Quest to Nowhere

I know some people have been asking for me to do a blog post about what I’m doing for my capstone project (the last thing I have to do to complete my Masters program,) and now I feel I can finally talk about it. I probably could have before, but I wanted to wait until it was signed off on and was officially happening.

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For my capstone project proposal I’ve been reading a lot of interactive comics, and from reading them I’ve found that a lot of them I wouldn’t categorize as interactive comics. Or seem to have interactivity for the sake of it, rather then actually using it to support what they are trying to do in the comic.

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The Basics of Narrative:

Now in the first part I sort of talked about things fairly generally, which really won’t fly with what I intend to discuss here. As such I need to establish something of a base for you, the reader, to understand what I’m talking about since not everyone has spent time learning how to write narrative works, and whatnot.

So what I aim to talk about in this part is the Act 2’s of webcomics with long running stories. What I mean by Act 2 is in reference to the 3 act system of writing used for movies, as well as TV, books, and video games (sometimes.) Act 1 is the introduction, where the reader learns about the characters and the world of the story. Act 2 is the main bit, where the characters do things (go on a quest, fight things, maybe just have tea.) Act 3 is the end bit, with the final conflict and resolution.

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I want to start off by saying that the point of this is not to bash webcomics, or say they are a bad thing, or anything like that. But rather try and address some problems/trends I’ve begun to notice that are detracting from the medium. My hope is that those reading this will get webcomic creators to think about their comics in perhaps a way they haven’t, or possibly find solutions or ideas they can use in their comics to improve them.

The idea for this whole thing was born out of a conversation I had with Asuka (Ruby Thursday,) talking about her comic, and webcomics sort of generally. Mostly it revolved around why certain webcomics are able to succeed and other webcomics fail, especially concerning good webcomics that don’t do well or fail, and bad webcomics that succeed or are popular.

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Got back from Connecticon a few hours ago. It was a lot of fun, as usual. Mostly spent my time at the Staccato/Halolz booth helping Shawn, and occasionally watching the VG Cats’ booth so that Scott could get away from the table for a break. I did pick up a lot of stuff: volumes 2-5 of Hayate the Combat Butler, the Atomic Robo vol 1 trade (post on this soon,) two of the original art pages of Atomic Robo comic (issue 1 page 21, and issue 2 page 10,) Buffy season 8 trades 1 & 2, … Continue Reading

At work Monday I managed to get through two of the comic books I picked up at Comic-Con on Friday, [amazonify]1932386572::text::::Mouse Guard Fall 1152[/amazonify], and [amazonify]1932664165::text::::Lost at Sea[/amazonify].

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This was my first NYCC and I have to say that I was really impressed with it. The entire thing, minus panels, is in one big exhibition hall in the Javits Center. I saw a ton of cool stuff, especially figures (none of which I bought.) It seemed like all the really cool stuff was really expensive, like limited edition figures going for hundreds of dollars.

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