sneezy, grumpy, sleepy, and dopey
Mar. 29th, 2005 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI desperately need to be up dealing with car insurance, but I'm sick, and all I feel up to doing is laying here (lying here?) blowing my nose. Also I am reluctant to go out and inflict my germy self on the populace. God I hate being sick. At least I feel justified in having skipped Scottish last night.
In other news the Girl Genius print comic is apparently ending, to be replaced by a thrice-weekly webcomic. It seems the Foglios only ever regarded the individual comics as a sort of publicity vehicle for the collections, and they think the web will be cheaper/better/etc. I for one am very disappointed, as I *liked* the individual comics, the pacing, the buying of one and having all those new pages at once... Kaja made some comments in the yahoo!group about "trying to get Phil to stop laying things out for the short, temporary comic issues", which has "driven her crazy all along since it's only in comic form for a little while but is in a book forever." So apparently the move to continual one-page updates (which, hahahah, how long do you think *that* is going to last) pleases her because the structure will be able to be more freeform within the constraints of the graphic novel segments. I think that's a *bad* thing. I think, especially in an action-adventure comic, strong episodic structure encourages a clearer, easier-to-follow storyline, helps writers set a good pace (not spending forever dragging out some single event, but also not rushing through important scenes), and is just fun to read.* Also, in the web -> print model, I just don't find it all that *fun* to buy the print comic; I probably *will*, because I want to have Girl Genius around to reread, but it's just not nearly as exciting to plunk down a big sum for material I've already seen as to hand over my few bucks for a Shiny New Issue. So, in short, foo. I guess on the bright side, it will now be freeeee, so those of you who weren't following it in print will be able to pick it up very easily.
*I should add that Phil Foglio is very good at what he does, so I figure the move to the web probably won't actually make him suddenly develop many of the faults you see in webcomics from people without all that experience. And Girl Genius has not in fact been doing the more complicated kinds of layout tricks he used in Buck Godot: Gallimaufry, like having one scene running along the bottoms of the pages while another goes on in the rest of the page, so it should adapt pretty directly to being read a page at a time. I'm still bummed by the devaluing of the single-issue format though.
In other news the Girl Genius print comic is apparently ending, to be replaced by a thrice-weekly webcomic. It seems the Foglios only ever regarded the individual comics as a sort of publicity vehicle for the collections, and they think the web will be cheaper/better/etc. I for one am very disappointed, as I *liked* the individual comics, the pacing, the buying of one and having all those new pages at once... Kaja made some comments in the yahoo!group about "trying to get Phil to stop laying things out for the short, temporary comic issues", which has "driven her crazy all along since it's only in comic form for a little while but is in a book forever." So apparently the move to continual one-page updates (which, hahahah, how long do you think *that* is going to last) pleases her because the structure will be able to be more freeform within the constraints of the graphic novel segments. I think that's a *bad* thing. I think, especially in an action-adventure comic, strong episodic structure encourages a clearer, easier-to-follow storyline, helps writers set a good pace (not spending forever dragging out some single event, but also not rushing through important scenes), and is just fun to read.* Also, in the web -> print model, I just don't find it all that *fun* to buy the print comic; I probably *will*, because I want to have Girl Genius around to reread, but it's just not nearly as exciting to plunk down a big sum for material I've already seen as to hand over my few bucks for a Shiny New Issue. So, in short, foo. I guess on the bright side, it will now be freeeee, so those of you who weren't following it in print will be able to pick it up very easily.
*I should add that Phil Foglio is very good at what he does, so I figure the move to the web probably won't actually make him suddenly develop many of the faults you see in webcomics from people without all that experience. And Girl Genius has not in fact been doing the more complicated kinds of layout tricks he used in Buck Godot: Gallimaufry, like having one scene running along the bottoms of the pages while another goes on in the rest of the page, so it should adapt pretty directly to being read a page at a time. I'm still bummed by the devaluing of the single-issue format though.
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Date: 2005-03-29 05:52 pm (UTC)I never buy single issues, even if I think the comic is absolutely brilliant; I always wait for it to be collected into a softcover graphic novel and buy that, even if (in the case of Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze) it means waiting about four years between books. Shanower's the exception, where single issues come out quarterly rather than monthly, but even monthly issues are too difficult for me to keep up with. I'd forget to go to the comics shop regularly and buy them, and then I'd skip issues and lose interest and stop reading altogether. A month is long enough that I'd forget about even the most brilliant comic ever after only a few months, I'm pretty sure. (I was reading Girl Genius at Jim's for a while, and forgot all about it after a couple months even though I really liked it.) And there are enough other things on my reading list that I have no problem not reading every new page or issue when it comes out, and just waiting months or years to read them all collected. (I don't bother reading web comics for the same reason, except for dailies that don't generally have an ongoing plot, like Dilbert or Calvin & Hobbes or Ozzie & Millie. For comic strips with long plotlines, like Mutts, I only read the collections.)
But more importantly, I agree with Phil's description of them as temporary and books as permanent: comic issues take a lot more storage space than graphic novels, and a lot more still if you want to keep them in good condition. So I wouldn't want to store them, and would wind up buying the graphic novel anyway and trying to resell the comics. Lots of extra expense and bother (though I suppose there's the possibility of making a profit by selling the issues to collectors?), and really, I'd rather read it all at once than in little chunks.