Layout before webcomics. The full pages were a lot more fun.
Webcomics are more closely related to newspaper daily comics; their collections resemble the oldest comic books, as collections of the daily strips.
Comic books are extremely labor intensive. To keep up with the monthly schedule instituted originally by the prose writer Charles Dickens – who used shorthand to get his stories on paper before handing them to translators – comics had been forced to turn to team workers. Because the money for each page was split up between the team, pencillers, inkers and colorists split up the stack fo pages and sell them at shows. The need to make every page work as as individual, frameable art-piece can lead the artists to pay more attention to a good layout and fine color than to story needs.
The only way around this is to dump the monthly schedule and treat the drawn book like a novel – it’s done when it’s done, to the best of a single author’s ability.
Where’s the next AFTERDEAD? I’m thinking….
Makes me think of how the prints in my little collection were produced.
About a million years ago, I started buying Gillray caricature prints. He’s said to be the father of the modern political cartoon. He etched his own plates, of course. They were published and sold by a woman– Hannah Humphrey– and hand colored by a small staff of women.
They seem dreadfully complex to the modern eye, but they were used differently from a modern newspaper cartoon. The newspaper cartoon has to make its point immediately and be thrown away. The Gillray prints were meant to be collected and enjoyed at length. And they’re very, very sophisticated.
Any links to those? Other readers would want to see.
I’ll look around, Donna. I’ve never put any of mine into digital format; they’re just on my walls looking purty!
There are some here: http://www.gillrayprints.com I’m amused that they’re selling the restrikes from the Bohn Folio for some pretty long prices. I always avoided those things. They’re printed on an acidic wove paper that tends to crumble, while the earlier ones that Humphrey published are on nice laid paper that is just as flexible now as when it was made two centuries ago.
Such a wide selection of Gillray! Yes, tree paper is crap; the Library of Congress is crumbling as we speak.