I have an odd tendency to drift from past tense to present as the characters get into the storytelling.
Anyway, continuing from my last rambling, the other tricky part with WPK is that I’m writing for two audiences: the archive-readers and the up-to-date readers. For example, Chapter 7 features a large section (15 or 20 pages) devoted to Dosh and Varaxunax (who got, I believe, a single panel in this chapter). For the archive-binger, that’s pretty painless, a half-hour of Lieberesque swashbuckling. I hope that for you, the up-to-date readers, it does not become an interminable digression from the activities of the main character!
Another tricky part is the use of narration boxes. Those are when a character’s round speech-bubble conversation turns into a square white box “…with speech in quotation marks.” It’s a terrific way of tying panels together, and an excuse to avoid drawing talking heads. Instead of showing a character’s head while they discuss the Totally Awesome Fortress of Doomination, I can just bring up the fortress on panel 1, then draw the fortress on panel 2 in a character narration box. But it’s tricky across multiple pages. While, in traditional comics, it’s important to draw the readers forward, and linked narration boxes are a great way to do that, it only works for archive-bingers, who immediate connect “the last line of one page … to the first line of the next.” For the up-to-date readers it can look ridiculous, with pages opening with “…and that was the last of the Cucumber Armies!” and only a dim recollection of how the previous page ended.
Anyway, chapter 7 starts on Friday, and the Ulenites will make their terrifying return!
It’s one of the thornier issues, I think, with Epic Continuity in a one-page-at-a-time medium like webcomics. I think archive binging would be a more effective way to read this story, but that would mean laboring for months before being able to release your product. Definitely some issues to consider when you’re thinking about storytelling in new media.
lol at Gilgam. …