Set-up, (Beat), Punchline – (2004)

According to the internet wayback machine, this horizontal scroller was made sometime in 2004.

There are many in-jokes and references to mid 2000’s webcomics in here. At the time, web-publishing meant that you could instantly comment on trends and work. Although the idea is ubiquitous now, it was a fairly new idea at the time. So the narrative is a comment on what I perceived as a growing trend of webcomics mimicking newspaper strip formats. There was a short time (some would argue that it’s still going on) when web-strip artists created and shaped their comics in order to translate to newspaper strips, in the hopes of breaking into the print business. I thought there was an enormous amount of potential in storytelling online, and most of the popular work ignored those advantages entirely. Some of these same artists also pointed out experimental work as being too pretentious and arty.

In that context, one of the formal goals of this piece was to utilize the metapanel to bracket the story information. Seen in this view, the composition is meant to have a feeling of “chorusing”, somewhat like riding an amusement park ride: you arrive at the spot you left, but somehow subtly changed by the experience.

You can read it in it’s entirety here.