Tetris

Why this sort of layout for my comics?

When I look at normal webcomics on the internet I see that most of them use the traditional way of stacking the frames. The biggest experiment most of the artist attempt is usually the looong drop down, when you have to scroll down more then just one webpage. This would be concidered the equivalent of scrolling through pages of a normal comic book.

Somehow I find it a bit frustrating that very few artist try out new ways of ordering their frames. Back in the day when the first artists made comics they had to make sure that the comic would fit inside a giving space in the newspaper or magazine. So the frames and layout was mostly done with that in mind. The same go's for comic books that were printed, the standard shape is a rectangle most of the time. If you want a special layout or shape of your comic book you have to be able to spend enough cash on it or else you just can't pull it off.

Most, if not all, of the comic layouts are based upon a standardised shape of a comic book that the printing factory once concidered the most practical and cheapest way to make them. I could be wrong of course, but I do belief that is a possible way of how it came to be this way.

Now, with the arrival of the internet and the freedom you experience on a webpage, you can do whatever you want. You can make the viewer scroll sideways, upside down and even diagonaly up to the left. Heck, you could even use still images with small animated backgrounds if you really wished. Of course some of those ways would be confusing for the reader, but its the freedom any person that hosts a website has. I would think that with this freedom a lot of artists would try to use this newfound liberty.

But, Sadly that is not what I see, for some reason a lot of artists still stick to the good old program of "left to right, down one row, left to right, down another row and stop when the complete layout looks like a rectangular". To me that seems like you get an entire empty house and you only use the bathroom to put your belongings. All stuffed togheter in a cramped space.

So with this comic I try to use the entire house as much as possible, in as much different ways I can think of. I don't claim to be succesfull at it and a lot of times I to get hooked to the old fashioned way. But really now, I would be stupid not to use something that has proven its succes in the past 70 or more years. But now with these modern ways of showing off comics I think we should embrace this technology and use it with the best of our abilities.

tetris by ~Wulfcomix on deviantART