Let Me Tell You About Webcomics: A New Postmodern Genre

Another way that webcomics question the traditional norms of story-telling in print comics is by re-defining the notion of a whole narrative by blurring the roles of the reader and writer. In print comics one knows who is writing the story and who is reading it. The author writes the story and the reader is reading along, but many times in webcomics this line is blurred. The readers get to make decisions, changing the flow of the story by their choices, to where it seems like the reader is telling the story, not the writer. This is how webcomics use interactivity to tell a story. Moorefield-Lang and Gavigan discuss in their article “These Aren’t Your Father’s Funny Papers: The New World of Digital Graphic Novels” the interactivity of digital graphic novels (also described as a webcomic, online graphic novel, and long-play comics) online. They write that “there is also a growing body of interactive Web 2.0 sites and apps that encompass the digital graphic novel style. These sites and applications take readers into a two-way interaction with the graphic novel, where the book may be read aloud to them; they can choose outcomes or options for the characters, help create stories as well as read them, or complete activities after reading Web comics” (Moorefield-Lang). Although these authors do not distinguish very well the differences between a digital graphic novel and a webcomic, they do tell the reader important information about the advantages to having the internet as a medium. Webcomics can and are interactive in many of the ways that Moorefield-Lang and Gavigan describes, as well as others they haven’t.

 

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