One popular title doing this is Dead Winter. A few pages have slight animations, like when one character is channel surfing in one panel and you see the screen change and his finger press the button in an endless loop, or when one panel is a first person view of someone about to faint and everything in it is going in and out of focus. The artist has a few pages that are fully animated but I liked those others more, they worked better with the story. If you haven’t already heard of this comic I’d recommend you to check it out.

I’m reminded now of the old Captain Underpants comic books where they set up a few pages so you can flip them back and forth to look like animation.

Because some people enjoy the obvious: A browser window and a printed page are not the same thing.

Having a comic on a two by three grid or a one by four grid in a browser window is just as arbitrary as having it on a one by twenty, or eight by fourteen grid.

The whole point of IC is that you can shape the comic any damned way you want and not have to worry about running out of paper. ie: You’re not limited by the method of presentation.

Plus, any resistance to the idea is idiotic seeing that the second your comic is too big to fit into a browser window, you are making an IC comic. It’s a non issue. Near everyone does it even without thinking of it.

McCloud was right about it being a window. Some just want to keep the view as print small as it has always been because they can’t provide anything bigger.

Reading Mr. Wick’s blog entry, I got to thinking how McCloud’s definition of comics makes it a form with a certain rhythm.

McCloud calls comics “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence”

So the whole point is that you focus on one section of the comic, followed by another, followed by another. So you have a sort of rhythm when you read them that goes panel, gutter, panel, gutter, panel, gutter, panel, etc.

Even if there aren’t gutters, there’s still a space where you’re transitioning from one “panel” to the next; if there isn’t, then you aren’t reading comics.

All that putting your comics on separate pages does is give you a slightly longer beat in your rhythm; panel, gutter, panel, gutter, panel, page… panel, gutter, panel gutter, etc.

And, well, so what? By definition, the composition of the entire comic is secondary to the individual elements inside it. Given this, it’s hard to see what pressing artistic concern is answered by doing away with pages.

Any change is going to make some kind of difference in how you view a work of art, but I really think getting rid of pages is mostly a novelty thing. I think it’s more like the invention of 3-d film than the invention of talkies.

Frankly, that’s how I feel about the web as a whole, when it comes to the art of making comics (Commerce is a different story, of course).