Web Comics and the Death of Narrative Forms
Quote of the Day:
D: I'm just saying that you have to have some minimum definition of a cliffhanger.
W: No you don't, it depends on presentation.
D: But the author doesn't intend -
W: That doesn't matter.
D: You're not usually all "death of the author" in your literary theories.
W: I what? I just don't care!
And you probably won't either but I'd like to talk about webcomics.
I love webcomics. I want to write a webcomic. The old fashioned serial where we eagerly wait for the next installment has found new life on the internet. New, frustrated, constantly cliffhangered life.
Cliffhangers are the first problem. See, one of my favorite series is Gunnerkrigg Court, which updates three days a week. Regularly you get people complaining about a page ending on a cliffhanger, especially a page that updates on Friday. They complain about this every day during quick moments of plotting. Even daily strips can fall into this when it's during an intense moment such as the recent breakup series in Questionable Content.
But if these pages were read one month later, instead of all of them being cliffhangers, suddenly none of them are! This wouldn't be worth mentioning if from time to time forum morons wouldn't lament that cliffhangers are cheap narrative devices.
Well, now that's a problem. A page can only be so long, and if it logically ends at a certain point, it ends. In a fight scene full of twists and turns and one person getting the upper hand, in a chapter where we reveal several big secrets, yeah it's fully natural for each page to end on a high moment of tension. Not that legit intentional cliffhangers don't exist, they do, but every page?
Another element that's getting a hard knock from the method of updating is foreshadowing. Because the nature of updates forces one's reading speed to be very slow if you're reading as updated it gives people a lot of time to digest and analyze material. It also gives people a lot of time to discuss material and compare theories. This, inevitably, leads some people to guess the correct way the story will turn and can cause the same forum morons to lament that a series is "predictable! How disappointing!" Now, there is a difference between cliche-predictable, and what-foreshadowing-is-supposed-to-do-predictable. You're not supposed to pull stuff out of nowhere, that's Deus Ex Machina, that's an ass-pull. Read at a normal pace these "predictable" turns would be a short jumps in a logical narrative.
Some of this can also lead to people feeling deflated or cheated if they'd convinced themselves that the fan speculation would end up being canon. Currently, the fan favorite theory had been that Antimony was descended from a Phoenix. Now that it's "some sort of fire elemental" people are either disappointed or hanging all their hope on the "I suspect" and maintaining it could still be true.
They do that about stupid things that have been debunked. I'm sure that there are people on the forum who won't be convinced that Anthony Carver is her biological dad unless they show him banging Surma with cutaways to show that fertilization is happening.
...okay that mental image can leave. Moving on-
Bad authors might take this as legit criticism and start pulling all sorts of "twists" that are barely seen or regularly ending pages at illogical points to artificially create the cliffhanger effects. Or go in the other direction and work too hard to make each strip in itself tell a complete story in a series that wasn't started as a joke-a-day format. Add in ultra slow schedule comics that update one day a week or are prone to schedule slip of weeks or months and you can have a seriously altered reading experience. And my experience as someone who keeps up to date is not at all the same as someone who only reads them once a week. And the person who reads them once a week has a different experience than the person who archive trawls once every couple months.
So, though, what does this do to the definitions? I'd argue that the foreshadowing one is the more frustrating of the two, simply because it does lead to some perfectly good authors being unfairly piled upon by people who can't seem to appreciate that form alters their perceptions.
The cliffhanger aspect is a bit harder to pin down. Wm argues the relativity aspect matters. As episodic shows can end on cliffhangers. Did every episode of Code Geass count as a cliffhanger? When it was aired? When it's on DVD? What is the minimal definition of a cliff hanger? I'd like to think that it's a complete narrative element. Therefore yes to episodes, yes to chapters/issues in a comic. Wm does extend that out to pages. But, what about book chapters? Now Mockingjay, book two of the Hunger Games, ends on a cliffhanger. But what about the individual chapters within the book that can be just as intense? To get ridiculous, if the pages in a comic can be individual cliffhangers why aren't book pages. Assuming you could get someone to typeset a book so every page ended in the end of a sentence, well, you could stretch that to be defined as a complete narrative element. And if presentation is all and intent matters not a whit, well what if I am forced to stop reading in the middle of an intense passage, is this a cliffhanger? I really want to find out what happens next, but does the definition move?
Maybe? How the internet changes the way we process information is an interesting question that many people are trying to answer, and/or are panicking over. (Like the librarian who got all shirty when I asked her to cite why she thought that e-books were a problem and if she thought that e-journals were impeding research. "Just a feeling I have!") With several plots in several different comics exploding with IMPORTANT PLOT POINTS all over the place it seemed like a good time to point it out.
Of course, most librarians are just noticing the value of the graphic novel AT ALL, webcomics would probably make their head asplode.
D: I'm just saying that you have to have some minimum definition of a cliffhanger.
W: No you don't, it depends on presentation.
D: But the author doesn't intend -
W: That doesn't matter.
D: You're not usually all "death of the author" in your literary theories.
W: I what? I just don't care!
And you probably won't either but I'd like to talk about webcomics.
I love webcomics. I want to write a webcomic. The old fashioned serial where we eagerly wait for the next installment has found new life on the internet. New, frustrated, constantly cliffhangered life.
Cliffhangers are the first problem. See, one of my favorite series is Gunnerkrigg Court, which updates three days a week. Regularly you get people complaining about a page ending on a cliffhanger, especially a page that updates on Friday. They complain about this every day during quick moments of plotting. Even daily strips can fall into this when it's during an intense moment such as the recent breakup series in Questionable Content.
But if these pages were read one month later, instead of all of them being cliffhangers, suddenly none of them are! This wouldn't be worth mentioning if from time to time forum morons wouldn't lament that cliffhangers are cheap narrative devices.
Well, now that's a problem. A page can only be so long, and if it logically ends at a certain point, it ends. In a fight scene full of twists and turns and one person getting the upper hand, in a chapter where we reveal several big secrets, yeah it's fully natural for each page to end on a high moment of tension. Not that legit intentional cliffhangers don't exist, they do, but every page?
Another element that's getting a hard knock from the method of updating is foreshadowing. Because the nature of updates forces one's reading speed to be very slow if you're reading as updated it gives people a lot of time to digest and analyze material. It also gives people a lot of time to discuss material and compare theories. This, inevitably, leads some people to guess the correct way the story will turn and can cause the same forum morons to lament that a series is "predictable! How disappointing!" Now, there is a difference between cliche-predictable, and what-foreshadowing-is-supposed-to-do-predictable. You're not supposed to pull stuff out of nowhere, that's Deus Ex Machina, that's an ass-pull. Read at a normal pace these "predictable" turns would be a short jumps in a logical narrative.
Some of this can also lead to people feeling deflated or cheated if they'd convinced themselves that the fan speculation would end up being canon. Currently, the fan favorite theory had been that Antimony was descended from a Phoenix. Now that it's "some sort of fire elemental" people are either disappointed or hanging all their hope on the "I suspect" and maintaining it could still be true.
They do that about stupid things that have been debunked. I'm sure that there are people on the forum who won't be convinced that Anthony Carver is her biological dad unless they show him banging Surma with cutaways to show that fertilization is happening.
...okay that mental image can leave. Moving on-
Bad authors might take this as legit criticism and start pulling all sorts of "twists" that are barely seen or regularly ending pages at illogical points to artificially create the cliffhanger effects. Or go in the other direction and work too hard to make each strip in itself tell a complete story in a series that wasn't started as a joke-a-day format. Add in ultra slow schedule comics that update one day a week or are prone to schedule slip of weeks or months and you can have a seriously altered reading experience. And my experience as someone who keeps up to date is not at all the same as someone who only reads them once a week. And the person who reads them once a week has a different experience than the person who archive trawls once every couple months.
So, though, what does this do to the definitions? I'd argue that the foreshadowing one is the more frustrating of the two, simply because it does lead to some perfectly good authors being unfairly piled upon by people who can't seem to appreciate that form alters their perceptions.
The cliffhanger aspect is a bit harder to pin down. Wm argues the relativity aspect matters. As episodic shows can end on cliffhangers. Did every episode of Code Geass count as a cliffhanger? When it was aired? When it's on DVD? What is the minimal definition of a cliff hanger? I'd like to think that it's a complete narrative element. Therefore yes to episodes, yes to chapters/issues in a comic. Wm does extend that out to pages. But, what about book chapters? Now Mockingjay, book two of the Hunger Games, ends on a cliffhanger. But what about the individual chapters within the book that can be just as intense? To get ridiculous, if the pages in a comic can be individual cliffhangers why aren't book pages. Assuming you could get someone to typeset a book so every page ended in the end of a sentence, well, you could stretch that to be defined as a complete narrative element. And if presentation is all and intent matters not a whit, well what if I am forced to stop reading in the middle of an intense passage, is this a cliffhanger? I really want to find out what happens next, but does the definition move?
Maybe? How the internet changes the way we process information is an interesting question that many people are trying to answer, and/or are panicking over. (Like the librarian who got all shirty when I asked her to cite why she thought that e-books were a problem and if she thought that e-journals were impeding research. "Just a feeling I have!") With several plots in several different comics exploding with IMPORTANT PLOT POINTS all over the place it seemed like a good time to point it out.
Of course, most librarians are just noticing the value of the graphic novel AT ALL, webcomics would probably make their head asplode.