The Wisdom of Scott McCloud and the Webseries
Despite being over a decade old and centered on a graphic medium, Reinventing Comics can easily be translated into a treatise for the webseries industry as well. Not all of the twelve revolutions necessarily apply as comics have obviously been around a lot longer than the webseries or even video, but the basic principles serve as blueprint for success regardless of the differences between the two mediums. In fact, webcomics and the webseries have more similarities than one might think, and are in many ways complimentary counterparts in the growing move away from traditional media and onto the World Wide Web for entertainment needs.
The twelve areas that Scott McCloud focuses on are: comics as literature; comics as art; creator’s rights; industry innovation; public perception; institutional scrutiny; gender balance; minority representation; diversity of genre; digital production; digital delivery; and digital comics. Many of those bullet-points pertain to comics being perceived as a legitimate form of entertainment by the masses. “Comics is one of a small handful of basic art forms and communication media,” he writes. “I want to see it take its place among them as a viable option for creator and audience alike.”
The webseries, although still relatively new, has seen tremendous growth as a legitimate medium in recent years but still pales when compared to other forms of entertainment. High profile projects like Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog no doubt raised the webseries presence in the mind of many Americans in much the same manner as Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivors Tale elevated comics in the late 1980s, but its impact was still limited at best in the long term.
“Maus hit bookstores in 1986, and its author hoped that a flood of other, equally serious and ambitious work would follow,” McCloud writes in regards to the Pulitzer Prize-winning work. “Sadly, the ‘flood’ turned out to be more of a trickle.”
Joss Whedon, whose webseries creation won an Emmy Award, expressed similar feelings during a 2010 panel discussion at the San Diego Comic Con. “After Dr. Horrible, I was waiting for everybody else to show up at the party,” he said. “I was like, ‘OK, now we’re going to get this all together. We’re going to make a ton of Internet stuff.’” That flood failed to materialize as well.
In order to raise the public’s perception of comics, McCloud believed that “the challenge for comics in the Twenty First Century is not to move ‘forward’ as so many would have it, the challenge is to grow outward.” One way of doing so was for the medium to become more diverse in terms of gender, race and genres. “Comics, like other minority forms, are vital to diversifying our perceptions of the world,” he adds.
In many ways, diversity is one of the webseries greatest strengths. While television is a business that caters to the widest possible audience in order to achieve high ratings and thus a larger profit, the Internet offers the opportunity to appeal to specific niches that are deemed too small for the television industry but are still strong enough for a webseries to succeed. One of the mediums biggest success stories, Felicia Day’s The Guild, initially began life as pilot script that network executives found to “niche” for television but has amassed a large web fanbase nonetheless.
While The Guild appeals to online gamers—in addition to fans of solid storytelling—regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation, there are a multitude of equally entertaining webseries offerings that appeal to these overlooked “niches” as well. Woman creators are increasingly represented on the World Wide Web, for instance, with such quality show’s like Fourplay in LA, We Are with the Band and Next! the series. Yet another webseries, The Real Girl's Guide to Everything Else, has the very specific focus of a Lebanese lesbian writing a chick-lit novel so that she can fund a research trip to Afghanistan and came about because of its creator’s frustration with traditional media.
“Why was everything about chasing unavailable men and pining over expensive footwear?” Carmen Elena Mitchell rhetorically asked Cherry Grrl in regards to women in television and film. “Where were the conversations about politics, books, art, and our careers? And while I’m not anti-fashion, anti-relationship, or anti-girly-girl, I feel like there’s so much more to explore in women’s lives.”
Scott McCloud advocated the same philosophy in Reinventing Comics for his own medium of choice. The comic industry was just as restrictive as television it turns out, with little opportunity for minorities of any kind to break into. “When I started reading comics in the mid-Seventies, the big publishers seemed like the only game in town to a young artist,” McCloud writes. “The explosive underground market of the Sixties had begun to dwindle under official disproval, leaving a market dominated by just two companies selling superhero comics to newsstands and drug stores.”
Other problems that McCloud saw within the business of comics back in 2000 still exist in television industry today as well. For instance, network television annually launches a litany of new show’s every fall only to watch them fail in the ratings and quickly pulled off the air. Whatever attracted executives to such offerings were obviously not reflected by the television viewing audience, a symptom that is shared with any entertainment industry that is primarily profit oriented.
“Ostensibly, what any bottom-line-driven publisher looks for is the satisfaction of its customers,” McCloud argues. “But all too often, those ‘customers’ are retailers and distributors, not readers, and each staffer’s primary job may not be pleasing the reader so much as pleasing the next man up the totem pole. An entire industry merely guessing what will work are not well-equipped to gauge when it does or doesn’t.”
He then adds what could be the best reason ever given for why network television is currently witnessing such a mass exodus of its viewers: “The idea that comics stores, distributors and publishers simply ‘give the customers what they want’ is nonsense. What the customers wanted, they didn’t get and they left.”
For Scott McCloud, the inherent problems within the comic trade ultimately meant that creators needed to find a more liberating approach for their creations. Just as Joss Whedon hoped that television-style practitioners would take their wares to the Internet rather than rely on the networks, McCloud believed the future of comics depended on an equally independent-minded spirit.
“Increasingly, many of comics’ best creative minds are finding alternatives to the direct market, often forging renewed personal contact with retailers or with the readers themselves,” he remarked in Reinventing Comics. “Some even find their meager print runs liberating—a chance to rediscover the power of hands-on craftsmanship or the excitement of guerilla marketing.”
While Scott McCloud is a comic writer/artist, many of the arguments he has made through the years in his role as the “Aristotle” of his industry likewise applies to the webseries. The opportunities that the World Wide Web offers as a level playing field for creators of both comics and television-style narratives are synonymous, and the strategies utilized by practitioners of either medium are likewise transferable to the other.
“Online comics are still in their frontier stage,” McCloud points out. “Everybody is pretty much writing their own rules. As a result, a variety of different approaches is being tested in the hopes of striking gold.”
Sounds like a spot-on description of the webseries as well.
Anthony Letizia (November 8, 2010)
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