Tuesday and Thursday.