action web-comics

So I've been thinking about action based web-comics. Most of the ones I read aren't really that good admittedly. The problem is just that they go so incredibly slow for my taste. You see, each page really only covers one action or so, say walking down an hall and entering a room. In a normal comic book, this wouldn't be so bad because the next page is right there waiting for you. A normal comic book goes on for 20-30 pages and you get a good cliffhanger on the last page to make you want to keep going. In a webcomic you get a page, then wait a week and get another page. In a year you'll get 52 pages, assuming it all is on time, of a story while print comics deliver at least 240.

Now, I get that a web-cartoonist 98% of the time is only doing this for fun and makes little to no money off of their work thus we just can't expect to get as much product as from print. This often leads to a slow moving story that makes me lose my interest pretty quickly. There are a bunch of examples, so I'll go with who does it wrong first.

Zap in space spent well over a year on a single fight. The problem they had with it, was they simply spent too much time doing absolutely nothing. I'm not sure if I covered it in this blog or not, but I've said it before somewhere. They have spent, more then once, several pages doing actions that can easily be done in one. I can understand wanting to show all the details of a fight scene, because that has suspense and action and blood and explosions and all that good stuff. Once that part is done, and all your character is going to do is meet up with someone and leave the area, do that in as few pages as possible. Other comics have this problem too, such as Lastblood which gives a lot of pointless action in between pointless "character development" about people who I just don't really care about.

Some people who do things well, at least for the most part is Goblins. Goblins keeps things fresh by running multiple story lines at the same time. Once one group starts to do some dull, but necessary plot moving he jumps over to the other group who we last saw in the pit of danger. This keeps me enthralled in whats happening because its always something interesting, even if its not the main plot. Recently though, I get the feeling that Goblins isn't actually going anywhere. Its always moving, but its not really moving foreword at least with the main plot. I think though, that this is simply a sign that we're about to spend a lot of time with the other cast of characters and see what they're doing.

anyway, thats all for now. check out goblins if you haven't already. its right over there --->