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A project, one day...
I was listening to the lastest podcast of Writing Excuses while on the exercise bike,* where they interviewed the Foglios about writing for webcomics, and that reminded me of a webcomic project I'd love to do one day.
It would be about exploring the possibilities that the web offers, and not in that silly scroll-until-your-RSI-kicks-in way that Scott McCloud suggested however long ago it was. Instead, you'd tell a story, perhaps one or two panels at a time**, and when a character moved offscreen, the reader would have the option of following them and taking up *their* part of the story from there. So you'd have, say, three characters meeting for a scene, then at the end of the scene they'd go their separate ways and the reader could opt for whichever character they wanted to read about, and follow them, and then maybe pick up one of the original characters' storylines later on in the story. (And you could have offshoots - follow a random congoer passing by to the next panel they're going to, frex, although you'd have to have an exit from that branch to get back to the main storylines without running into a dead end. And you could ahve silly little offshoot stories and jokes that way.)
Ideally you wouldn't get the *whole* thing unless you read all of the storylines, and each scene might have a different implication depending on which character you were following at the time.
I think it'd work best if the overall story were set in a pre-defined area, and each storyline developed at about the same pace so that when you stopped following Character X and took off following Character Y for a while and then picked up X again in a later scene, it wouldn't be a big jump. (Although I just realized that you, as writer, control the amount of time passing between panels, so that wouldn't be much of an issue for the reader. Er, I doubt that makes sense to any of you BUT IT DOES TO ME SO THERE.)
I originally wanted to do this in the context of my/![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mothoc/myrialux's late unlamented webcomic Can't Sleep, Con Will Eat Me, and I still think that the setting - that of a con of some ilk - would be a perfect setting for this sort of thing, since it's got natural physical and chronological boundaries, and a set pace through the convention.
Aaargh, now I'm all fired up to find someone to work on this with, as I think it would benefit from more than just me plot-noodling, and I neeeed to be getting ready for AnimeFest instead. Aaargh.
Still, does this sound like a nifty project to you? Questions, comments, thoughts, ideas?
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* Head pain gone. Utter exhaustion still here. Assumed 20 minutes on the bike certainly wouldn't hurt, and might get the fuzzy out of my head. Result: slightly, but no miracles, and I still want another nap.
** Obviously, you'd have more text in the panels than in any comic save Death Note. But as the whole panel would fill the entire browser screen the way I'm envisioning it, this is less of a problem.
It would be about exploring the possibilities that the web offers, and not in that silly scroll-until-your-RSI-kicks-in way that Scott McCloud suggested however long ago it was. Instead, you'd tell a story, perhaps one or two panels at a time**, and when a character moved offscreen, the reader would have the option of following them and taking up *their* part of the story from there. So you'd have, say, three characters meeting for a scene, then at the end of the scene they'd go their separate ways and the reader could opt for whichever character they wanted to read about, and follow them, and then maybe pick up one of the original characters' storylines later on in the story. (And you could have offshoots - follow a random congoer passing by to the next panel they're going to, frex, although you'd have to have an exit from that branch to get back to the main storylines without running into a dead end. And you could ahve silly little offshoot stories and jokes that way.)
Ideally you wouldn't get the *whole* thing unless you read all of the storylines, and each scene might have a different implication depending on which character you were following at the time.
I think it'd work best if the overall story were set in a pre-defined area, and each storyline developed at about the same pace so that when you stopped following Character X and took off following Character Y for a while and then picked up X again in a later scene, it wouldn't be a big jump. (Although I just realized that you, as writer, control the amount of time passing between panels, so that wouldn't be much of an issue for the reader. Er, I doubt that makes sense to any of you BUT IT DOES TO ME SO THERE.)
I originally wanted to do this in the context of my/
mothoc/myrialux's late unlamented webcomic Can't Sleep, Con Will Eat Me, and I still think that the setting - that of a con of some ilk - would be a perfect setting for this sort of thing, since it's got natural physical and chronological boundaries, and a set pace through the convention.Still, does this sound like a nifty project to you? Questions, comments, thoughts, ideas?
---
* Head pain gone. Utter exhaustion still here. Assumed 20 minutes on the bike certainly wouldn't hurt, and might get the fuzzy out of my head. Result: slightly, but no miracles, and I still want another nap.
** Obviously, you'd have more text in the panels than in any comic save Death Note. But as the whole panel would fill the entire browser screen the way I'm envisioning it, this is less of a problem.
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* Because it would be totally awesome to, say, follow the progress of a particular object throughout the con. What immediately springs to mind is the A-Kon where one of the guest liaison staff spent the entire con trying to hunt me down and give me a guest badge that nobody had bothered to tell me I had. Or the Worldcon where a straw hat passed around the con at parties for three days - it was plopped on my head during a party, and I passed it on to someone else on an elevator. And *that* brings to mind an entire branch that is nothing but snippets of things that all occur in one particular elevator.
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Depending on how complex it is, the site map might just have to be lists of the panels in each person/object's storyline, with links to them - trying to draw all the connections between them would be complex.
Maybe also each panel would have a time in the title, so you'd know, if you were the sort of person who liked to get the whole story chronologically, which ones to read and which ones not to read?
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I figure the connections don't need to be mapped out: half the fun is finding them, and the obsessive-compulsive in me freaks out less if I know there is somewhere I can get to everything. Plus, if stuff is mapped out via timeline, there's a better sense of what's connected and not.
Uh, not to make this way too complex....
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A basic table structure could be used to map it out on the, er, map. Which would probably fit with the vague ideas I had of working the story out beforehand, which involve a giant sheet of butcher paper or a large whiteboard and a Sharpie. XD And would probably be replicated on the computer as a spreadsheet.
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You could well construct some kind of mystery plot(s) in/among this, but it would be very hard to live up to the buildup. The ongoing search for the samurai who smells like sunflowers?
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(and I really like the one branch that's all in the elevator, where you get snippets of various stories and conversations and some of them are parts of other storylines in the whole thing, and others you never learn.)
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Lots of bittersweet two-ships-passing opportunities on that elevator. Security camera? Someone stuck on it between floors, never to return?
In-story gaming: cosplay chess!
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...now I'm imagining it as machinima with Church's ghost wandering off somewhere. Though endless pages of empty CGI desert hills would get really old really fast. But it's kinda the same spirit, a la "Let's wander off and mess with this other thing instead of doing what we're supposed to and writing a conventional narrative/playing through this shoot-'em-up game!"
*THERE SHOULD ALSO BE FOOTNOTES
no, I am serious, I love the treasure-hunting-glee of footnote-lit SO MUCH, and there is infinite possibilities for them on the web. One of my favorite works of fanfic/doujinshi and the hands-down-best Inuyasha fic I've read even though incomplete, The Hero in the 21st Century, has entire subplots and swathes of backstory that you never see if you don't click through to the Author's Notes. I very much suggest you poke at it for this project.
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I still have my con setting firmly ensconced in my head*, but the unreality of a con lends itself to playing with reality and identity ... cosplay/masquerade: are you wearing a costume or a character? Follow one branch, you're utterly mundane and simply attending a con, follow another and ... are you LARPing? Are we watching what the audience is watching somewhere? Or is it something happening here? And then
shades of DWJ's Deep Secret,there's the nature of the hotel and the convention itself.**(I also tend to do humor naturally and tend towards that. Er, were you online when I posted my Bleachfic?)
* Put there during the webcomic run, but its depths have not yet been plumbed, oh no...
** Teresa Nielsen Hayden asked, when I was going to dinner with her and PNH at the CoNDFW they attended, where all hotels bought that hideous carpet. And she was right - the most hideous carpet in the world is in hotel corridors.
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Also con crud medical mysteries! The ever-widening circles of WisCon-attendees on my flist vomiting their guts out at home made me go "Wow, I am glad this was not tuberculosis..."
(The mockumentary Bleachfic? AWESOME.)
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(If you ahve more ideas, post away. I'm crashing so as to get as much sleep as possible to keep the dreaded migraine away! Will blather on more tomorrow!)
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Gonna be at AFest as usual? I'm hoping I get a good table in the downstairs bazaar, but if my A-Kon luck holds, it'll be awful. ;_;
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I hope your table arrangement works out!
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Fingers and toes crossed! XD
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It does sound like a cool idea, though.
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Which would be why I'm gathering other people. If it were me alone, I'd obsess on it for a week or two, then stop. But if I gather enough people interested and get the project started, it can gain enough forward momentum to keep going. (Note that's what happened with the 3ish years I spent on Can't Sleep, and the 4-years-plus on Project Blue Rose, and the reason the Bishounen Battle cards project is currently stalled is that I got people *interested* in the concept, but nobody volunteered to *do* anything.)
The way I'm envisioning it anyway, the drawing wouldn't happen until the majority had been plotted out and scripted, and by then I'd have recruited a few artists. :D I'm less concerned with artistic consistency than with making everything simplified so that characters are recognizable no matter who's drawing them.
ETA: And it may implode under its own weight, or run out of steam and die gently, but I don't think that means I shouldn't try.