I have always mistrusted the common practice in webcomics where artists include their commentary directly beneath new pages. Often reading this extra material is comparable to watching a movie or television show with the commentary track turned on… and who elects for their first viewing to include commentary? It does a (sometimes minor, sometimes major) disservice to the work when you don’t allow it to speak for itself, and I’ve seen far too many comics lean on those blocks of text to actually convey what’s going on more than the page above does. This is a dangerous trap to fall into. When a comic simply doesn’t make any sense if I ignore the commentary I usually stop reading altogether. “It’s part of the presentation,” some say. So are indexes in books, and like all supplementary materials they should never be required reading to understand what the supplemented work is saying.
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