Web Comics

This week I read some of the web comics that were posted on the class blog.  I read Octopus Pie, the Bad Machinery Scary Go Round, Girl Genius, the digital flash comic talking about the new possibilities of the medium and Delta: First Word.

Being so new to comics I have never read any of these before but I really enjoyed most of them.  Octopus Pie was really cool and very entertaining.  I really liked the art style I felt that its style really fit with the content of each piece and the characters had a nice charm to them.

The Scary Go Round one (not exactly sure what the title is) was really cool as well.  The humor was funny to me, pretty dry with awkward moments and random happenings like the caped homeless hillbilly really made me laugh.  The art direction was also really appealing as well.  It reminded me a lot of the shows cartoon network has been putting out recently.

The girl Genius strip was not for me. I found it really overwhelming both with the layout and compositions which seemed really crammed and the text which felt forced into it.  There were a handful of panels I struggled to tell what was going on.  I was really turned off from the first few pages and didn't really give it a chance maybe I'll revisit it again another time.

The little digital flash comic was by far my favorite.  It brought up tons of new possibilities for digital story telling that I for one never really considered.  I really like the idea of the reader controlling time while the artist controls the space within that time which is something Delta: First word really suffered from.  While reading that comic I felt I had no idea what was going on and I had no control over the pace it was told.  I found it very interesting the way it kept so many of the things that make comics appealing and to me it really improved the experience.  There was a strong sense of motion from panel to panel and it never fell apart at any time.  I read Delta after I read this one and Delta really suffered from many of the points the flash comic made.  Not only with the time and space aspect but the special effects and gimmicks that were forced on to the reader.  I felt they added confusion and weren't really necessary.  They could have been solved with better posing and staging from the character rather than using the special effects.

Overall I had a really positive experience with the web comics and I am looking forward to reading more of them.