Olaf's comics blog

When I read on Twitter (thanks, @rkarolius) that someone were saying “Forget the Chat Roulette piano mashup, this is the best YouTube video of the week”, I was skeptical.

I was also wrong. This is the most fascinating thing I’ve seen in a very long time.

Dorling Kindersley Books has made this awesome video about the future of publishing. It is a must-see for everybody who’s interested in documentation, publishing (yes, that includes comics publishing), modern technology (yes, that includes webcomics), books or just awesome videos.

Watch it. That’s an order.

“We also discussed, very briefly, the ambient barometric pressure.”
“You’re telling me you guys talked about the weather.”
“Yes. Very briefly.”

When the Penny Arcade guys launched pages two to five of Lookouts, I was struck with awe. This was a great concept. However, I was looking forward to their other new concept — Automata — even more.

Now, Automata page 2 is out.

Seriously, everybody should read this. Make sure you start on page 1, if you haven’t seen it already.

And what I like perhaps best about this is, surprisingly enough, not the comic itself, but a comment Jerry Holkins makes in the blog post accompanying the comic:

“I get five pages of this thing, to assert a few more facts about the world these characters live in. That’s not enough to tell a full story, not at the full resolution of this world, and I’m aware of it – so my aim is, instead, to tantalize the shit out of you, and get us in position to tell a wider story in the future.”

Seriously, am I the only one that’s paralyzed with awe from this?

Last week, the 2009 Eisner awards were awarded in San Diego. First thing first: Warm congratulations to Jason for winning the Best U.S. Edition of International Material category. I think it’s wild that a Norwegian can win an Eisner, but when the same Norwegian wins the same category three years in a row, it’s obvious that we have a true star we should be proud of.

And now, let’s look at what I think is one of the most interesting categories… Best webcomic. The winner was Carla Speed McNeil‘s Finder. I tried looking at this comic a few weeks ago, but had to give up. I found the comic a struggle to read. Not because of the quality of the comic, but because of how it is presented.

First, look at the URL: http://www.shadowlinecomics.com/webcomics/#/finder/. What is that # doing in there? Isn’t that a very inconvenient URL? “Hi, check out my webcomic, it’s at www dot shadowlinecomics dot com slash webcomics slash number sign slash finder”? Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But it appears that was never the intention, either. You’re apparently supposed to go to shadowlinecomics.com, click “webcomics” and find your way from there.

Now, the first thing you notice there is the huge Flash thingie that the entire comic is presented in. Which annoyed me a lot. What is the purpose of it? Apparently, only to make the reading experience more difficult. The pages of the comic are so large you have to scroll to be able to read all of them, even when viewing it in full screen. That wouldn’t be that big a problem if this was ordinary HTML files where one could scroll, click the button to read next page, scroll, and so on. But here, the previous/next buttons are on a separate toolbar. Meaning: When you’re holding your pointer over the “Next” button, you can’t use the scroll wheel. You can’t use the keypad to scroll, either. And I seem to recall that when I tried reading this comic in Opera (my browser of choice — but not the one I use at work, where I currently am), the scroll wheel didn’t work either. Goddarn it, why not just let me progress forward by clicking the page itself?

It seems as if this comic is being updated on a semi-regular basis. Well, that’s good, but if I’m a regular reader, how do I get to see the latest page? Most webcomics either display the latest page on the frontpage or they have a link to it from most other sites. Here, if you want to see the latest page, you either have to click “Next page” fifty-seven times, or you have to find the thumbnail button, open the thumbnails (which you’ll want to close again as soon as possible because it takes up even more of the screen so that you have even less space to view the comic), drag the scrollbar all the way right, and click the correct thumbnail. Imagine doing that three times a week.

The Flash format has a few nifty advantages, for instance you can zoom in on the comic if you want to. However, there are also some disadvantages that may or may not be intended. In addition to the navigational problems mentioned above, one thing that annoyed me was that there seems to be no way to print the comic. Okay, I understand that McNeil wants me to buy her books, but this comic is hardly ideal for viewing on a screen, so why can’t I just print it as long as it’s free online anyway?

And every time you click to view a new page, you have to watch the Shadowline logo while it’s loading. As long as you’re using Flash, why not actually take advantage of it and pre-load the next page while I’m reading the first?

Notice that in the <title> field, words like “Finder” or “Carla Speed McNeil” aren’t mentioned at all. That’s probably one of many things that make this comic near-impossible to find in search engines. If you google “Finder Carla Speed McNeil”, the Shadowline comic won’t show up in the top ten. However, you will immediately find a link to Carla Speed McNeil’s website, where she also publishes “Finder”. Wait, I’m confused. This looks as if it’s a completely different comic? Okay, apparently it has run for thirteen years, so I understand that there are tons of different material to choose from, but the stories seem so very, very different. The “Finder” we learn about on McNeil’s website appears to be “a secret society of hunters, trackers and more“. The comic published on Shadowline’s pages… I’ve only read the first thirty pages, but I get the impression that it’s about a beauty contest and that there’s a species of people where men have boobs there.

Oh, and by the way, this comic isn’t finished. No, seriously. I don’t mean that the ending isn’t written yet, while that seems to be the case it’s not really a disadvantage, but most of the last 26 pages haven’t been inked yet. Only pencils are published. I would link you there, but that’s another disadvantage of the Flash navigational system used… Linking to or bookmarking a specific page is impossible. But seriously: Why on Earth isn’t the entire comic inked before publication? That just looks unprofessional.

I’m sure McNeil is an excellent writer and artist and that the Eisner award was well-deserved. But this was a terrible, terrible way to present a webcomic.

With the exception of one night aboard a boat in the middle of the Atlantic ocean eight years ago with nothing better to do, I’ve never played tabletop role-playing games. While I vaguely recall some aspects of my character — a halfling paladin (or is the proper term “paladin halfling”?) — I don’t really remember anything from the experience, except that it somehow involved a dungeon.

So why is it that I like webcomics about tabletop role-playing games so much? There’s something about them which appeals to my nerdy genes, I guess.

I’ve been a fan of The Order of the Stick since Rich Burlew made a guest strip for PVP in April 2006. Go back to strip one and read it. The story is sheer awesomeness. The art… Well, you read xkcd, don’t you? The art is better than in xkcd. Basically, the concept is a fantasy world where the characters are characters in a game — or, they’re humans and halflings and dwarves and elves and so on, but they’re aware of things such as skill points and level updates. Strongly recommended.

The reason I write this is that yesterday, I stumbled across a link to Darths & Droids. by Andrew Coker, Andrew Shellshear, David Karlov, David McLeish, David Morgan-Mar, Ian Boreham, Loki Patrick and Steven Irrgang. Perhaps I should be ashamed to never have seen it before, but now I’ve skimmed through the archives (they’re not that big, it can be done in a matter of hours), and I’m awed by the brilliance of this story. I’ve bookmarked it and added it to the “Webcomics I read” list. The concept is basically that a group of players is making up the entire plot of all six Star Wars movies through a campaign — illustrated by screenshots from the movies. This could have been a really bad idea — however, the cartoonists really make it work. Check it out! (That’s where the title of this blog post is taken from. I’m gonna scream “Summon Bigger Fish” whenever I find a difficult problem the next week.)

So I now have two webcomics I really like that focus on tabletop games. Of course, there are also comics on tabletop gaming which I don’t like that much. Darths and Droids is inspired by a comic which does the exact same thing, except that instead of Star Wars it uses Lord of the Rings as a source for inspiration. I’ve looked at that too, and didn’t really like it that much. And there’s, of course, Erfworld — which, while not necessarily bad, never quite captured my interest.

Clearly, tabletop games are huge in the world of webcomics (not as huge as videogames, but hey).

First, let me state that the term “geek” is in no way meant to be offensive here. I’m talking about people with an extreme knowledge of and interest for technology.

I assume that many of you have already seen Ben Parr’s excellent article IE6 must die for the Web to move on. The article is an attack on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, which I agree is an outdated browser which everybody should replace. According to Parr, between fifteen and twenty-five percent of Internet users still use IE6. That is not a small number.

In October 2007, Online Services summarized, on behalf of Nettredaktor.no, statistics for 1200 Norwegian webpages. The results showed, among other things, that 47 % of the visitors used IE6. On second place was IE7, with 29 % of the visitors.

Based on these numbers, it seems pretty clear that Microsoft has a firm grip on the web that they won’t let go in a while. Even though 2007 is a while ago, I’m sure recent number would still show high numbers for Internet Explorer (even though people now use IE7 and IE8 and not as much IE6… I hope).

But then I start looking at my own stats. And I scratch my head, because there’s no connection between the numbers I get here and the numbers I hear about elsewhere. IE6 is almost nonexistant, and Internet Explorer isn’t even the most popular browser!

As many of you are aware, I run the Norwegian webcomics portal Nettserier.no. The pages have approximately 1000 visits a day, so it’s not the biggest site in the world, but I get the feeling that most webcomics-interested Norwegians use the portal regularly. And for Nettserier.no, Google Analytics-stats show these numbers for the past month:

• Appr. 38 % use Firefox
• Appr. 34 % use Internet Explorer
• Appr. 13 % use Opera, Opera Mini users not included
• Appr. 9 % use Safari
• Appr. 4 % use Chrome

So… huh? What is the reason that the most popular browser in the world, the one browser which is already installed when you fire up your new Windows machine for the first time (82 % of my users are Windows users), ranks second here, as low as 34 %?

And obviously, 15 % of my users aren’t using IE6. More like 2 %. If I decided to change the entire portal into something completely not IE6-supported, very few would find out.

The only theory I’ve come up with so far is that my visitors are mostly geeks. But if that’s true, why is that? Is this specific for my website, or do other webcomics portals and websites have similar stats?

If you have a webcomic of your own and you have a decent statistics system there, what does it show? Are 90 % of your users still Internet Explorer users, or are they embracing Firefox and Opera and other systems, too? Are webcomics readers simply geeks? Or am I alone to have stats like these?

Have a nice weekend! If I’m awfully quiet the next couple of days, it’s because I’ll be working on my contribution(s) for the previously mentioned comic book scriptwriting contest. I have a couple of different ideas for it — one is a nerdy humor series of one-pagers, one is a standalone drama story, and one is a drama-fantasy-scifi-superhero concept. The last one is my favorite so far, but it’s very possible that I submit all three. We’ll see.