Crossing A Line

Back when Soup was first starting, one of the first other webcomics to link to it was Rogues of Clwyd Rhan. I don't recall whether I took the initiative in contacting Reinder Dijkhuis, the creator of ROCR, or whether he found out about Soup by some other means--though the former is much more likely to have been the case--but he remarked to me (though I'm paraphrasing since I can't find the e-mail in question, which makes me think maybe the remark was on a message board or something and not in an e-mail at all) that, while it didn't seem to him that I was quite there yet, the strip had potential. At the time, the bit about being "not quite there yet" bothered me, but in retrospect he was completely right; my art now is far better than it was than when I was starting out, and I don't think I'm still really "there yet". Anyway, he didn't put a permanent link to Soup on the ROCR front page (it would have been astonishing if he had; Soup was just starting out, and his front-page links were limited to half a dozen comics), but he did give it a spotlight. This was something he was doing at the time: spotlighting a different comic a week at the bottom of his page. He assured me that even after it rotated off the index page, the spotlight for--and the link to--Soup would still be there in the archives.

Which, of course, didn't turn out to be the case--impermanence is a frequent feature of the web. Not that Reinder Dijkhuis intentionally removed the link, but when he redesigned his site the spotlight feature didn't survive the renovation. Which is entirely understandable, and I don't blame him for not anticipating the redesign back when he first communicated with me, or for not going out of his way to carry over the spotlights into the archives on the renovated site. Such is the way of the web.

It did, however, make me feel less guilty about removing the link to ROCR from the Soup site.

In the earliest version of the Soup links page--you can still see it here in all its regurgitory glory; it's no longer linked to from the main site, but I didn't actually delete it--, I linked to every fantasy webcomic I could find. And, for good measure, any webcomic that ever mentioned role-playing games, even though Soup had nothing to do with role-playing games itself. (Actually, I did exclude "furry" fantasy strips, but in retrospect there was absolutely no good reason for that; it's not like there were enough of them that they would have drastically inflated the links page. In fact, offhand the only one I know of that existed at the time was Fight Cast Or Evade, though it's possible there are others I'm forgetting.) Anyway, as a fantasy strip, Rogues of Clywd Rhan, naturally, was included on my links page.

The links page went unupdated for far longer than it should have. (Of course, the same could be said, to a slightly lesser degree, of the entire site at various points in time.) But when in mid-to-late 2005 I finally got around to giving the entire page a much-needed overhaul (which involved, among many other things, getting rid of the hideous background it had had before--clam chowder does not photograph well!), I redid the Links page as well. It was by this time, of course, no longer remotely realistic to try to link to every fantasy webcomic I could find (let alone any that mentioned RPGs); there were orders of magnitude more webcomics around than when Soup had launched, and though fantasy webcomics still made up only a relatively small minority, webcomics were numerous enough that even that small minority meant an awful lot. (I did try to seek out fantasy comics in non-standard settings--but I could only find two. Neither of which, I notice, skimming that earlier post I just linked to, actually did end up making their way to my Links page. Hm...maybe I should rectify that.) I was pickier about the comics I linked to--well, pickier in that I didn't link to all the fantasy comics, although I let myself also link to comics I liked that didn't fit my earlier criteria. But anyway, a lot of the comics I had earlier linked to didn't make it to the new page. Some of them were (and are) dead (such as Dragon Blues (no link, obviously, 'cause it's dead, though I just found a website by an illustrator who has the same name as its cartoonist and may (or may not) be the same person), the protagonist of which had a costume remarkably similar to the champion's in Soup--although I have no doubt the similarity is completely coincidental), but others were removed, well, just because I didn't like them as well as some of the strips that stayed on the links page.

The primary reason that ROCR was removed? Because I was put off by all the nudity.

Well, since then, I've decided, um, to be a little less prudish. And as of earlier this week, ROCR is back on the Links page. (Which is still in serious need of some reformatting and "prettying up", but anyway.)

And I've just read all through the archives--having left off previously in late 2001. (In fact, I think it may have been at this strip that I'd stopped reading, given the rather blatant nudity there...)

All of that is just a preamble to what I actually wanted to write this entry about, which has nothing at all to do with nudity and very little to do with ROCR. So, uh, I guess I should probably get to the real subject of the entry, shouldn't I?

So, anyway, like I said, I've just read through all the archives, and it's a good strip. (And by stopping where I did, I just missed out on the introduction in early 2002 of what would become my favorite character.) But there's one thing that bothers me. Reinder Dijkhuis is a bit too fond (for my tastes) of participating in big crossovers.

Oh, not that he's alone in that. There are a lot of webcartoonists who participate in big crossovers--by definition; they wouldn't be big crossovers if there weren't. But I've never liked them. Even crossovers between two strips bother me, if they're the kind that alternates between the two strips--which they almost always are. It's not that I don't like characters crossing over between strips; that's just fine, if it's handled right. I just don't like having to go between two different comics to follow the storyline. Even if they're set up so you can follow links on the pages directly to read all the strips in sequence, or even if they're all collected on one page--it still bothers me. It strikes me as jarring.

(And that's not the only way to do a crossover! See, for example, the weeklong crossover between Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly back in 1999. There's no alternating of comics here; one character from each comic visits the other comic, and there are parallel storylines going on in both comics that don't rely on each other and can be read independently. I'm not a huge Sluggy Freelance fan (though I admit I do read it), and I don't read User Friendly (though I did briefly back around the turn of the millennium when there were much fewer webcomics around), but if you're going to do a crossover, I really think this is the way to do it. Don't force the reader to read both comics to keep up with the story; design it so it still makes sense even if he only reads one of the comics involved.

But that kind of crossover is all too rare (as witnessed by the fact that the only example I could come up with offhand was one more than seven years ago from strips one of which I don't even read). Far more common are the crossovers of the kind of previously mentioned, those where the strips alternate between comics--or, if one comic updates more often than the other, switch between comics on a more complex schedule. And these crossovers are really, really annoying!!! Well, to me, anyway.

Alas, ROCR has participated in all too many of those kinds of crossovers. In fact...it's in the middle of one right now! Urgh. This one involves (among others) something called CameoComic. What's CameoComic? Well...let's see:

"It's going to be one of the largest, if not the largest crossover event in all webcomics history...this'll be a continuous journey through the world of webcomics, drawn by everyone as we cross over with them."

Urgh. Okay, first of all, largest crossover event in history? I doubt it. They'll have a heck of a time beating Damonk's Framed Great Escape. That event, in the words of a Comixpedia article, "involved numerous crossovers and cameos throughout dozens of webcomics." Wait--Only dozens? Huh. Seeing the actual numbers involved, I'm thinking its place isn't quite as secure as I thought it was. Maybe CameoComic has a shot at surpassing it after all.

But the more important question is: why would they want to?

Take a look, if you haven't already (and if you're not already familiar with the matter--though actually anyone reading this who cares probably is already familiar with it), at the "Framed Great Escape" link two paragraphs up. What the hey--I'll even give you the link again here. What you will see is not a mega-crossover involving characters from dozens of comics. What you will see is an explanation of why the crossover is missing from the archives. To summarize, it was lost during a site meltdown, and in any case many of the sites that once hosted strips that were involved no longer exist.

Now, suppose CameoComic does manage to surpass the Framed! Great Escape in number of comics involved. How many of those comics are going to be around in a year? In five years? Isn't it likely CameoComic is destined, as some contributing comics vanish from the web, to become a morass of broken links and disconnected, meaningless vignettes?

Admittedly, on the Framed Great Escape page, Damonk says he still has copies of all the comics involved, and that he'll get the Great Escape back in position in the archives within the next few months. Or, that is, he apparently said that back in October 2004, so I guess it's been more than a few months now--but given how many times I've said I was going to update my webcomic "late tonight" or "tomorrow morning" and failed to do so, I can't be too critical of Damonk for that. Anyway, the point is that, even if Damonk hasn't yet gotten around to rebuilding the Great Escape archive, it's certainly possible to keep local copies of the strips involved in a crossover event, and still have a coherent archive even if the contributing comics disappear.

It's possible to do that, yes. But it just isn't the same. Most of the "fun" of those big crossovers is the interaction between different comics. The context of the strips the characters individually came from is crucial. Once the individual comics disappear, and the crossover is just left as the interaction of a bunch of random odd characters without context. And that entirely defeats the purpose. You don't need a cartoon crossover to throw a bunch of random characters together--but without a bigger context for those characters, there just isn't any point. An archive of strips from a crossover, sans the comics that the characters and settings in the crossover originally came from, isn't at all the same thing.

But really, there's more to it than that. You might have noticed I put the "fun" in the last paragraph in quotation marks. The reason for that is that I question how much fun a mega-crossover like that is in the first place. Oh, I've no doubt it's loads of fun for the cartoonists, though I've never participated in one myself. But is it really fun for the reader? I know it isn't for me; crossovers like that drive me up the wall. But then, part of that may be that I'm a little too obsessive. I need to know the context, so when I hit such a crossover I feel obligated to read the archives of all the strips involved in the crossover too. Which...gets to really drag, especially if (as is frequently the case) one or more of the strips involved isn't very good, or just doesn't interest me.

Now, you might think, of course, that this would be good for the comics involved; because they're in the crossovers they get read. Well...yes. If the crossover doesn't just get me to stop reading the comic altogether rather than bother to follow it. As I mentioned in a post two years ago, that's happened before with comics as prominent as College Roomies From Hell back when it crossed over with Fans! in 2001--I had been reading both strips up until that point, but when they came to the crossover I quit both of them rather than bother to follow it between them. I'm not opposed on principle to going back and catching up on one or both strips now, and it's entirely possible that one day I will, but it's not a priority. Obviously, that's not to say that I always stop reading comics when they get to a crossover (I did get through the ROCR archives, after all)--but it does tend to motivate me in that direction.

But, as I was saying, maybe I'm in the minority here. Maybe most readers don't feel the need to slog through the archives of the other comics involved in a crossover. But if they don't--well, then we're back to that problem of context, aren't we? Unless the reader happens to have been following all the comics in the crossover all along anyway, he's missing out on the context of some of the characters involved, and the whole point of the crossover is lost. It's a losing situation either way: either the reader gets drawn into tediously running through the archives of comics he may not be interested in, or he misses out on the context of the characters so the crossover is meaningless.

Now, a two-comic crossover is bad enough--like I said, that got me to stop reading CRFH. But a multi-comic monstrosity like the Framed Great Escape--well, the problems in the previous paragraph just get multiplied. Even if the constituent comics don't disappear, it's a complete mess trying to follow it all. And if they do--and when there are enough comics involved, it's quite likely some will--well, then I guess it's an incomplete mess, which is worse.

None of this, incidentally, is in any way meant as a slam on Damonk, the creator of Framed, who's responsible for the Framed Great Escape. Damonk was a real webcomic innovator, and played an important role in helping webcomics become what they are today. (And I'm not just saying that because Damonk (damonk13) and his wife (ocarina) have me on their LiveJournal Friends lists and could be reading this entry.) But the thing about innovations is that, well, they're risky, and they don't always work out. And in my opinion, the Framed Great Escape was a daring and innovative experiment, but one that in the end was in many ways a less than total success--but that doesn't reflect poorly on Damonk for having tried it.

Anyway, I've been picking a lot on the CameoComic here, but that's mostly because it's the aspiring megacrossover that most recently came to my attention. Well, that, and because of the very ambitious language I quoted from the strip above. But maybe that quote isn't meant to be taken at face value; it's not from an "About" page, but from dialogue in the strip itself--dialogue from characters who are analogues of the strip's creators, true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their opinions and goals completely match those of the actual creators. Maybe their stated goals for the strip are intentionally over-the-top.

It doesn't matter, really, because I'm just using it as an example; I'm speaking of webcomic megacrossovers in general. Whether CameoComic really does aspire to be "the largest crossover event in all webcomics history" or the creators were just putting intentional hyperbole into their comic counterparts' mouths, that doesn't change the fact that I think such huge crossovers--or any crossovers, really, that require the reading of multiple strips to keep up with what's going on--are a bad idea.

it just occurred to me as I was writing this entry that there may be a good analogy with comic books. Possibly the most frequent criticism I've seen leveled against comic book mammoths Marvel and DC is that their comic books are too interrelated (within each company, not between companies, of course); that one comic book relies so much on events happening within other comic books that you practically have to read their entire line to know what's going on. This is especially true when there's some kind of mega-event going on--which, nowadays, seems to be pretty much all the time. Right now, for instance, there's some series called "52" going on at DC that links all the comics together and has repercussions throughout the line (as I understand it)--right on the heels of an even bigger event called "Infinite Crisis"--, and in Marvel there's something called "Civil War" that does the same thing there only more so. This, it seems to be almost universally agreed (except, apparently, by the people in charge at Marvel and DC), is a bad thing. It may appeal to those who are already following all the series, but it will turn away new potential fans who are daunted by the prospect of reading so many other comic books just to keep up with what's going on in one, or repelled by the impenetrability of the comic books if they don't do so. And even some old and previously loyal customers get disgusted by the need to follow so many different series and stop buying comic books. It's not a strategy that's good for long-term viability. And, well, it's annoying to any but the most obsessive fans.

So if this is such a bad thing for comic books, why is it any better for webcomics? Really, a lot of the same arguments apply. Well, true, at least for webcomics you don't have to pay to follow other series, but it does still take time. Cameos and crossovers of the non-intrusive kind that Sluggy Freelance and UF did are fine and can be fun, but forcing the reader to follow multiple webcomics to keep up with what's going on with one just gets tedious. Please, let's not do that anymore. Okay?

Of course, given that only a handful of webcartoonists read my LiveJournal, I guess making such an appeal here is pretty pointless. Oh well.