Jamie Smart’s longform webcomic Corporate Skull kicked off in high style: with cavemen, shit suicides and the splatteriest photocopier incident of the year. It’s been getting progressively more mental and looks like it’s going to get even better. I’ve been enjoying it so much I felt compelled to draw my first bit of fanart for absolutely ages.
The screen is a less than ideal method of reading long comics, at least not with the same storytelling techniques that work on slices of dead tree: reload times, publication schedule, resolution, glare and aspect ratio are the big ones, but there are solutions. (Usually ones considered before the page’s creation - I recently read a bunch of comics that were put on the web after print and the reading experience was pretty awkward.) Jamie’s solutions are actually pretty simple/elegant - with the most glaring one being to make every page brilliant. Look at this or this, each builds the overall narrative forward but also delivers a self contained experience.
I suspect at least part of this comes from working on the Dandy (enjoying his Desperate Dan more than I enjoyed Desperate Dan when I was the right age to enjoy Desperate Dan is actually how I stumbled across him). For someone who can harness the power of ludicrous violence and improbable swearwords, he works magnificently on sweet, funny kids stuff. At a bookfair earlier in the year it was great seeing a crowd of kids clustered around Find Chaffy and thinking “hah, this is the same guy who drew Bear.”
The Dandy and Beano seem to be an undermentioned influence in British comics. I get why everybody raves about 2000AD, but having a pair of widely-available anthology comics introducing youngsters to comics with unruly kids, humour, characters as iconic as any American hero and dense storytelling (1 or 2 pages to get everything done), is surely pretty significant. Corporate Skull operates with an awareness of what a single page is capable of, so every update is worth reading. Of course, there are other ways of making webcomics work one page at a time…
