Traveler Has Launched!
You will, I expect, permit us one day of celebration between chapters. And if you haven’t already, the previews above and below should nudge you to check this out! Go ahead and click, I’m just going to spend the rest of today’s annotation thanking people.
To Jason and John Waltrip, who have spent a big chunk of their careers bringing my crazy dreams to life, and lent this one their beautiful sense of plot and character as well as visuals. To Monica Marier, who soon joined us as colorist and demonstrated just how much storytelling could go into that role. The four of us have made a rich layer cake of this narrative. But we’ve been further aided by my wife Janice Campbell, who serves as first audience for the story, logistical advisor, and script doctor. And also by Tyler Beckett, a colorful, insightful, and nurturing editor who saw a few offhand remarks in these very annotations and sparked their transformation into a career-altering project. Thanks also to Webtoon, for offering a contract that made it realistic to develop that project, and of course, to any brave soul who actually reads this story and thus brings it to life. (Hey! That’s you!)
Congratulations on the launch of your new project, gentlemen! May you find much success with it.
Congratulations!
*heads over there right now*
My body is ready for this.
Thank you, all! It’s great to be back “in print”.
Great hook, happy to have another story to follow.
Anybody else had to think of my namesake when seeing the fish and the fish bowl in space?
Hang in there Sushi, it’s gonna be fine!
Guilty as charged.
I dread to think of all the times I put poor goldie through the grinder before I realized it was avoidable.
You …. monster!
(I got stuck at the very beginning and snuck a peek from the solution, so I knew I didn’t have to)
…but then I went and killed the two-headed squirrel by accident :(
But … but, that’s a double squirrelcide!! Terrible! ;)
I was a huge fan of Faans, have been a huge fan of Guilded Age, and am incredibly excited to see what the three of you do with this new project. Looks really exciting so far!
If all the episodes are going to be as long as the first three, may I please request a secondary site with a more ADHD-accessible format? The long form is impossible for me to follow because I keep forgetting what happened up above. So I have to scroll back up to re-read it, only to then forget what happens down below. So I just keep randomly ping-ponging up and down, until I’m so lost and frustrated that I give up.
I would be able to actually read this if they were cut into smaller panels that were either put on separate pages or placed into a more traditional comic-strip grid. If you did both that *and* the long-form you have right now, it would make your new comic accessible to a larger audience.
Yes, that design is just awful. Doomscrolling format, no content breaks, with javascript serving that dices the image up in random chunks so you can’t even copy a page to show people. Best of luck to them, but I hope they got paid in advance.
Webtoon isn’t exactly a new kid on the block: it’s been operating at a profit for 18 years. And we get paid on episode delivery, so that is in advance of publication. (Admittedly, some less-proven comics are self-published on the platform.)
Your critiques are noted, but honestly, I think we’re past the stage of online comics where the ability to have pages copied and shared really helps a “story comic” much. One-and-done gag strips can still spread through social networks, sure, but one-and-done gag strips have never been my forte. That “doomscrolling” format is very adapted to people who read on their phones, and these days, that’s where it’s at. I’m personally quite excited to be able to tell a story that doesn’t need to be “cut up” in the same way as my other work…it’s hard to get the terrifying vastness of outer space into the narrower confines of GA format, for instance. But I recognize and respect that such a format is not for everyone!
I’ll pass this note along, though this is something I don’t have a lot of direct control over. Webtoon gives me a lot of freedom, but just like the newspaper comics page, it does have certain expectations when it comes to formatting. This is a format I’ve long dreamed of working in, so that’s not really a complaint, just an apology.
The accessibility issue is curious to me. I would consider Webtoon’s format more accessible, overall. Guilded Age‘s page-per-update format relies on you remembering a lot of information from week to week, not just from scroll-click to scroll-click or thumb-flip to thumb-flip. I have done one thing to make Traveler more accessible that a lot of other features on the service don’t: every episode after the first three has a quick “Previously…” recap at the top.
Agreed that not having to click a link and wait for a page to load to see what happened on the previous page is a big bonus for people who easily forget what just happened.
The disadvantage of the long scroll is that there are no easily-found marks. So if I scroll half the page up to check something, I don’t easily get back to exactly where I was.
For paged comics, my solution is to open the previous page in a new tab, so I can just switch between them. For a long-scroll one, I might open the same episode in a second tab/window, so I can view some “previous” scene next to the “current” one.
My optimal solution would be something where I can flick back and forth between screen-filling pieces of content using the mouse wheel. But then of course the size of each piece of content would need to be adapted to my screen, and not someone else’s phone, so that’s not actually something I expect anyone to make.
Which is funny because I saw some experiment close to this some 15 years ago, where someone made a flash-based comic thingy showing one picture at a time and the mouse wheel would switch to the next one, in place. Which allows almost animation-like sequences because you can see if someone/something moves between two frames, on an otherwise blank background, which is hard to judge if the two frames are next to each other.
I don’t have ADHD, but I also found myself scroling back and forth. So, an observation for what it is worth:
I would guess that the standard comic page isn’t read in a strictly linear fashion, but with a lot of glances back and forth as one digests the content. If I use the previous Guilded Age page (41-24) as an example, one might for example read the monologue in squares 1-3, then glance back at the mountains and the light pouring in from the top on the right of square one to make sense of the movement in squares 2-3, and then proceed to square 4 (arrival). Probably not in a very conscious fashion, just how one reads comics (which probably varies). Little bit of scrolling on my screen, but more eye movement then finger movement.
In the webtoon format the squares comes in a linear fashion, making the back and forth more into a finger movement. Each update is about three pages of material (correct me if I am wrong), but instead of being divided into three pages that are in turn divided into squares, all the squares are placed in a linear order. With your content, I think this accentuates the “what the frigg is going on” feeling, for better or worse.
I realise I have read another webtoon, the quite insane saga of Scoob and Shaggy (with guns), and there I didn’t notice scrolling back and forth, probably because the content is very straight forward (and violent).
If it is the combination of content and format, the feeling might be pass (or not depending on reader) when your content settles into a more straight forward story telling (if it does).
Update sizes vary among features, but ours started with a 75-panel episode and will be mostly 50-60 panels. No matter how you count, that is…more than three pages! I think of it as around 10-15.
Episodes 1-3 were aggressively strange, for sure…
Well, one of us can estimate content to comic pages, and it is better that it is you :)
“Thanks also to Webtoon, for offering a contract that made it realistic to develop that project”
Just out of curiosity, from someone who has read – and supported – webcomics for a decade and a half (times flies by apparently) how would you characterise the relationship, is it more akin to publisher – author in print comics (ie you sell them rights, they pay you, publish and monetise) or more akin to a service provider where you pay them to publish, or something in between?
Naturally, you don’t have to give any details if they are sensitive (or even answer at all), I am mainly wondering if we are seeing the rise of the content platform in webcomics.
Webtoon has two levels: Canvas and Originals. Any cartoonist who wants to start a Canvas comic can do so. But as you can imagine, Webtoon doesn’t pay just anyone who offers them just anything, so the pay contracts are for Originals only. The most promising Canvas comics can be promoted to Original status. Other projects start out as Originals if they strike Webtoon as good investments. In both cases, there are usually some hoops to jump through and a lot of outlining to do before that contract is finalized. Because Tyler was familiar with my earlier work, we were able to go straight to negotiations for Original status.
Most of the above info is pretty common knowledge among Webtoon fans. I won’t get into our contract’s specifics except to say that I know the history of creators’ rights issues and I’m confident we won’t have cause to regret it.
Thanks! Hope the economic model works out well for you!
Sweet, definitely looking forward to more.
Not sure if this is a webtoons problem or something on your end, but the “&” in the author field seems to be messing up the RSS feed xml.
what’s more, some feeders (Fraidycat in my case) seem to have an issue with the fact that there’s no static link to the feed. The RSS link is: https://www.webtoons.com/en/super-hero/traveler/list?title_no=3205 … that spits out an RSS file, but Firefox will insist on either downloading it, or showing it in a text editor. Fraidycat can’t set it up. Vivaldi can, but I’m trying to keep my feeds in one place, and that’s Fraidycat because contrary to normal feed readers it can even update me on web pages that have no feed at all — except this one because it’s not working without the “?title_no=3205“ appendage :(
The title of the book in the alt text isn’t bringing up anything on Google. Does someone have a link, or am I missing a joke?
The missed joke is a reference to both “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Arthur C. Clarke and the billionaire space race we had recently.