Let Me Tell You About Webcomics: A New Postmodern Genre

Webcomics also challenge the traditional notions of unity and continuity to create a continuous narrative free from a set structure. While webcomics use all sorts of media to tell their story, they also do it in a unified way. Going from reading print to watching a flash animation to playing an interactive game might sound confusing at first, but webcomics makes it so that they fit in naturally with the narrative. The different medias in which to read webcomics aren’t random, they are specific and are there purposefully to tell the story. This is very different from print comics where the unity is that all of it is in print and images. The reader doesn’t switch into different mediums because print comics are contained in their books. Print comics also are unified by the panels framing each moment and how the author creates flow. Going back to Seyfried’s choices for print comics and graphic novels, one of the choices is choice of flow. Seyfried discusses this by looking at a print comic and describing how “the flow of the story, through the panel arrangement, matches the flow of the airplane, the flowing of the curtains, and even the flow of Deslisle’s body hunched over the windowsill” (Seyfried). Print comics utilize this choice of flow to keep the unity of its narrative. Instead of letting print comic’s medium and frames dictate how webcomics should be unified, webcomics leaves behind both of these. As webcomics cross through several mediums they still contain a unity and flow that makes sense, even though it’s very different from print comics.

 

 

 

Click on the buttons to explore how each webcomic does this!