Quote Originally Posted by ag30476 View Post
You're an editor, no? Layman's question: Do you think Rob and Jamie made any changes for presentation in serial form? I would have thought the serial format always made you "leave them wanting more" while a comic book form does not necessarily have to end every page with a cliffhanger or punchline.
Eep! I must have said that somewhere, or you're psychic. Yes, I am an editor... and for a major American media corporation, no less!

My opinion, following the reread, is that yes, they have made changes to accomodate the format which, in general, can be summed up as follows...

In-strip plotting and pacing is very much done with the serial nature in mind.

Cross-strip 'big arc' pacing is not, at all, sometimes at the detriment of the strip-to-strip experience, so it's a bit of a hybrid.

Look at how often an individual strip finishes with either a splash page, a big reaction shot, or a revelation. It is far more often that what would occur in most graphic novels. If you printed the Erfworld strips to date, and bound them up in a nifty, glossy cover, I don't think you would fool any serious readers that it had never been published in strip format. Each page would be too encapsulated to escape noticing that, though it IS clear Rob and Jamie are keeping their options open on one day nicely binding it in a book, one strip per page (for we never get any 'double-sized' strips, or extra-big splash panels that would break the format).

That said, given my experimental reread from last night, the mega-pacing for the whole story seems to have been done looking at the (hopefully completed) work as a whole, one day, given how nicely it paces read all at once, and how much frustration the pacing sometimes causes in these forums at the leading edge of its serially-created nature.

So I guess Rob and Jamie get the best and worst of both worlds. They get to have regular zingers/splash panels/little dramatic cliffhangers AND get to have a work, at the end, that will be eminently readable (probably even more so) once it is compiled into a coffee-table book, more readable than a lot of other webcomics out there. On the other hand, they'll sometimes frustrate a devoted audience who is reading it 'fresh from the drawing boards' and end up with a coffee-table book that won't be indistinguishable from other graphic novels, it will clearly be a repackaged strip book, of sorts, albeit a highly sophisticated and readable one.

So is their glass half-full or half-empty? You'd have to ask them, but I'd err on the side of full, seeing as they're producing a nifty webcomic and I'm composing mindless little blurbs that pop up on your screen right after you hear 'You've Got Mail!'