[HN Gopher] Toward a Digital Comics Praxis
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Toward a Digital Comics Praxis
Author : solarized
Score : 36 points
Date : 2023-02-15 06:29 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (digitalcomics.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (digitalcomics.co)
| 97-109-107 wrote:
| I'm not a comic reader, but if anyone's interesting in the
| related media-theory, these two popular books should prove
| relevant:
|
| - [scottmccloud.com - Understanding
| Comics](https://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/)
|
| - [Ways of Seeing -
| Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_of_Seeing)
| chrisweekly wrote:
| See also (or first!) this closely related, amazing work,
| "Unflattening", by Nick Sousanis:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unflattening
|
| https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674744431&c...
| staticman2 wrote:
| How long will a comic designed with modern web standards continue
| to be viewable in web browsers if the creator dies or abandons
| it?
|
| A lot of experimental comics from two decades ago (some of which
| were designed based on Flash or internet explorer features) won't
| load properly today.
| syntheweave wrote:
| It's not really actionable for most comics makers, because there
| isn't a standard toolchain to point to, other than "learn web
| technologies, mash them into shape, pray it doesn't break".
| Splitting up the comic into various assets for panel layouts,
| lettering, etc all comes at a cost in terms of software
| dependencies.
|
| The advantage of sticking to a traditional "plain image" with
| scrolling or pages is that the information is consistent, easy to
| parse, and robust to technical changes. The work of reformatting
| can be delegated to a sufficiently smart client app. We have OCR,
| we can definitely build a panel recognizer.
| mftb wrote:
| So I need to give this a more thorough read. I'm pretty into
| comics and related media, but looking at the PoC it presents, I
| don't understand why it's so janky on first view, nor why it
| thinks it's good to require both scrolling and pagination (it's
| not). On the other hand, it eschews all animation which is good.
| So I don't know, maybe it's not so far off, from a future web-
| based presentation.
|
| Side note - For anyone interested in legacy comics stored in
| cbz/cbr files, I recently published my desktop (native, no
| electron) viewing application [0]. It's free and open source.
|
| [0]https://github.com/mftb0/cbxv-gotk3
| gabereiser wrote:
| The font choice makes it really difficult to read on my screen.
| The letters are extremely thin.
| dym_sh wrote:
| this website was made during the ipad-pro/retina gold-rush of
| apple fame, low'ish contrast is another symptom
|
| since when, even mac fanboys started to pay way more attention
| to general accessibility, now that Johnny Ive is no longer a
| default idol
| causi wrote:
| Complaining about bad formatting choices and other problems not
| related to the content is technically against the HN
| guidelines, which is why you're probably going to get downvoted
| a lot. I wish it weren't, though. If I ever write something
| good enough to hit the HN front page I'm going to change the
| font to alternating papyrus and comic sans and put auto-playing
| music in the background to see just how dedicated people are to
| this ideal of not mentioning when an article is a godawful
| reading experience.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Worse: the front page/ToC is not compatible with Reader mode.
|
| Luckily, all the rest of it is.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Not all artwork lends itself to being represented by vectors, so
| that's a challenge. I'm also not sure every artist wants their
| compositions to change depending on the device. At least not all
| the time. And it seems like it'd be a lot of work to try to keep
| the focus on the right parts of the panel and represent
| transitions between panels and pages in a controlled way.
|
| I understand that digitally distributed comics present these
| challenges and tradeoffs, and that they're probably worth it for
| many people. I've never had a better comics reading experience
| than just a printed trade paperback collection. Harumph.
| toto444 wrote:
| I am creating a fully digital comic in HTML & CSS only. Even the
| illustrations are CSS generated pixel art. In case someone's
| interested you can find it here :
| https://drdru.github.io/twc/twc_save_aryn/02_on_the_way_to_k... .
| hummus_bae wrote:
| That's really neat! I've been looking for inspiration for a
| design idea like this, but CSS animation + images can get
| clunky. How are you handling transitions between "pages"?
| toto444 wrote:
| Thanks. Right now it's all static. To go from one page to the
| other you can click Ci and Qian . It would be easy to move
| the characters within the images using a bit of javascript.
| That's a plan I have for the future.
|
| If you need inspiration you can take a look at this as well
| made using REXPaint. https://preview.redd.it/vxfohcwxywt71.pn
| g?width=1458&format=...
|
| It's all ASCII art so in theory one should be able to convert
| it to HTML. I have a project to make a story using REXPaint
| to HTML in a near future.
|
| If you need more info, feel free to contat me raising an
| issue on github.
| dym_sh wrote:
| should ~~designers~~ comic artists (learn to) code?
|
| not before instagram starts accepting SVG uploads
| LegitShady wrote:
| If you aren't big enough to have a working staff, you should
| learn everything you can that doesn't take up time you could
| spend doing the thing that makes you money.
|
| If you're big enough to have staff, someone else should be
| doing the code so the artist can focus on the thing that makes
| you money.
|
| So basically "only if you have to" and people generally don't
| have to.
| car wrote:
| Pre-web a German comic artist used an Atari ST to draw and render
| comics.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/atarist/comments/xgs4rh/comicbook_c...
| CharlesW wrote:
| Also, _Shatter_ was an amazing milestone at the time:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_(digital_comic)
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(page generated 2023-02-15 23:02 UTC)