Blog@Newsarama to Highlight Webcomics

There is an entirely new blogging team at Blog@Newsarama, the old team having quit en masse last month due, as far as I can ascertain, to a surprise redesign and a glitchy comments system. The new bloggers seem, so far, eager to connect with the community, and particularly bullish about webcomics, which would be encouraging if it weren’t for the way they parrot all of the current conventional wisdom about ‘new’ media. That the web is only good for bite-sized information, for example. (Perhaps we should just pat HTML on the head and give it a sippy cup full of Coca Cola?) Or that the web wants all of your output to be 4:3. (In that case, why are there scrollbars on all of Blog@Newsarama’s pages? Why must only those who draw pictures and word balloons follow this prescription? Doesn’t the vast majority of the web, in fact, scroll?) You get the picture. More of my counter-reasoning from the comments section of Sarah Jaffe’s opening webcomics salvo…

Relegating the web to being about ‘burst culture’ is seriously underestimating the web. It’s more bursty, sure, but one shouldn’t confuse being better at something with being worse at the things that have gone before. Having something live and online has so many advantages to it, that the slightly less convenient available reading scenarioes compared to print are not nearly as consequential, and will ultimately fade away — especially as handheld devices become better and more universally adopted. (BTW the Kindle just doesn’t cut it: without reading PDFs natively it’s like inventing the iPod without allowing it to play MP3s — woefully misguided much like the Apple TV. Even Apple didn’t learn its own lessons in this regard.)

So, common objections to literature being ‘harder to read’ compared to older media will become obsolete faster than the actual older media they are meant to protect. Those older media will be around with us a long time, the same way that film will always exist, because it isn’t just a technology: it’s a style. Like engraving, it will always exist for at least that purpose; print will never die it will just become more and more a rarefied collector’s culture and less the ‘people’s medium’. That is natural and as it should be.

And I’ve seen people sit and stare at websites for hours on end. Trust me: the resistance to long-form art on the web is purely psychological in cases where older media is still available, and will ultimately fall away as the landscape changes and it becomes clear that the screen is our new Lingua Franca. Engraved stone tablets are easier to read than little black ink etchings laid on wood pulp. But we don’t think about that anymore; that superiority no longer matters. The same will go for whatever superiorities you currently believe are endemic to print. The technoculture will adapt to overcome those objections and besides, it will become so ubiquitous that old advantages will be drowned in the new noise.

As for the tall format being denigrated in favour of a 4:3 computer screen aspect ratio: that’s purely a matter of fashion and style. People are quite willing to scroll web pages. If everyone starts to present in 4:3 then somebody will come along and present an infinitely scrolling 1:40 comic and break that conventional wisdom wide open. On the web the format isn’t fixed. If you want to make it more compatible with an ultimate print run, some techno-enthusiasts might take issue with that, but that objection will like the others be very short-lived. Ultimately, there is no aspect ratio to web content. I believe that’s the most accurate way to think about it that will stand the test of time.

[Submitted by The Laroquod Experiment.]