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The relevancy of the cartoon is a two way street
Cartoons and newsprint are symbiotic in their history as they will be in their downfall unless efforts are made to modernize the craft. This responsibility falls to both artists and editors.
When placed on the web, static comics seem out of place. I think if they were to be reinvented with the web in mind, comics could become something more dynamic than they are without contorting into full-on animated cartoons, which I consider a very different medium.
For example, I see very little use of the animated gif file. With a gif, a cartoonist can modestly animate their work without resorting to full-fledge animation (which strips away the reading aspect of a comic. Wholly half of the medium). With an animated gif file, one panel could make way to another, for example, or dialogue could flow more naturally in speech balloons by alternating what they contain, or minor animations could liven up otherwise still frames. All of these are easy to implement, do not require proprietary or bulky plug-ins (ie Flash) to operate, and could help keep comics relevant in the future.
The other consideration here are editors. One problem over the last decade or so has been that most alternative news weekly carry the same five or so artists, no matter where you are in the country. This Modern World, Tom the Dancing Bug, Troubletown, Red Meat, etc, we've all seen them before. Of course, there is nothing wrong with any of these comics. They are quite good, in fact. But with the significantly lower overhead of running an online publication, I hold out hope some of the more well funded e-magazines of the future see the value in opening their doors to more cartoonists than the handful we have all seen before and maybe this will, in turn, allow artists to move beyond the nerd culture and skin deep observations that plague so many so-called "web comics."
That said, the roster at publications like Salon.com are not a promising start.
Posted:
Feb 28 2009, 12:46 AM EST by
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