Julia Draft 1
From DigitalRhetoricCollaborative
Webcomics, or digital comics, are comics posted on the internet. Many are created and found exclusively on the web, but the creator may offer a print version as well. Some are simply a remediation, or digital version, of a preexisting print comic. The digital format gives more freedom to creators and allows them to experiment with unconventional styles and forms that would otherwise be impossible in a physical format.
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History
Print comics
In dealing with comics and publishing which will ultimately lead to publishing comics on the web, it is first good to look at a small history of how comics publishing first came to be. No one can truly admit when and where comics originated on the timeline of history (McCloud 15). Throughout time, readers of comics have come to see that this particular media has gone through a lot of critical examination (McCloud 6). Only through the invention of printing did the sophistication of comics come into play for people around the world (McCloud 16). Looking to see when what is to be considered modern comics; the creation of panels, the idea of cartooning, and bringing together words and pictures, came into action believed to be around the mid 1800’s, historians believe that Rodolph Topffer was the father of such action (McCloud 17). Moving forward in time and publishing the comic book, starting in the year of 1938, in the United States, was when comics became popular with society, particularly the superhero. The idea of the superhero came from this masked or goggled view of events that are witnessed throughout our culture (Spurgeon 1). Expansion of the comic book came after the Second World War with many different genres coming out to the public (Duncan 40).
During this timeline, it is easy to see how through the invention of technology that comic books have progressed throughout many different cultures and periods. Looking at today’s era, people are now faced with publishing comics on the web. Whether through publishing comics that have been previously published in other media, or creating comics strictly published for the web, the amount of attention that has been given to this genre of literature because of this change in publishing is exciting.
