If comic revolution is the name of the game here at Making Comics (dotCom), then our good friends Mark Luetke and Bizhan Khodabandeh are risking it all on the front lines. Their weapon of choice? An awesome new way to read webcomics. The Kickstarter project is called INDOOR/OUTDOOR: A New Infinite Canvas Comic System and it’s one hell of an investment for anyone who owns and operates a webcomic. Designed to scroll from page to page in a smooth, streamlined style, the Infinite Canvas is shaping up to be a very powerful tool with a gorgeous design. I reached out to Mark and Bizhan with some questions about their project and what it means for webcomics in the future.
KEVIN CULLEN: You mention on your Kickstarter page that you came up with the idea for the infinite canvas after hearing about it from Scott McCloud. What was it about his concept of utilizing the “screen as a window instead of a page” that struck such a chord with you that you decided to bring theory to reality?
BIZHAN KHODABANDEH: I used Scott McCloud’s books to teach myself the mechanics of comics and would follow his blog. McCloud’s blog often exhibited infinite canvas theory and examples of comics using the infinite canvas method. So this approach was always in the back of my mind and I really wanted to try my hand at one. After years of paying attention to what other folks were doing I made the connection that Google’s lazy loading could be utilized to make a more efficient way of displaying and updating infinite canvas comics. The crazy thing is that the mechanics are so simple that it is surprising no one has done this before. I didn’t have the expertise to do something like this. I know a decent amount of coding, but not something that is organic. Most of the coding that I’m familiar with is static or modest modifications to a CMS like WordPress. That’s where Mark comes in.
MARK LUETKE: I’ve always enjoyed experimenting with layouts based on intuition and feel rather than tradition. This often led me to make what I had always called “comic installations” that could only really be displayed on a gallery wall and have never seen print due to size and dimensions. The idea of infinite canvas on the web is the closest I will ever get to publishing these comics as they were meant to be read.
KEVIN: Very cool. I know Bizhan has been working on comics with the infinite canvas in mind. Mark, have you had a chance to test out some of your more experimental pieces on there, like Experimental Sequential 2? Or have you got a project in the works that will take full advantage of the canvas?
MARK: Something like Experimental Sequential 2 still wouldn’t really fit in our system. We’re trying to pave the cow paths and create a system that will work with how creators are already working. Your standard web comic that updates incrementally will be able to work as an infinite canvas comic. So while I’m not doing anything at the moment designed specifically for our system, I am working on comics that would do well in it.
KEVIN: The idea of the scrolling comic canvas exists and is in use by a few webcomic creators. But an “infinite” scrolling canvas…now that just sounds plain ambitious. What kinds of technical knowhow go into designing something like this? Has something along these lines ever been attempted before? And will the coding involved in this process be available for others to tweak or refine on their own?
BIZHAN: I’m not aware of something similar that uses a post based format. There are some interesting systems where you post the entire comic all at once, but not in posts. So you can’t build a following over time. These are usually finite short stories.
There is a lot of management with multiple components of the content management system or CMS, but I defer to Mark as the expert on the coding side of things. I’m mostly dealing with the audience experience and front end side of things.
KEVIN: Ah, yes! I think the scrolling comics I’ve seen are uploaded as one massive image. How apparent will it be that each page is a separate post when you’re scrolling through the comic?
BIZHAN: Each post will have it’s own title and social networking options underneath the post. So it will be obvious enough, but not so much that it will significantly break the comic’s flow.
MARK: What we are doing isn’t really a new idea. Medium does something similar for reading articles and many blogs incorporate an infinite scroll to keep the reader engaged. Whatever our end product ends up being exactly will absolutely be open to others. It will be available on github, free and opensource. Anyone will be able to fork it and do whatever they want with it.
KEVIN: A lot of webcomics out there host their comics on WordPress using themes like Comic Press and whatnot. How are you proposing to make the infinite canvas available? Will creators have to set up webspace on an infinite comic motherpage? Or will you be offering this as like a theme that plugs into sites like WordPress or Tumblr?
BIZHAN: They would upload the CMS onto a hosting provider, but it would function similar to WordPress where you will be able to navigate, edit and post installments using an online user interface. We will make all of these instructions also available online so that it’s relatively easy. There is a CMS called indexhibit that uses a similar approach.
MARK: Yep, Bizhan is spot on with this one. Our goal is to provide a tool that others can utilize. We want to be as hands off as possible.
KEVIN: I like the sound of this. How user-friendly is the interface? A lot of folks (myself included) have little-to-no programming language experience. Will we need much of a base knowledge of coding in order to get the infinite canvas up and running?
BIZHAN: The interface isn’t complete, but it will be relatively easy. Mark’s day job is to make websites accessible to artists sometimes predominantly using non-digital media. I am confident that he’ll do a great job on the back end for users, but I bet he could elaborate more on that.
MARK: Getting it up and running will require you to be able to follow some instructions carefully, much like any other cms that requires installation. Once installed and ready to go, it will be very easy to manage and won’t require any code or development experience.
KEVIN: One thing I think is super cool about the infinite canvas system is the fluidity and the uninterrupted flow of scrolling through the comic. Watching you use it on the Kickstarter video makes it look like reading comics will be a much more relaxing experience than having to constantly click or flip through pages and stop after each line of panels. Obviously the infinite canvas is designed with comics in mind, but have you given much thought to expanding the idea beyond comics, into genres like photography or as a tool for portfolios?
BIZHAN: Actually I haven’t, but there are portfolios that use a similar system. However, this isn’t really a gallery as much as it is a blog feed that on the surface looks like a gallery. You could probably use it for a portfolio, but that isn’t the intent.
MARK: When we release it into the wild, other uses like the one you describe will very likely be discovered. As I mentioned earlier the goal is to create a tool, primarily for comics, and release it for free.
As someone constantly looking to push the envelope, this Kickstarter is well worth my time and investment. But with only seven days left (as of this posting) the time to join the revolution is dwindling! So get on it, folks, and help these splendid gentlemen out. The rewards are worth it (for only 50 bucks, you can get a wicked skate deck) and the final product has the potential to permanently change the way we read comics online.
Hmm. I’ve been doing something in a similar place for my own comic, except I’m building on top of WordPress and Comicpress. It’s a horizontal-only scroll, split up into chapters that range from 1-15 screen-sized pages. Plus advertising, comments, all that kind of stuff, thanks to WP having assloads of plugins. Saves me a ton of the coding work these guys are having to do to build one from scratch. Also has all the overhead associated with WP of course.
I experimented with lazy loading but ended up just using a CDN (Photon, accessible via the Jetpack plugin) to serve up a whole chapter’s worth of pages at once. I really ought to write up a guide to what I did and/or clean up my templates (or fold them into a patch I could offer to Comicpress).
Basically it’s just a ‘taxonomy-chapters.php’ custom template, plus a custom taxonomy list plugin to get a list of links to each whole chapter.
Also I can tell these guys right now that they are going to have a bunch of people who insist on using their scroll wheel to navigate everything that trying to navigate by using the horizontal scroll bar is a dealbreaker for reading their comic. I have not found a good solution for that which does not make the experience for someone scrolling around on a Mac trackpad (like myself) utterly miserable. (Actually now that I’m thinking about it I might try implementing another idea I had sitting around for that.)
Hey Margaret, your webcomic is actually the first one that sprang to mind when I was doing the interview and checking out their Kickstarter! I couldn’t remember your website’s address. Now that I have it, I’ll link to it in the article above. Cheers!
That’s great that you were able to accomplish that with relative ease building on WordPress, but the average person doesn’t have enough of a background in coding to edit existing WordPress themes. So it might mean building from the ground up. It might also mean building a new theme. I think that it’ be great if you provided templates! I encourage you to do that.
You’re not the first to warn us about folks complaining about having to use the scroll bar. We are all making baby steps and will constantly need to update it. Once something is accessible and open source, We’re hoping that others can jump in and improve upon what we come up with. We also plan on a vertical format. The horizontal one is just one option.
Personally, I want to try to have everything accessible at once instead of by chapters. I’ve seen a few folks that use chapters, but having everything at once is the encouragement behind working with lazy loading.
PS could you share your comic? I’d love to see it!
Bizhan – if you click on Margaret Truth’s user name it auto-links to her webcomic. Definitely a beautiful comic worth looking at.
FYI I’ve packaged my own horizontally-scrolling WP theme up in something that other people can hopefully use. http://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2014/05/28/bayeux/
I figured I’d drop a note here since the e-mail exchange that prompted me to do this came about because of someone finding my comments on this blog post. *grin*
The opinions done are very interesting…painting is very important at comics artwork…there are many technics of doing that…using layers at photoshop in different ways…this reading is so nice and important…