Jam Session! What Makes a Webcomic

For me, my problem is I got five pages into Homestuck.

well uh i was in the mines i was in the homestuck mines in 2012 i was reading it i read the every single one of its like you know 10 000 pages or however many there were yeah

So when you say pages, okay, let's just do that.

Like, let's start from here.

When we say pages, scroll leads, episodes, it's just terms are getting thrown all over the place, and I actually don't know how to gauge it.

Like, one thing that's really interesting is that when we were doing...

the uh nib and ink fest web comic portfolio reviews we had to kind of be like okay we want things to be x amount of pages but then we also had to consider how many episodes is that and then episodes are not all in um like a certain amount of quote-unquote pages and they kind of change a lot too and yeah it's i don't know i don't know how to describe it

I think depending on the type of work that it is, it can always mean it's true that it does always mean something a little bit different.

In the case of Homestuck, referring to a page like is more in the sense of a web page, like an individual web page in its update, which would have a slightly different format every time because sometimes it would be one image.

sometimes it would be one image and a little bit of text, sometimes an image and a lot of text, sometimes anywhere between two and like five images.

I can't remember how many ever actually got put into a single update.

And sometimes it would be like an entire like flash game or something like that.

In the case of Webtoon, just to kind of go take a sidestep into that field, Webtoon itself, when they're figuring out things about their originals and stuff, I think they... quantify it by panels they'd be like for like each episode should have 40 panels in it basically obviously the people who are not on originals can kind of put as many panels or as few panels into an update as they want but that kind of determines the overall length and amount of content at least to my knowledge

yeah i think that's interesting because you were also mentioning that they sometimes this film stuck this sometimes has some images like one to two to three to apparently and then some more texts than others um how did you read the comic

well you see it was on the web akin to a webbed comic

did you click through like the text and it appears or was it just a wall of text

So for a little bit of kind of format thing for Homestuck, the appearance of the pages, they kind of have like this became iconic in Homestuck and all the Homestuck alikes where you would open up the website.

And you would have a single image in kind of a static dimension, which is usually a landscape formatted, like, I don't know, kind of a four by six aspect ratio image, like centered in the frame.

And then below it, there would be some sort of text.

And at the bottom of the text, there would be in larger text, there would be a hyperlink that would lead you to the next page.

And sometimes it would just be like arrows, often like ASCII, like it would be equal sign, equal sign.

And then like the, the, greater than bracket basically to make an arrow sometimes that link would also have text in it which would additionally give extra context to the story because part of the conceit of a lot of those comics is that it's it's like an adventure game and you're telling the character where to go and So often those links would take the form of like, open the chest, and then a little arrow or like, you know, pick up the stick, walk through the door, that kind of thing.

But additionally, above that, usually above that, maybe it was below it, sometimes it really changed constantly.

But above that, there would also be a chat log.

which you would be able to expand, like it would just be a little read more button.