T Campbell's Blog

How about names for categories that make more sense?
 

You need to include all the comics that look like a damn Bloom County ripoff. Like mine.

I dunno... I assume you're going to tie these into some kind of historical context. I mean, "Piroism" comes out of a fairly old-school background of anime/manga fanart, whereas the Pants Pressers are a much more recent group with a loosely shared manga/Glen Keane fangirl aesthetic. The way the different styles and genres have developed reflects the online communities from which they emerged, and the shape the Web was in at that particular time.
 

Art styles:

Stick-Comic (?)

Writing Genres:

"Slacker," a subgenre that superceeds gamer/college genres. Where it's just about a group of slackers who don't do much, and college and games are only supplementary to the theme. [Loserz, Mike's Stupid Comics, Better You Than Me, Questionable Content (sorta)]

"Anthro/Furry," a genre where the characters are people-animals, and the comic uses that as a recurring theme and/or calls attention to it frequently (Not webcomic unique, but definitely relevant enough to warrant note). [Suburban Jungle, Kevin and Kell, 13 Seconds]

"Catgirl," a genre similar to Anthro/Furry, where one or few characters are Furries, typically a catgirl protagonist. [No specific titles come to mind]

"Psuedo-Journal/Quasi-Journal," a comic where the characters are based off of real people, but less than real things go on in the strip [Real Life, Built For Comfort]



That's all I can think of at the moment.

Can I write your foreward? :-p
 

Transformation...

Accidental Centaur

The Wotch

El Goonish Shiva (SP?)

Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuki

(Though probably that last one fits into webmanga too)
 

You need a name for the type of art style that's distorted and unintentionally non-representative and never gets better over time. Keenism is a nice ironic name for that, but I'd accept Abrahmsism too.

A name for Frank Cho's artwork would be good too -- that mix of realistic human characters with absurdly comic animals -- but I guess it sort of follows the old Tom & Jerry meme. I love the early T&J eps, where Tom is owned by a big lady with stereotypically black dialogue...
 

Would "Reinvention" be your word for Scott McCloud's "infinite canvas" and other techniques he's publicized? If not, then McCloud's ideas deserves mention. I may not agree with him, but he's clearly had an affect on webcomics.

In terms of storytelling technique, I find it interesting that we're seeing more of the "one page of a print comic" style these days, such as Phil Foglio's "Girl Genius", which might be worth mentioning in your History as a comic that made a recent transition from Print to Web instead of the other way around. Since it's one page out of a comic instead of a 3-4 panel bit, there's less pressure to have a punchline with each daily/weekly/whatever installment.
 

Yeah, that's exactly what "Reinvention" means there.
 

Cobbled-together Microsoft Paint sad-looking.

A step up from that would be the oekakis and whiteboards that occasionally get used.

But I've seen an awful lot of comics that there clearly one pass through Paint.

It's very serious.

Also there have been several attempts to do kind of stop-motion comics with action figures and pictures, but I suppose those are not web-only.
 

Oop. Another one.

Those little icon/chat room ones like the Fans strips where they switch bodies.

And how about "somewhat animated" like some of the Kid Radds and the once a year Diesel Sweeties or Sluggy.
 

Pantspressionism?

Something tells me I want in on that.
 

Melting Pot. I can’t think of a fancy technical name for it at the moment, but there are many webcomics which seem to incorporate many genres. CRFH usually gets stuck in fantasy or sci-fi, but when you think about it Maritza goes beyond that every so often. I would even classify COTC as more of a mix than a straight fantasy or adventure. You could also and ALICE. At first glance the strip is clearly in the joke-a-day genre, but look how Alice’s imagination unfolds. It’s usually not a panel about shooting down the Red Baron or being a T-Rex. Michael tells stories through her imagination, fantasy stories. So, is it a joke-a-day or is it a fantasy or is it both? In print comics you know what you’re getting. Batman is the Super Hero world. Sandman is in Fantasy. In other words, with very few exceptions print is always genre specific. With web it’s much easier to cross genres. Not to toot my own horn, but I created Clan of the Cats with that specific intent. One story may have Chelsea fighting Dracula while another may be about Chelsea giving her cat a bath. Okay, maybe both of those are horror genre, but you get my point. ;)
 

My first impression is that the categories alternate between too specific and potentially silly-sounding, like "Piroism", and too general and hence awkward, like "Reinvention". I'd say it's better to list up the signifigant works you want to classify, figure out how they are best grouped, and then come up with the term for it. Do Magic Inkwell and Electric Sheep really belong in the same group? What about Nowhere Girl?

Also, these categories should be designed so they can easily overlap. Garza and Farley have things in common, Farley and Shaw do as well, but Shaw has little in common with Garza, capich?

Also, I think you should steer clear of naming a movement after a particular artist or group of artists. You might be getting a little webcomics-centric here. I mean, Piro is a competent artist for the purposes of his highly successful series; but everything I've seen from him is pretty darned mediocre and derivative, IMHO. To put him on the same level as Eisner or Robert Crumb seems ridiculous.

Best,

Joe Zabel
 

Vector Comics? These are the type cleanly made and fairly simple done on Illustrator and such. Most of the time you can also see that due to the simple style, they tend to have recycled images used, but then again the stories tend to be ace.
For Stick figure comics like "Order of the Stick" by Rich Burlew, I would put it under Vector Comics also, seeing that not only does he use it, but Stick Figure comics run with the anthem of Vectors.

Another type could be just Old School comics. There are comics (like mine) that are strictly old school are made in the same fashion on print but tend to use the internet as its launch base. It shouldn't be such a big deal genre but it's good to recognize those who are following the same path laid out by print.

Photo comics, could be another thing. Vigil has a couple of such uses of photo, and since digital camera technology is getting so out there and image software is so cheap or really, easy to steal, it's becoming something on it's own. I forgot that name to a popular one, which had the folks dressing up as Heroes and Villains and using photo. ....Damn they were Megacon T, you know who I'm talking about?
Another photo comic is Quisaz-haderach, a LARPy ass comic, with some humor....and I mean some.

Also another type, I guess, are the sites that have contest and such, or "Challenge Comics"; I don't know
what you to call them. Sites like Sketch Battle and Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge who tends to have contest and such, sequentially and trade off images. I think they are becoming more and more apparent.

Crap I don't know what else.
 

"Limited Art" category: Comics which continually re-use a limited set of images and depend heavily on dialogue. Examples: String Finger Theatre, Knights of the Dinner Table. (I know, I need a better category-title. "Limited Art" sounds mean, and my other idea "Art-Recycling" even worse. I love both the example comics.)
 

To Candidate Levy's "Somewhat Animated" I'd add "Half-Animated", productions like Broken Saints, somewhere between a comic and full animation.
 

In reference to Joe Z.'s opinion about the term "Piroism":

Discussions of Fred Gallagher's level of quality or overall ability as an artist/storyteller aside, it's pretty clear that he's been influential on the webcomics scene. I doubt he'd be comfortable with having a genre of comics named for him (I know him through my work at Anime Central, as Programming Director -- he's a frequent guest), but the fact is that people look up to him, and do see his work as something worth emulating.

Eye of the Beholder and all that.
 

Did someone mention clip-art? I'm thinking of Get Your War On
 

I'm with Joe Zabel on the cutesy names for styles. There's no surer way to make yourself sound less than serious.

"Piroism" gives Gallagher too much credit for the syle. He's really derivative.

Those "Stop motion" comics I think are mainly inspired by Toyfare magazine's "Twisted Toyfare Theatre" comics, so they're not entirely webcomics-specific.

"Transformation" is more of a theme than a category. I mean, Sparkling Generation Valkyire Yuuki, El Goonish Shive, and Accidental Centaurs aren't that similar even in the sorts of transformations, let alone tone or style.

Giving MS Paint comics their own category would seem like you're saying that crappy comics with lazy art are a valid group. It's like a bookstore having a section for "sucky books".
 

Re: "sucky books"

It would be a mistake to make it seem as though those comics didn't exist because they're not good. If you wrote the history of the book, you would have to include something somewhere about the general failure and ickiness of vanity press, for instance.
 

Art-wise, I'd classify webcomics as follow:

* comic-book type (gsg, the jaded, wandering ones, everything jake, elf life, sluggy freelance)
* traditional newspaper comic strip style (todd and penguin, greystone inn, count your sheep, narbonic, freefall, goats)
* illustration (drew weing, derek kirk kim, bruno, demonology 101, copper)
* computer-generated (comics drawn with a tablet don't count here, since I consider them hand-drawn). I'm counting any comic that uses cut and paste or poser, sprites, or an illustrator library. Photocomics also included here.
* Designer-style art. Here I count penny Arcade, pvp, mac hall, and all its clones/influencees. Also comics like wapsi square and scary go round.
* Manga or manga-influenced. This covers the piroism.
* Furry.

Maritza
CRFH.net
 

Hmm, I think webmanga is more of a style then really a genre of webcomics. You have stuff like Megatokyo and Alpha-Shade, both considered webmangas but totally diffrent in story, elements and scope. So its really difficult to pigeon hole these comics into one category just because they share a similar influence(usually visual style) to Japanese manga.
 

But when I said manga or manga-influenced, I was just talking about the art style. A comic like Avalon, for example, is manga-influenced, yet it's totally different from Megatokyo.

Maritza
CRFH.net
 

Shaenon is right. Instead of thinking of specific "genres" or "styles" which on their own are only good for looking at things at one point in time, you should try to break things into blocks of time. This is tradionally how art is broken up, whether it's music, literature, or visual art. Not only do things accumulate over time, but styles evolve over time, and take on new features from various inspirations. For example, look at how technology has evolved over the last few years. From improvements in scanning and graphics processing software, to the increasing popularity of tablet computers, the evolution of technology is having a big effect webcomics. People change HOW they draw, which changes WHAT they draw. And, as in the case of "manga-style", trends in OTHER forms of media have a big impact. Over the last decade we've adapted a lot of features from asian-comic styles, as well as the alternative styles from the late 80s, early 90s. Not only do they effect the art style, but they also effect the narrative, as more people are associating the "cartoon" style with a broader form of story-telling.

Of course, this is all VERY complicated, especially due to the nature of the internet. As I'm sitting here I'm having difficulty, despite being used to (and somewhat good at) interpreting things historically. Your best bet may be mirroring the approach in musical historiography, which evolves in a similar manner to webcomics (from what I can tell) due to it's open nature.

And as for styles you missed, you also seem to have over-looked "raunch" (such as Exploitation Now, or Thin H Line/Sexy Losers) which are a type that, in the Western world, could only succeed on the internet.

Andrew MacLaren
wrpd_mnd@excite.com