Sequential Art Variety

The interesting comments that followed my xkcd post offer opportunities for exploration I want to pursue. But first a bit more about stickman art.

I didn't come out and say it, arousing suspicion among some observers that I am hostile to xkcd, but I think Stickman art is a valid way to cartoon. Here's why:

In junior high, I was friends with a freckle-faced thug from Texas who drew poorly but enjoyed doing comics and loved to laugh.

When I was with him, I copied his stickman style, and we were occasionally bounced out of class for giggling and inattention.

We drew stickman comics, about 20 panels per page, and discovered what worked in the format: stickmen being crushed by rolling boulders, flying out of ferris wheels, and tumbling off cliffs. The simple, iconic forms of boulders and cliffs match stickman design.

Comics are hard to do well. They require multiple talents, especially if you are managing a webcomic site. To Comicdom's credit, I don't see people harassing sequential art that uses oddball forms. We've got comics using action figures, Legos, 3D graphics, My Little Ponies, photographs, static art, instant messaging exchanges, vintage ephemera, Star Wars toys and many more. Some of them are sitting ducks -- literally -- for the little Hitlers trying to gain attention by denouncing "bad" comics, but they somehow avoid attack.

We're all in touch with the sequential art concept, and we see the ignorance of people who shout, "Those aren't comics!" Maybe to that person they're not, but when you start defining people as non-participants, it diminishes us all. One place where there has been solidarity in what we pass off as a community is in our tolerant admissions policy.

Besides, some of those comics are good. Setting aside xkcd, on which I have an unsettled opinion, I've gotten big laughs from Irregular Webcomic, Cyanide and Happiness and Married to the Sea. Those are larger titles, and I wish I could say I've recently read an entertaining little Play-Doh comic, but to date, I have not explored that deeply. My reading list is huge, and I am always behind, and yes, I do feel bad.

Irregular Webcomic, by David Morgan-Mar

Discussing the quality of an untraditional sequential art comic, we can compare it to other types of comics as long as we remember those forms have restrictions that are different from pen-and-ink. Stickmen don't inflate well, which is why I am critical of the head shots in xkcd. The format doesn't move that way, and they puncture the suspension of disbelief. I get cross when my disbelief won't suspend.

One of my favorite comics, Ugly Girl , is about teenagers whose names and faces reflect their social status. It started out very stickman, but as the artist, Nanda, found her way, the characters fleshed out (intended meaning of that tired phrase) and got colorful wardrobes. I don't think the stickman form could have carried the story that evolved. It is, to me, a beautiful strip, without pretension, but you can still see stickman genetics in the heads and faces. This is not to slight the potential of the stickman form, which is currently serving some titles quite well. It's just, how do you draw a stickman called "Fatty?"

Some of the workarounds in more conventional styles are so well known as to be unremarkable. Consider the overhead floating light bulb, signifying a brainstorm (or, *ahem*, this blog), or icicles on a word balloon indicating a frosty tone. To master our styles, we must be ready with workarounds if we push the limits, or the effectiveness of the comic is degraded. I hope occasionally posting and critiquing specimens is a way for us all to detect those limits, trade ideas and invent solutions.


My apologies that I couldn't squeeze in more unorthodox comics. I know you are often neglected in webcomic media, and I look forward to revisiting this topic.

And now is as good a time as any. Just as I was going to post, I discovered a new static art comic, and I'm absolutely bursting because I figured out it was static from only reading one episode. Can you guess why? It's Chocolate Shoes , and if you don't know the term, Dinosaur Comics is static art -- it never changes from episode to episode.

Testers wanted

Meanwhile, may I remind readers that we have a product demo for you to try out on last Friday's post, the Kidjutsu Comic Reader . Brian from Kidjutsu , the free webcomic site for kids, agrees with me that we have some good minds passing through here (on their way to the free buffet), and he'd be grateful for as many honest comments and opinions as he can get. Only takes a minute or two, unless you become absorbed in the Scratchin Post cartoon loaded on the reader (it's a Kidjutsu participating title) or you have a lot to say. Thanks for supporting some comic site R & D. (See the comments for heaps more detail.)

The Open Directory Project: C-L-O-S-E-D

People with new web sites are advised to get listed in the Open Directory Project. It's striving to be the largest human-edited directory on the web. A listing provides a very high ranking link that increases the prominence of your site, and it's free, unlike the Yahoo Directory.

Here are my own results.

I started submitting sites last winter. Usually, I was careful to only submit one site at a time, as instructed. I may have violated this once.

I compared my sites to existing sites in the webcomics categories. I did not see a quality or archive size issue.

Over the next ten months, I submitted a total of six times. My sites never appeared in the directory, and I never received a reaction. Attempts to inquire were thwarted by emails that bounced back.

I saw little or no change in the directory's comics listings during that time.

The directory is filled with invitations to become a volunteer editor. Figuring this would put me in touch with someone, and that they probably lacked help in comics, I applied. Ten minutes later I received an email telling me that they had more editors in comics than they need, and requesting I apply for another topic.

That's not likely.

Because I manage a webcomics list, I am pretty familiar with most active webcomic titles, plus lots that have dropped away.

The Open Directory Listing for online comics is filled with unfamiliar titles. Unfamiliar, because they're dead, and have been for years.

A few sites aren't exactly dead. The comic is, but there are links to a blog that has updated within a few months of now. They're not about comics.

In the "D" section, picked at random, are about 65 titles. I should recognize at least half, but only spotted about six I know to be active.

All those comics editors -- what can they be doing?

Usually non-pathological human behavior that defies easy explanation traces back to incompetence. It's a polite way of saying the people in charge are unable to meet even the most basic requirements of their assignments.

Or, were this project honest enough to require people to sign their real name to editing actions, we might discover that webcomic empires built not on quality but on early arrival, fearing competition, have stacked the deck by squatting in editor positions. That seems far-fetched to me, but the roster of approved comics contains names of people who have been caught executing similar hi-jinks. Once caught, always a suspect. Multiple times caught, well hello. With one exception, the people I think of first as possibly being capable of such a scheme are present on the roster. (I don't report most of the stories of human weakness that reach me, because I'm really here to write about comics, not duke it out with some comics demagogue's born yesterday fanboy brigade.)

Wikipedia's comments on the topic lacks attribution: "There have long been allegations that volunteer ODP editors give favorable treatment to their own websites while concomitantly thwarting the good faith efforts of their competition." The site, owned by AOL, has experienced some documented issues in the past.

I'm all for archiving comics of the past, but linking to them is a sorry way to do it, because it requires somebody to keep paying the comic's hosting bill. Offering a comics directory should also give users current titles (vastly underrepresented) and some sorting of dead links. I could whip that list into order in a month, part-time. I would like to know who and what is staffing this department, and who is over-seeing it, because if the rest of the Open Directory Project is in similar disrepair, it's a lost cause.

Roughly Every 3rd Link is a Dud Like These

Legend Knights - dead over 4 years

Demonic Boppu - dead since '06

Otaku Life  - dead for years

I encourage everyone to submit their comics today (takes about two minutes.) As is so common, the less there is at stake, the more tenaciously people protect their turf, so please share any outcomes.

Here is direct submission to the directory. You'll be entering your comic, URL, brief description, email, Captcha code and agreeing to terms. That's it. Make a note of your submission, and check it every 3-4 weeks. I'd like to know if anyone gets in.

Navigate in from ARTS at dmoz.com if you want to list a comics site that is not a comic, and you need the right section.

Note: I accidentally published this several hours early, so I'm just going to leave it.

Webcomic Title Tags, Made Simple

Been away a few days? Kindly check out this post , where you will be asked your opinion about a web site product created by Brian, one of our colleagues. Your opinion, good, bad or mixed, is greatly appreciated.


Experts say the top three factors affecting your site in search are text content, title tags and links to your site.

Accessing title tags varies from platform to platform, so I'll simply explain why they matter and what to do with them. You should have no problem Googling up a tutorial on accessing and modifying them in any major system.

A few years back, Google relied on keywords to know what a site is about. Soon every site was stuffed with highly popular keywords, and differentiating sites became difficult. You may remember the year Google's results were often bad. So does Google.

Now, though the word "keywords" is often used to describe words used strategically in tags and text, actual keywords are a thing of the past for major search engines.

When choosing your strategic keywords, you want to choose words that describe your comic site. But you also want to be conscious of how distinctive those keywords are. Popular words will do little to advance your site. A mix of popular and specific-but-rare- word, in phrases, is often a good strategy. I plan to write more about keywords soon.

Good search position isn't just about luring the curious to your site when they see it pop up in results for a similar topic. It's about making it easy for readers who don't bookmark to find you again, and it communicates information about other things on your site that might interest people.

Good search position plus submitting a site map to the search engines is key to earning "sitelinks," those small indexes you see below some search results detailing the site's contents. I'll be covering all these topics, but you don't have to wait for me: there is plentiful information on the web. I try to test everything and simplify things that are poorly described, but most of my facts come from studying many web sites. Luckily, we have a few search and site optimization people among our readership, and they advice me of any errors.

In some cases, it is difficult for a search engine to tell what a site is about, so we give pages titles via the title tag. The maximum number of characters allowed in this tag is 70.

The title tag is different from your page name and does not affect the address of the page. The text for a decent title tag might look like one of these:

Exactoman Comics | Slice and Dice

Slice and Dice | Exactoman Comic 33

The beginning words get more emphasis, so choose your first word with that in mind. Title tags should be different on every page, so adding a page number allows recycling if you are not going to get alter word choices. Whether to put the name of the adventure or the comic or something else depends on what people are most likely looking for. You can mix it up if you like, and check to see what pages show up in search after several days. If you have chosen a fine title tag but your search results place your comic at number 37, it's time to think about optimizing other areas, like text.

Other titles this comic might use:

Exactoman | Home

Exactoman | Webcomic Home

Exactoman Comic | Home

The vertical bar is considered more polished by many. It's called a pipe, and hides on many keyboards below the delete key.

A long string of titles with only the page name changing isn't going to help anybody much, so you might get creative with some semi-general descriptions: Hero Battles Dragon, Vigilante Attacks Crime Boss and so on. These may not be red hot search terms, but they may land some traffic while not competing with more important pages.

You may have noticed that many blogging systems, such as Blogger, have a box for a post's title and another for some descriptive words, underneath the post. Those are the equivalents of title and meta description (which we're not covering today) for web sites.

Again, for best results, don't overstuff a tag with words. I accidentally did that to one page, and it dropped fifty search positions.

There is more information about webcomic optimization at Psychedelic Treehouse: Webcomic Tools: Optimization and Psychedelic Treehouse: Webcomic Site Design and Kez's article, Improving Webcomic SEO . If your site has a CMS requiring tag formatting and you need help with that, check out the link going to Kez.

One last note: Title tags appear at the top of many browsers when people visit your site, so don't put anything in that isn't public or professional. Tags may also appear in search engine results.

 Subscribe in a reader

An xkcd Critique

The nice thing about famous comics is you can critique them without much fear that you are squelching someone's fragile dream.

Here is a recent episode of xkcd. I'd like to share what I see when I read it, to see how eccentric I am, or you are.

Read it twice, if you would. I decided to select the latest comic for this analysis without rifling the archive, so we'll work with what we have.

The goal is to constructively criticize, not worrying about the episode's merits, of which the improbably redemption of Rick Astley is one.


The problem for me is this is a gimmick comic. It's built around some internet pop culture, and presents itself as a humorous comic strip.

It's not unfunny, but when you care about comics deeply you tend to linger over them and see what makes them work, and this comic lacks substance for that.

• There is no explanation for the motives of the prankster. Maybe that's the sarcasm promised in the masthead, but then, I haven't seen much "advanced mathematics" either. (Perhaps the sarcasm comes during the jibe at liberal arts majors, but ironically, what this comic needs is an immersion in liberal arts)
• The prankster disappears from the story immediately
• In the central frame, the girl appears twice, but is not so well rendered that we all recognize her instantly
• The limits of stick figures are especially apparent in the second figure of her, in which she lacks the arm length for a proper freak out pose. They also appear in the final frames, where close-ups lack faces. The face is the most concentrated pallet. When it is featureless, depth is sacrificed.
• The dramatic sequence is wrong in the last three. No one dons shades to speak to someone. The proper cartoon universe unfolding (again, limited in stick work) is Rick Astley arrives in sunglasses, and his eyes peer out over the frames in the last panel.

These execution defects, while distracting, are not fatal. What leaves me queasy after too many cartoons like this, is that it's soulless and ephemeral. It's laughing gas, without the comic equivalent of literary merit.

I tend to think that comics like this are widely read because comics are not widely respected in English-speaking countries. For the same reason that Maus got a "special" Pulitzer, comics are regarded as a demeaned medium associated with young, dumb people. Frivolous. Throwaway. Unable to withstand deeper analysis. I would enjoy a chance to compare xkcd's circulation with thoughtful, popular comics in countries where comics are accorded more respect. It would be interesting to see if there was a difference, wouldn't it?

Titles that serve as the Lite Beer of comics bug me a little, though it's tempered by the enjoyment I know they produce for people who seek a laugh without commitment. It's like gaming: people stop video games when they are able to occupy their minds more enjoyably than the distraction they get from games. In pop culture, it's called getting a life.

I looked at this comic again. I can feel it: somewhere, the author scours the internet for a gimmick to work into a cartoon. I find this depressing, because it's much less pleasant than thinking up the ideas yourself.

Got an alternate take? Comment away. And may I remind readers that the previous post about Kidjutsu features an invitation to demo a new tool without leaving or spending much time. The creator of the tool is greatly interested in feedback, and shares my observation that people visiting this site tend to be thoughtful and sharp. Thanks for taking a couple of minutes to share your opinion.

 Subscribe in a reader

Kidjutsu's Comic Reader

Besides its home page, our comic Scratchin Post appears in Kidjutsu , a website where kids can read comics online for free. There are over 100 titles participating, including Dreadnought: Invasion Six , Inverloch and Wings of Nibonet. 


Kidjutsu has developed an impressive Flash reader for comics. I'm asking readers to sample it by clicking on  Scratchin Post catalog one, below. (It will open in full screen mode. Use ESC to close it.) Kidjutsu is interested in hearing reactions, because making the reader available to webcomics at large is under consideration.


If you could use comments to reflect on whether an embeddable reader like this would be useful to you and your readers, and would be something you would be interested in putting on your web site, that would be awesome. I'm sure sincere comments are desired, so don't feel pressure to report a particular way.


You needn't read the stories to experience the speed of the reader. In fact, you can be in, out, and commented in a couple of minutes. Feel free to post questions, too. I turned off the Captcha letter scramble to make commenting easy.


Thanks for helping out. It's great to be able to tap the expertise of our readership for a worthy cause and product analysis.

Powered by Kidjutsu

Cartoons Vs. Comics

You're a cartoonist, but you make comics. You're a comicker, but you make cartoons. Wait -- animators make cartoons. Toothpaste for Dinner is a comic, but there are cartoons like it in the New Yorker. Leonardo DaVinci made cartoons, but never comics.  What's going on?

The first meaning of "cartoon" was a preliminary drawing made prior to starting a painting (or stained glass or tapestry). It jumped meanings upon the appearance of newspapers and magazines, where it was used to refer to humorous illustrations. These were single panels accompanied by captions, not word balloons.

"Comics" comes from the same Greek word as "comedy." As the comic strip as we know it developed in newspapers, the form was distinguished by word balloons, sequential narrative and emphasis on the image. Newspaper comics were bundled in magazine form, giving us "comic books."

Early attempts at animation date to cave paintings sometimes feature animals with extra legs, to simulate running. The zoetrope and praxinoscope were fancy approximations of the flip book effect, but no one would truly achieve animation until film.

In the studio, the artists recruited to draw the animation cells apparently adopted "cartoon" as their word for the drawings, and it spread to include the films themselves. Soon, cartoon meant film animations as well as single panel, captioned gags printed in periodicals, and comics meant newspaper strips and comic books, which were mostly humor when they started.

That rather arbitrary demarcation would be survivable if cartoonists didn't draw comics.

The limited search data I've seen shows "cartoonist" about twice as frequent as "comic," with end destinations that suggest people who type "cartoon" are often uncertain what they want, unless it's Cartoon Network. "Cartoon" may be a lowbrow term for comics the way some people calls magazines "books."

"Comicker" and "webcomicker" are slowly gaining traction but I wouldn't expect them to appear on resumes any time soon.

I've done as I always do when confusion reigns: I found something I can decide on, and I made a decision. Hence, my use of "webcomic," not "web comic."

 Subscribe in a reader

Webcomics 1.0

Ever think of ending the year with a "top comics" list? Better yet, ever wonder what such a list will look like in ten years?

I not sure how old this one is, since it's been programmed to display today's date. At least five years, since one of the titles stopped updating that long ago.

And what a trip it is. Visits to locations like Tripod and GeoCities, Web 1.0 design and a slew of comics that seem out of a time capsule-- plus Superosity, now a decade old. One comic shares the site with the 1971 Sears Catalog, a garage sale find presented for its quaintness. The author didn't anticipate that today there are people looking at her site that way.

Some of them are still going! Jenny and her backpack fill the holes left by some that died, but some updated yesterday. They all have the 12K modem awareness that led to most of them being tiny by current standards. I usually have to dive deep to find older comics I've not heard of, but I don't recognize most of these, and people are still making some of them.

Check out this one about Y2K. It turns out they were right all along, it just didn't happen until this summer when the economy refused to reboot:

Click to see all four frames. It defied being resized.

I'd be interested to hear if these are more familiar to you than to me, and whether you have encountered their authors on the web.

Also, Happy New Year to all readers and to your favorite characters as well.