My mind always changes about these things, but I think I might be going in a new direction with this comics series on this website.
It’s Saturday night as I type this, and I have just finished next Tuesday’s Super Party comics page. It’s a one-off thing that is totally silly. It has nothing at all to do with any of the stories I was thinking I would be telling here, and does not tie in at all with any of the big over-arching themes I want to explore. And it’s one of the favorite things I’ve done recently, and I think it’s some of my best comics.
I did Benny Bunny Meets Benny Banana as a serial on this website because I have had the story pressing to get out for almost a year, and I was dying to get a webcomic going. This site seemed like the quickest and most direct way to get that story to you. But serializing it on the web was a completely different thing than issuing it as the comic book I had dreamed it up as.
When I do a comic book, I am very conscious of the book as an object, considering everything from the indicia to the end-papers to the binding. One of the skills I have worked hardest to cultivate is to work the turning of the page into how I tell the story.
With a webcomic, the story as a singular work and the comics as an object – two of my favorite aspects about issuing a comic book – are gone. We’re back to looking at each page as it’s own product. I was going to say that a webcomic is not the best outlet for long-form stories but I can think of several artists who pull it off brilliantly. I guess it’s just that when I come up with a comics story, I see it as a book and I want it issued as a singular work.
Additionally, I find single-page stories to be an enormous challenge and it’s something I really should get good at. So I’m feeling like I’m going to keep doing one-off pages weekly here at seanwardsuperparty.com, and issue my stories as a completely separate Super Party comic book series. I have a lot of fun issuing comic books, promoting them, getting people excited about them, and I think it would be even more fun to have a comic book series and a webcomic going at the same time. Makes me think of The Beatles, and how the singles were never on the albums.
At the end of the day, this is the whole glorious thing about webcomics, and the web generally. It’s all one great big work in progress and I’m really excited to see where this all goes, what surprises it holds for me, and what kind of fun you and I can have with it.
After all… at the Super Party, the V.I.P. section is wherever you happen to be sitting!
