Decompression

[Drowemos]

Does...








...Decompression....










...work in....












.... webcomics?

[Alschroeder]

About as well as it does in regular comics.

Personally, I think it's a little overused in regular comics, but my tastes run more to the Silver Ageish comics that told more in one comic than most comics tell in six these days.

But that's my opinion ONLY, and there are certainly many comics who use decompression well. ---Al

[CaptainClaude]

perhaps there's more of a place for it in webcomics seeing as there's no need to fit so much story to a certain pagecount.

perhaps you're a wanker if that's all you put on a page when you're updating sporadically though.

Anyway, it's very very very very very tired if you ever watched sealab 2021 thats for sure. two thirds of their punchlines were just decompression.

[Dallawalla]

Would it be sily of me to ask what decompression is?

[Drowemos]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_(comics)

In short Decompression is using panels with just images to convey mood and timing. Long pauses are illustrated in the comic instead of a text bubble with “…”. Action scenes are drawn out over many pages as if they were in slow motion. It is a style that focuses on the art instead of the text. The idea is trying to simulate a movie with the comic.

If you take a look at my now dead comic Uesutan. The first couple of pages are examples of decompression.

http://www.uesutan.com/d/20070218.html
http://www.uesutan.com/d/20070311.html
http://www.uesutan.com/d/20070325.html
http://www.uesutan.com/d/20070404.html

Nothing happens. It is setting a mood. But I feel it doesn’t quite work in the webcomic format.

The thing is in a webcomic you update a page at a time. So a page of a character just staring out into space may be powerful in a full comic but if that is the only page a person sees that day or even that week it could be very boring. Two pages of decompression could mean two weeks of nothing happening.

Also paging through the archive is not like reading a book. The individual pages are more separated and have less of a emotional connection from one to the other.

[KWill]

The thing is in a webcomic you update a page at a time. So a page of a character just staring out into space may be powerful in a full comic but if that is the only page a person sees that day or even that week it could be very boring. Two pages of decompression could mean two weeks of nothing happening.

Also paging through the archive is not like reading a book. The individual pages are more separated and have less of a emotional connection from one to the other.

I'd say it depends more on your update schedule and the quality of your art. Two weeks of nothing happening are pretty bad and showing off stick figures is a tad underwhelming as well.

But that doesn't mean that it isn't appropriate at all where webcomics are concerned, the medium just promotes other types of story telling over decompression.

[Dallawalla]

Thanks guys.

[Alschroeder]

Nothing happens. It is setting a mood. But I feel it doesn’t quite work in the webcomic format.

The thing is in a webcomic you update a page at a time. So a page of a character just staring out into space may be powerful in a full comic but if that is the only page a person sees that day or even that week it could be very boring. Two pages of decompression could mean two weeks of nothing happening.

Good point.

You can't go far in the other direction, either. If you have a complicated plot, you can't have an explanation that covers several pages, because the reader will only get PART of the explanation. The only way to do it is to do partial explanations---explain one plot point on one page, and then later deal with another plot point.

---Al

[Mr.GtF]

I think I've used this decompression thing before now.

But now that I've become aware of this concept, I'll be consciously aware of it while drawing and I'll be constantly questioning myself whether or not I should be using it! Am I overusing it? Am I not using it enough? Should I perhaps cram loads more stuff into one strip to make up for a particularly quiet one?! Should I possibly try to find a happy medium by drawing consistantly while conveying the mood by playing an audio file of myself making atmospheric noises into the microphone everytime the webpage opens? Should I instruct the reader to read the comic only when they are sitting in a suitably atmospheric place, like in a misty wood at night, or in a dark cellar or in the twisted metal bowels of an abandoned oil rig while being chased by a rapist murderer of some sort, possibly a really ugly one?
I just don't know anymore!

I JUST DON'T KNOW!

[Bustertheclown]

The thing is in a webcomic you update a page at a time. So a page of a character just staring out into space may be powerful in a full comic but if that is the only page a person sees that day or even that week it could be very boring. Two pages of decompression could mean two weeks of nothing happening.

Also paging through the archive is not like reading a book. The individual pages are more separated and have less of a emotional connection from one to the other.

I could go on and on and on about this particular block of points in the conversation, but I'll save everyone the text wall.

To one end, I agree that decompression may not work too well for a comic that updates a page or two a week, since that single page of mood-setting "nothing" is going to comprise a pretty large chunk of someone's weekly, monthly, or even yearly experience of the comic. I also find that this particular technique is quite overused in the webcomic world, thanks to it's popularity in the manga that so many webcomics are trying to emulate. If one chooses to update their comic a page at a time, then one should be mindful of what that weekly allotment of space is going to be used for, and use the space more prudently. After all, as important to the author as such things like mood may be, if they're only handing out a page at a time, then things like story progression might rather take precedence.

However, I also think that the "page at a time" method of storytelling for webcomics has seen its purpose largely outmoded by the evolution of what webcomic storytelling styles have become. So, perhaps the solution to proper webcomic decompression is simply uploading a block of pages at a time. Also, the problem of paging through archives, and the solitary feel that having a 1:1 comic page to webpage ratio can create can be solved by uploading that block of comic pages to a single webpage. After all, we are now living in the days of fast internet connections and powerful servers for most, so the speed and load of opening twenty comic pages at once isn't going to be painfully felt by too many.

[Jekkal]

Ideally, every page should be important. If you're gonna do a single-panel page (and I do 'em every 20 pages or so myself), it better have something important going on, and not just wordlessness.

Everything else is a cover page.

[Joel Fagin]

Without even knowing what this is, I sort of covered it in an article for Comixtalk. Basically, with updates coming just once a day at best and once a week on average, you absolutly must progress the plot at least a little. Something has got to happen. Decompression is fine but it's geared towards when you have time and pages to play with, as with a printed graphic novel. Webcomics are the reverse of that.

- Joel Fagin

[Bustertheclown]

Without even knowing what this is, I sort of covered it in an article for Comixtalk. Basically, with updates coming just once a day at best and once a week on average, you absolutly must progress the plot at least a little. Something has got to happen. Decompression is fine but it's geared towards when you have time and pages to play with, as with a printed graphic novel. Webcomics are the reverse of that.

- Joel Fagin

I keep meaning to write up a rebuttal to that article. Perhaps one day, when my free time isn't squandered on cheap booze and cheaper women.

[Joel Fagin]

I keep meaning to write up a rebuttal to that article. Perhaps one day, when my free time isn't squandered on cheap booze and cheaper women.

Do it!

- Joel Fagin

[Alschroeder]

Don't you mean do THEM?

Oh, you mean the ARTICLE, not the cheaper women....

Nevermind.---Al

[Deathbringer]

.h

[Deathbringer]

[[geoduck]]

I sort of do it with my comic, although I too had never heard the word before this thread. I do strips that just wander around the Mansion of E, showing bits and pieces of the environment, without any/much dialogue. I do try and include some scrap of plot/background information in each strip, however minor it may be some days.

[Kisai]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_(comics)

In short Decompression is using panels with just images to convey mood and timing. Long pauses are illustrated in the comic instead of a text bubble with “…”. Action scenes are drawn out over many pages as if they were in slow motion. It is a style that focuses on the art instead of the text. The idea is trying to simulate a movie with the comic.

Unfortunately (as others have stated) it doesn't work that well in webcomics as the update frequency is not high enough. To give you a point on how this is not effective, take a long running webcomic and see how much "real time" is taken up in respect to the length of the story. If you read a years worth of archives that comprises of 122 pages and the "real time" in the comic that has passed was only about an hour, then I think the author either got too caught up in talking head explanations or frame-by-frame telling the story.

Decompression may work in short bursts in webcomics, but for example, if you were to draw out 50 some poses in a battle sequence, only to have the real time in the comic pass be about 2 minutes, I think you'll lose the readers who have short attention spans. It may be more effective if you can decompress across only 3 comics (that take real world time one week) instead of 50.

One needs to take into account where it is in the archives. Someone reading from the beginning may get bored if the art isn't interesting enough across the decompression, where as if it was the current comic, someone may come across it in the middle of the decompression, click back a few times and "not get it" and pass. I know when someone has linked me to a comic, if I can't see what's so great about it 3 comics from the current or 3 from the start, I won't be coming back.

If it's a long string of comics that take the place of one story arc, where other story arcs would normally have dialog it may also be effective. In this case it may simply be better to draw out all the comics in advance and upload those simultaneously instead of spanning them across the normal update schedule.

[Alschroeder]

I'll mention one comic that uses decompression well, without obliterating the point of the page...8:!. Check out
http://yeahduff.comicgen.com/d/20071026.html or http://yeahduff.comicgen.com/d/20070727.html ---and again, he doesn't use this with every update, and his storytelling is always good, even without any dialogue. It's not hugely decompressed, just enough to do well in webcomics.---Al