The Difference Between Digital Comics and Print

Thanks to The Comic Journal's Journalista for the link.

Balak from DeviantArt creates a brilliant webcomic to show the differences between digital comics and print comics. It is seriously brilliant.

Scott McCloud has created some brilliant webcomics, of course. But he's showing off things that are easy online, but difficult or impossible to print. Small bits of animation, or panels that would be 4 inches by 60 inches in print.

What Balak has done is stuff that could be printed, but would be a horrible comic book in print. He's showing things that work better online than they do on paper.

If an art student showed me a printed comic of this stuff, I'd point out what would seem to be basic storytelling mistakes. But because it's online clickables on a single page, not multiple pages, it works beautifully. It shows the difference in medium in a way that McCloud's comics never hinted at.

It takes on some of the virtues of animation, without actually using animation. It's worth reading for the theoretical experiments, but it's also just damn readable. Click the link.