Print vs Digital Formatting

Comic creators, by and large, know how their work is going to be presented. There was an old "rule" in writing comic scripts that you couldn't end a sentence with a period because there was no guarantee it would actually get printed. It wasn't a naive way to generate excitement in the story; it was a manner to work around a technical limitation of the printing technology they had available. Likewise, the comics back in the day were colored using lots of solid, bright colors because they didn't have the capability then to publish anything more nuanced.

This latter issue began raising its head several years ago when printing and paper technology had advanced considerably. There were more than a fair share of complaints fired that reprints of old books looked garish because these bright colors were intensified with better ink and whiter paper. It didn't look quite right because it was being presented in a format it wasn't originally intended to be presented in.

The same holds true for online comics. Yes, I can sit here at my computer and scan every page of a comic and post it online. I can even reconfigure the page scans so that they're all embedded in one file. But it's not going to be an entirely good reading experience, regardless of whether that's a PDF or whatever, because the original was not intended to be read like that. Of course a gorgeous page layout from Neal Adams is going to suffer when it's read on a computer -- he created it to be read in a pamphlet comic!

Adams is actually a good person to bring up here. Setting aside his incredible illustration skills, he's very conscious of how his work is being presented and adjusts his designs accordingly. Before his famed work on Batman, he was in DC's coloring department. He spent quite a deal of time and energy learning about what was and wasn't possible with the printing technology available at that time. His studies led him to realize that Marvel had a different deal with the printers than DC did that allowed them to use more colors in their books, making them look more sophisticated visually. Adams was able to take the ideas to his superiors and eventually get a better coloring deal for DC -- because he knew how things were being produced. Years later, when DC started to reprint his Batman stories in a nice, hardcover format, he opted to go back and recolor them all himself (for free, I believe) because he knew that the printing technology had changed sufficiently that the old coloring would not translate well to these new printings. And if you look at those books, you can see that, sure enough, the couple of stories Adams didn't recolor look decidedly muddier than everything else. Not that Adams changed the actual colors themselves, but he utilized the new coloring technology to achieve the same effects he created using a decidedly different -- and not immediately transferable -- technology decades earlier.

So when you look at Marvel Unlimited books digitally, or if you illegally download scans of the same books from a torrent, you're reading a story in a manner in which it wasn't intended to be read. Likewise, if you go to Webtoons to read a Marvel comic per their recently announced agreement, you're going to be reading comics that were designed to be printed and, even if they've been re-formatted for vertical scrolling, your satisfaction is going to be less than what's possible. This is why Comixology's "guided view" never caught on -- it was a less-than-ideal compromise that inherently changed the storytelling experience.

So, is it possible to write comics for an online venue? Absolutely, but the only people doing it are webcomic creators.

So here's the thing. Many, many more comics were written and designed to be presented in a format other than online than were made for the web. That's mostly just a function of how long the web has been around compared to pamphlet comics. But as long as creators continue developing comics with a "traditional" presentation in mind, their success is going to be limited in the online world. The problem isn't that the delivery mechanisms online are flawed; it's that people are using them to deliver the wrong material. Comics of any sort need to be created to take advantage of the unique properties of how they're being created to be truly effective.

It is good that digital options are available; it makes accessible thousands of comics fans might not otherwise have access to because the original printings are too expensive for them to buy and reprints for obscure issues are too expensive to print (for the limited audiences they'd attract). But my point is that it will always be an inherently inferior reading experience because they were designed to be read differently.

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