Adpating comics for the web

I've already posted on part of what I'm going to write here a while back when I compared webcomics and their layout to translated manga, and English adaptations. I'll just come back to this a bit later.

I've been reading Will Eisner's "Comics, a Sequential Art," and have been putting my readings in parallel with my webcomic. Will Eisner analysed, like quite a few other comic book experts like Thierry Groenstein and Scott McCloud, the sequence and design of comic books. When you look into the design of a single page and it's sequential art inside that defined space, webcomics work in the same way. The pages in most webcomics can be read following the "right to left, up to down" occidental reading method.

I've illustrated this by adapting a couple of sequential pages of a speechless comic into an animated .gif picture. This experimenting has allowed me to explore and visually demonstrate quite a few differences, similarities, obstacles, and adaptation techniques of printed comic books to webcomics.

I have adapted these 2 comic pages into the following .gif:

The images in the comics have been organised in the .gif file in the logical sequential reading order. This brings me swiftly to two points: adapting printed sequential art to the internet, and digital medium sequential artwork representations which cannot use digital technology that cannot be reproduced in printed form. That sounds really long, but what I mean by that is that there's quite a few ways to adapt a printed comic into a digital sequential art form, but only one way to go adapt it the other way around.

In the digital world, the tools are infinite to tell a sequential story, and mixing the media to create a digital comic book, say like mixing the layout of the comic, but adding animation to some of the page and images allows for a whole new storytelling method that cannot exist (without a substantial budget, resources and research) in a physical print form. All I'm saying here is that by digitalising comic books, many more options are given to us a part from the printed sequential form.

Now if one has a look on my webcomic browser and remembers the previous post I have written about webcomic browsers, which can be summed up easily by: webcomics favour people revisiting the website to newcomers by placing the latest page/comic in the place of honour. On my webcomic, while placing the 2 directly sequential pages which should/would be following each other in an order that would make the most logical sense. Therefore adapting this to a new medium causes some logistical problems (as I like to call them). This is just worth pointing out seeing as I already discussed quite extensively the reasons for my browser setup on my website. One has a choice to make, and generally, like most choices each decision contains pros and cons. The pros outweigh the cons, but the frustration of not having a perfect system is there: what if I put a few sequential pages on my webcomic, and people read the end before the beginning because of the browser setup? Nothing is perfect.