Annotated 43-8
FB: “The virtual office reduces workplace violence on tonight’s GUILDED AGE.”
Sometimes I fantasize about putting together a better data matrix of my own work. If I did, this page would probably rank a special place as the comic with the second least amount of text on it. (All purely silent pages would of course be tied for first place.) Not much else to say about this one, so…
Guys, I’ll be real with you: our audience numbers could use a boost. So tonight would be a great time to check out Traveler on Webtoon, if you haven’t done so yet…or even if you have. In the self-critical spirit of these annotations, I’ll admit that I wonder a lot whether our opening was a bit too strange and ambitious for readers who weren’t quite sure what made this a superhero story. The latest installment completes a bit of a course correction in that regard, and introduces a couple of my favorite characters in the series…though their exact role in it, heroic or villainous, might not be clear for a while longer. Kinda like Payet Best and HR. Sometimes it’s about watching the destiny unfold.
Is this a case of stairs right up to a doorway, with no hallway or landing in front of it? Wouldn’t that be pretty unsafe even if there weren’t a hitman bursting through them? You open your bedroom door and tumble down a flight of stairs?
I assume it’s an attic room.
I’ve seen places like this. One room a place I lived in had a lower floor than the rest, so right *inside* the door it had two steps downward. Not a door you want to storm through in a hurry…
Indeed.
So, yes it’s very unsafe.
But also not very uncommon.
One of those things that become less safe the less frequently you encounter them…
Re: Traveler: the inconsistent panel lengths and Webtoons’ vertical strip format make it a chore to read. This can’t help.
Agreed. The vertical format may work better for phones in theory, but in practice it’s annoying and put me off almost instantly. This held even when I went back and tried to read it on my phone. Which is a pity, because the story looks interesting!
I don’t want to be too quickly dismissive of this feedback, especially since Muttley is one of my most longtime readers. But the vertical format is practiced by the majority of Webtoon’s features, some of which have audiences of millions. That doesn’t mean everyone’s gonna like it, just as you may not like how Netflix series are optimized for binge-watching…but I doubt that particular aspect of Traveler has hurt us much with Webtoon’s audience.
I like the story, and the vertical format is interesting, but somewhat painful to read on a computer – I get the feeling it was designed to work for phone/tablet browsing. That it’s impossible to resize to be smaller {the rest of the page scales up and down, but not the image} makes it that much harder to take in, especially since a lot of the panels are too large to fit on the screen.
Just my two cents here. The story I’ve read so far is pretty intriguing.
impossible to resize?
On Firefox and all its derivatives and in Vivaldi (using the Chromium renderer), ctrl+mouse wheel will scale the comic just as it scales the rest of the page.
Also, Traveler is the reason I looked up and found out that “Autoscroll” is the name of the feature that almost all browsers used to have on by default, where you press the mouse wheel down and move the mouse to scroll, with mouse position setting the speed. Very useful to scroll through long pages quickly, or slooowly, at whichever speed you’re reading, with very little mouse movement. These days it seems to be off by default but it’s easy to activate.
The format is unusual to me, and horizontal scrolling would be more comfortable on a desktop but I found it’s totally fine. Some pictures are too large to fit on one screen, but then I just zoom out. And it’s nice to have the high resolution.
Actually, come to think of it: Why would web comics imitate the format of some virtual paper page when they don’t even exist on paper? I think if I were discovering Traveler two years from now and decided to read it all in one go, I might just rotate my monitor to vertical and read it that way. That would be pretty neat :)
I also can’t stand the vertical format.
It might be the way the majority of Webtoon’s features function…but that’s kinda why I don’t read any Webtoons.
T, it’s not so much the vertical format, but that in combination with the considerable variation in panel sizes. I find myself zooming in and out a lot, wheras the other Webtoons strips that I read or have read can be managed without zooming and with just the PageDown and scroll keys.
I know that artists appreciate the lack of constraint, but it does make reading the text and then zooming out to appreciate the whole panel, then zooming back in to read the next bit – and so on – disruptive to the flow of the story.
+1 I read the first… several panels? 10% of scrolling? when it came out and just didn’t enjoy the experience at all. There wasn’t enough plot development yet to react to, content wise (dude in spacesuit floats in space, plus living room objects), so I’m sure it had more to do with the format.
Just read all of episode 1 on my phone, and yeah. It’s really long – too much for a single sitting (at least, the way I usually read webcomics). I am a since-way-back RSS page-per-session unless-I’m-binging kind of reader. Something that’s striking me right now is that I’m really hesitant to go do Ep 2 because if it’s that long, I won’t remember / be able to easily get back to where I left off unless I *don’t start* or *totally finish it* and… yeah, not interested.
Zak said something about zooming, too, and I think there’s something there. Pages of panels have visual interest page to page because the layout changes. So there’s a form of subtle emphasis at play with panel sizes and large visual elements grabbing attention at first glance. And I don’t mind then zooming and moving the rest of the page off-screen to take in the art because I feel oriented – I know how big the page is and where I am currently at in it, and how far to go to finish, etc. All of those markers are lost in this format.
Being perfectly honest, too – the middle section with the situp six pack, the jabs at 80s cartoons, and implied subtexts were just this weird tone shift that didn’t make sense to me at all.
So yeah, don’t think I’m going to go for it. Not really my thing. Wish you the best of luck though.
One more thing – not a critique, but so you know. The art style, character design for Trevor, and intro sequence are all very similar to the opening for Outsider: https://www.well-of-souls.com/outsider/outsider013.html
I guess maybe *any* blond anime spacesuit guy alone in space would be, though? Just thought I should mention.
Outsider has been a good read so far, but the update rate has slowed and I’m worrying if the author is able to keep it going.
Alex is a sole survivor thrown into an alien conflict, and the context is pretty hard SF, so I’m not seeing too many similarities with Traveller so far. Mind you, I’m waiting for the Traveller to start travelling.
Yeah, Arioch has phases. It was great getting page-a-week during the last active phase, but it was more like page-a-multimonth not long before that. And the dry spells in between and before were fairly big. I do hope he gets back soon, the story’s just starting to get interesting.
I’m actually okay with the vertical format — as long as I use a browser that supports autoscroll. Then I can press the middle mouse button and move up/down as fast/slow as I want without abusing the mouse wheel, or having to be incredibly precise with the scrollbar.
In other browsers: Not so great.
Since Webtoon’s pages consist almost entirely of scripts of some sort, I wonder if they couldn’t implement a mode where you can use the up/down cursor keys to smoothly scroll at a sensible pace.
Also: Traveller is the only webcomic where I zoom *out* in the browser. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, though. I’m often reading GA zoomed in somewhat.
I have been enjoying learning new characters in Traveler. This story has taught me to trust your storytelling, so the different format and episode length is not concerning to me. I do hope you continue to post there – I was excited to find it on the site :-)
I want to strongly encourage anyone reading these comments to check out traveller, very interesting stuff. Also if anyone from the old P&A forums is reading this, much love. Love and gratitude to you T.
Complete agreement.
I love the story o far, and I don’t find it too strange or overambitious at all, at least not so far.
The only thing that makes it less good is the Webtoons stuff
I clicked the link the first time you linked it, forgot about it, and clicked it again the second time. It doesn’t have a convenient domain of its own like Guilded Age, but I’ll get it eventually.
Also, I don’t think anyone who’s followed this fear is going to stop just because you link your new stuff in every post, so… link your new stuff in every post, maybe?
Hm, yeah, fair point!
I don’t like webtoon in general, since they seem to purposely make it difficult to tell when a comic has been updated and to navigate through what has been put up.
I read several series on webtoon and haven’t had any issue telling when something has been updated or or navigating through what has been put up, though I do use the app and have an account so that might be a contributing factor.
I will admit knowing if someone replied to you on someone else’s comment is a pain though but that doesn’t pop up to often
You can point an RSS reader at the toon to know when it’s been updated.
Of course, unless you log in or store cookies, you’re going to have to enter something into the age gate every time.
Minor annoyance, that.
I know you probably can’t influence much of what Webtoons do, and they’re paying your bills, which I am not [1].
That in mind, here are some of the annoyances I’ve had with them:
1: Even with a link to an episode, I first land at the the age verification page, which then takes me to their homepage. So I have to click the link, verify, then click the link again.
2: To view the comic comfortably, autoscroll is required, unless I want to keep ratcheting my mouse wheel, a lot.
3: The RSS feed only works in some readers because there’s no static link to the RSS file, and the contents are not quite correctly formatted either [2]. This means my preferred RSS reader (Fraidicat, a Firefox plugin) doesn’t work, and I resorted to the one built into Vivaldi. However, Vivaldi supports no autoscroll –> see number 2
4: I’d need an account on the site in order to comment. I don’t like that sort of thing. I’m a lot more ready to trust guildedage.net with an e-mail address than Webtoons — they make money from viewers, which means they must have some strategy to turn my data into money, and I hate that sort of thing. I know there’s not too many people who think like that, but I do. So no user account for me.
None of these are keeping me from reading Traveller every weekend, and really liking it. I think I’ll go ahead and recommend it to a few people.
[1]: I did/do support some other webcomics, as several posters, T-shirts and the Dr. McNinja omnibus edition on my shelf can attest. Sadly, none of the GA merchandise quite worked for me, and 60$ for a partial print edition is a bit much — I’d happily spend some money on a complete PDF edition, though!
[2]: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-validator/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.webtoons.com%2Fen%2Fsuper-hero%2Ftraveler%2Frss%3Ftitle_no%3D3205
All that said:
With regards to Traveler, I just can’t stand the webtoon, long page format. I feel like they were made to be read on phones, but I’m rarely on my phone.
yet another reader who is very interested in your story, but very not interested in it being on webtoon. I’ve tried reading comics on their site before, and it’s just a huge chore. the problem isn’t the long pages, though that isn’t great–I’ve dealt with that on other comics before–but I keep up with comics through Piperka.net, which doesn’t work with webtoon at all, in part because of how webtoon handles updates (poorly, as far as I’ve been able to tell).
Regarding Traveler: I read Penny & Aggie and I was enjoying Quiltbag while it lasted (plus of course Guilded Age) so I’m primed to give a lot of time to develop to any new creations involving members of the creative teams. I think I’m in a similar boat with earlier commenters, in that I’ve had difficulty getting ‘hooked’ into Traveler; I’m sticking with it but I hope the ‘hook’ comes soon.
Part of it is the formatting. Not the Webtoon formatting per se; it’s how the Webtoon format is being utilized. NB, I only read one other Webtoon so take this commentary with a grain of salt. When I compare “Nothing Special” [NS] ( https://www.webtoons.com/en/fantasy/nothing-special/chapter-1/viewer?title_no=1188&episode_no=1 ) to “Traveler”, the NS art is more ‘right-sized’.
One aspect is that the scale is just very different. In Chrome on my desktop PC I’ve found I zoom out and shrink Traveler down to 50% to make it a consumable experience. But in this format, it ends up being *very* narrow.
Possibly because of the ‘narrowness’, the episodes have felt uncomfortably long. Comparing again to NS, the NS pages are more ‘bite-sized’; this means the narrative delivers on a fairly regular (and by comparison, quicker) pace. But in defense of Traveler, I’m willing to give y’all the extra room to see how you make good use of it. [hopefully!]
Generally so far Traveler has had a “partially experimental” feel to it. The vertical storytelling in particular is a break from all the other webcomics I read, all of which have at least some horizontal component (even NS has horizontal flow in layers, staircases, and so forth). When you are doing something outside of the “norm” it’s expected to get a slow start; it takes time to warm the masses up to New Things(tm). Hopefully y’all are giving yourselves breathing room to let things play out!
Regardless, thank you for continuing to create and tug at the boundaries!
Hmmm yes, both comics have the same width in pixels, but Traveller uses a much larger font, less detail per width, and a lot taller panels. As if it was a magnification of a much narrower comic.
Not sure what it’d look like on a medium-sized phone, though. Maybe that’s what the resolution is aimed at?
Either way, the story of Traveller pretty much worked for me from the first page. I want to know what happens, and why.