Friday, January 12, 2007

link?

Here is a link to the webcomic Whispered Apologies: LINK!

I did my assigned wiki entry about webcomics, and Whispered Apologies is a pretty interesting webcomic in terms of new media writing, because it involves collaboration that would be much more difficult (though technically possible) without the Internet. Storytelling by any means possible! It is on (permanent?) hiatus now, and the archives aren't terribly large, if you want to click around for a while.

The deal is that different artists and writers from different webcomics collaborate to make a single strip. The artist draws, and the writer fills in the text. You don't have to be a successful webcomic artist to contribute. You don't have to be a webcomic artist at all, really. You don't have to have worked on a comic at all before in your life. The Internet has an interesting effect on this endeavor in that if you are a total comic amateur or even just a sort of unsuccessful comic dude or lady, Whispered Apologies provides you with a place to collaborate with artists you admire, or just a place to be involved with comics at all. Technology also definitely makes it easier to send comics and add text and things of that nature. I think it's a pretty killer deal. You get all sorts of perspectives from all sorts of people, and you can even get in on the action if you want. If there were no Internet, I would never have even heard of any of the artists I admire, and those artists probably wouldn't have heard of each other. But the blessed series of tubes lets these artists springboard off each other's creativity and inspire each other, and it lets anyone with Internet access witness all this, and possibly even participate (unless maybe you are in China or another place where your Internet is censored).

Whispered Apologies is one of the many brainchildren of Ryan North. He is the guy who does Dinosaur Comics, and he also came up with RSSpect, Oh No Robot, and Project Wonderful, which are all crazy innovative tools to help out the webcomic industry.

He also did this, which, besides being full of hilarity, addresses the issue of Wikipedia vandalism, a New Media issue if ever there was one.

I would like to point out that I have no idea if I am doing this right. In fact, originally I posted this as a comment instead of a post. Good job, me. Anyway, I just sort of picked a topic at random for the wiki/this link. Are they supposed to have something more to do with the readings? Are the link and wiki entry supposed to be significantly different from each other? I feel like this turned out like an informal expansion of my wiki entry. I think I may have failed. I am worried about this. =/ =/ =/

1 comment:

Allan Vol Phillips said...

I'm not really into webcomics, but Achewood, by Stanford alum Chris Onstad is, I think, the most interesting comedy being produced today.

I just wanted to plug that thing. Sorry to use Comments for such a purpose.