June 10th, Friday, 2005
The Future of Webcomics

The abrupt stop of Joan’s speech is deliberate, for she will be revealing something terrible which I think is better left for the next page; I know of course that this will leave several readers feeling disgruntled for I have ended the page with an obnoxious page hanger especially after I missed Tuesday’s update!

I have been taking far longer to color these days, for as you can see, the coloring of SKOOKUM! has reached a more detailed standard compared to earlier pages. It’s trade off kinda thing, you get better colors, but you also get slower updates… I am not thinking of changing to a once-a-week schedule for SKOOKUM! as yet, I just need more time to get used the careful coloring.

With reference to the two pictures above, the creator, Hawk (of AppleGeeks fame) wrote this in his blog, “[In time, we would have a] Virtual Webomic Archive Database [and] just think, in the future we'll be able to fly through a tunnel of thumbnails and rotate the view with our mouse. When we find what we're looking for, we'll be able to select the thumbnail and view the comic...”
 

What Hawk is trying to say is that gone will be the days where people have to fumble through a whole list of archives just to look for the more interesting pages of a webcomic. He visions that webcomic experience of the future would include a more interactive setting where people will be able to see the thumbnails of each page, and it will not be arranged in a stack order like most of our thumbnail images today, but it will be in a spiral or tunnel form which is adjustable with the mouse. In this sense the reader is able to see pages after pages glow by him with just a movement of the cursor, hence not only allowing the reader to get the pages he wants faster, it is also much more fun to navigate through a huge amount of information. Incidentally, Hawk thought of this after creating this image with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Quartz. More information can be found here on Hawk’s blog.

Now it seems to be really far-fetched and hard to even imagine, that was what people thought before the advent of the Internet in 1994. Now it is impossible for most people to live or carry on living WITHOUT the Internet. What was thought then, as something impossible had become a necessity in fact for people. People should not be too eager to deem something as impossible too soon, for it always returns to haunt them. I never thought I would be doing a webcomic, I only thought of publishing a comic; look at what I am doing now.

Gone also are the days where science and art are two separate disciplines that must never under any circumstance meet. It is with the advent of more and more amazing design and art software that people realize that not only must science join with art, their integration must be perfect so as to create the best CGI we see dominating the movie and media industry. Should artists of traditional media start to worry? No, as more people flock to create digital art, traditional artists have more to go around. Digital artworks are impressive, but they lack the quiet soul of a painting or a piece of Pencil art. Somehow skill and talent of an artist WILL speak for itself, and it is not something that can be replicated easily too.

Wataru

 

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