T Campbell's Blog

At least we learned that you're "some crazy Edison with ninja skills".
 

I agree, the full five pages was a bit much. I found my attention skipping over chunks.
 

I've been thinking for a while now it'd be great fun to go through and summarise the roundtables. I'm a dab hand at psuedo-intellectual bullcannon, to the point where I can read it back the other way.
 

There's a thought that's been nagging me for the last few months as I've researched webcomics. This roundtable once again hammered it home for me, making it clear what I've known but couldn't put to words. The webcomics "community" is too diverse and nebulous to considered a single community. The rules of narrative may govern sprite, pixel, hand-drawn, photo, and amerimanga (to name a few), but are they all really "webcomics" in anything but the loosest sense of the word? Reading this Year in Review on Comixpedia and then before on The Webcomics Examiner, I couldn't help but feel that they're geared to a specific section of webcomics. Rarely do you see discussions or reviews of amerimanga aside from the usual suspects of Alpha-Shade, Errant Story, and Megatokyo. And sprites comics, though largely derivative, seem to be disregarded as a whole as a cancer more vile than yoai fanfic. The only sprite comic that might get mentioned by either site could be 8-bit Theater. Lord knows it's a good strip, but what about other ones? Bob and George, for as large as the community that surrounds it and the wonderful subcomics it hosts, is always little more than a historical footnote in most roundtables and discussions. I can't help but feel that even if these 'Zines honestly intend to serve the "webcomics community" and the medium as a whole that they do it at the expense of the greater whole.
 

The rules of narrative may govern sprite, pixel, hand-drawn, photo, and amerimanga (to name a few), but are they all really "webcomics" in anything but the loosest sense of the word?

Truth to tell, I'm still queasy about the term "webcomics". It seems like defining comics by the medium they're being displayed through, rather than by any property of their own. It's true some sections of comics work best or only on screen (infinite canvas, partly-animated, etc.), but others can and do work fine in print. And for the cartoonists who are still hoping to succeed in print, I can't help wonder if the label could harm their chances - "webcomic artist" could easily be interpreted as "wannabe who can't get syndicated."
 

And sprites comics, though largely derivative, seem to be disregarded as a whole as a cancer more vile than yoai fanfic.

You mean this isn't true?

As for the greater whole... Well, the comics that are notable do get noted. So if an exceptional sprite comic showed up that rocked the world, then it would get talked about. All of the comics and people discussed in Comixpedia and The Examiner are/were standouts in the webcomic world.

At least, standouts in the webcomic world that were agreed upon by a number of people. which is at least a slight bit distanced from being a purely subjective group of choices.

And really, if people are staying insular about their webcomic reading habits, that's hardly our problem.

But there's simple solution to lengthy roundtables: Limit the number of participants. If you note, it's not too often that someone goes off on a long winded rant in these things. The length comes from ten or twelve people writing two paragraphs about ten different topics.

Trust me, the editors DO hear the complaints about length. This would be a simple solution.
 

Yeah, I hear you. You may have noticed the "um, what" tone, although most of that was more frustration with end-of-annum syndrome.

It's a flaw of the format. We're treating this in the manner of a radio documentary transcript, when we need to be whittling things into something of a collaborative article. I'm fairly convinced that a vicious editing pass will do a far better job at making these things sensible than restricting participant levels. Throw all the crap at the wall, see what sticks, and scrape aggressively. (Frustratingly, the one time I offered to do this for a roundtable, I then couldn't allocate the resources to perform the task.)

Heck, why isn't this all being shunted off to Digital Strips, Blank Label et al.? The roundtable is a time-honoured staple of public radio (consider the bulk of CBC Radio One's national morning programme; I can't speak to other countries) and it should port much more easily to the podcast than the webzine.
 

Editing would go a long way towards me not feeling like review is being written for the sake of being able to say "I'm writing something important." It's nice to be able to lay down 10,000 words in a sitting, but if volume is in the way of reaching your audience, then there's a problem. There isn't enough cud in webcomics that requires this much chewing.

In webcomics, you usually have four panels. In the first panel, he's getting the cereal out of the cupboard, and in the second he's pouring the milk. An additional twenty panels aren't needed to show him setting the box down, getting a clean bowl, opening the fridge, choosing between 2% and skim, etc, etc.

Maybe an audio roundup would enforce brevity, because everyone is sensitive about talking for too long!
 

Audio's editable too, is the thing. (What the heck with Lost? It doesn't have any evangelists.)

Hell, maybe we just all need to get bitchier with each other. I crush about two to three posts a day because I'm sure no one cares, and it's preferable to smash them at the outset.

God. I don't write for the sake of feeling like I've done something important at all, which makes it frustrating to run across the occasional person who does. (The identity/invisibility/sole-value-as-adjunct issues are unrelated, and more bound up in Dumb Gender Issues.)

But it's a natural companion to the initial rush of enthusiasm, certainly. That's what happens when you join a new religion: missionary zeal. The problem emerges when people don't get over the missionary zeal, or have to burn out in a spectacular way in order to get there.
 

"which makes it frustrating to run across the occasional person who does."

One of my initial, early posits, especially with one of my less read projects, wasn't that ALL critics were like this, or even any notable number, but that they DO exist. Even this was shot down.
 

How long is too long for a Roundtable? I mean, when Steve and I start on our mini-roundtable reviews (like Wednesday's CRFH review) we tend to get close to 3,000 words down in the hour we're typing back and forth. It's a hefty amount of wordage... but sometimes you need that to get your point across.

Amusingly, the first one (on Questionable Content) was called the best review I've had on Tangents. I guess sometimes the reviews need a more jaded perspective to balance my own rather upbeat perspective on comics. :)

But yes... I think five pages of Roundtable might have been pushing the boundaries a tad. *chuckle* It might have worked better cutting the Roundtable into smaller sections, each one on independant questions and letting people click each link as they feel like it, rather than slogging through everything in one go.

Robert A. Howard
 

The roundtables that The Webcomics Examiner has published have been our most popular features. I have tried to cut their lengths (I cut out 1/4th of the Future of Webcomics roundtable) but I don't want to cut meaningful content.

The real problem is that the scope of these things tends to be too broad. Having a roundtable on the art of Derek Kirk Kim is fairly manageable. But having a roundtable on the entire artistic history of the medium is pretty ridiculous.

But the audience seems to want it. The Artistic History has been our most popular feature, and two of the 'Pedia roundtablers singled it out as the best webcomics article of the year. And furthermore, it's a subject that has needed to be covered, and doing it in one wreckless thrust was probably the only way we'd have gotten it done.
 

I'm with you that the scope of roundtables in general has gotten too broad. Narrowing the focus may be a way to trim the bloat.

For such an interactive medium, we've got a remarkably poor setup for figuring out what people want. Just because something seems to have worked once doesn't mean it's a great idea forever after. KING KONG's success does not mean people want five more giant monster movies.

(Some of the Artistic History's success has to have come from the fact that Scott Kurtz griped about it... but I do think it was a great idea that worked pretty well despite its length. Once.)

Let me add that Joe and Xaviar have been doing bang-up jobs in general, as far as I'm concerned. My issue is with the format, and the assumptions behind it, which they faithfully execute. I think it's time for those assumptions to change.

It may seem impolite or disingenuous to let people speak and then pick and mix their words, but it's down to the editing process to summarize fairly. And it has to be about what is useful to readers, not what gratifies the authors. There are more readers than authors, and they are the future.
 

Wednesday rightly pointed out that tighter editing could have helped that recent Comixpedia roundtable. I say that as a fairly frequent roundtable contributor as well as a reader. Also, better design would help -- the Comixpedia piece was pretty much just a five page mass of grey text. The Examiner seems to do a bit of a better job of using subheadings and pull quotes to break up longer articles and guide readers through them, so readers who are losing interest in a section and want to skim to another can do so more easily.

And I must disagree with T -- WE WANT MORE GIANT MONSTER MOVIES.
 

"And it has to be about what is useful to readers, not what gratifies the authors."

To repeat, the Roundtables have been our most popular and talked-about features.

I have a theory that the average reader is more tolerant of length than someone with a strong literary background. Where the literary person is trained to appreciate conciseness, the average reader likes something more conversational. And as any trained public speaker will tell you, repetition is critical to being understood.