I’m in the middle of doing a long form story on Plant-Man at the moment. Well, that’s nothing new, because Plant-Man has always been long form. The funny thing is that I never thought it was.

As you might know I started doing Plant-Man + Flowerin’ as a mini comic, and they usually ran to about 12 to 15 pages of story. Compared to a regular Marvel or DC book which had 22 pages of content each issue or a graphic novel that ran anywhere from 48 to 72 pages, I always felt that Plant-Man was pretty small.

On the web however even a 12 page story is treated as an epic. Weird, huh? I think a lot of its comes from the way most webcomics are done as a traditional 3 or 4 panel strip format. They’re easy to digest, you don’t have to scroll, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a joke at the end.

A 6-or-so panel page in a multi page story on the other hand doesn’t have those conventions and so people tend to stay away from them. It makes drawing in and keeping an audience a hell of a lot harder than something like, say, Funny Webcomic, which you can drop in and out of with no prior knowledge needed. A strip comic is also a lot quicker to get through, too, which can be seen as a plus.

On the negative side though strips (typically) don’t have as much depth or length to the story-lines. I know I put a lot of jokes in Plant-Man (well, in theory) but I don’t feel like I have to do a joke every four panels or whatever.

I like the form of the full page, it’s something I’m comfortable with and I’d hate to have to drop it completely in order to keep doing comics online.

I think a week or so of ‘strip’ type Plant-Mans would be good…what do you think?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 11:04 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.