Waffle

While you're waiting for new Feral updates, go take a gander at the mirror site on Drunk Duck, where the revised version of The Corby Tribe starts its run today!

Back in 2001, I really wanted to experiment with a comics format that America hadn't seen in so long, few readers were even willing to recognise it as comics. The format of a row of panels with a block of captions underneath is a throwback to the early days of newspaper comics, when word balloons were by no means universal. In the US, the captioned comic format is best represented by the old Prince Valiant Sunday pages, but in Europe, it was both very common and very enduring. The Dutch comic Tom Poes ran in this format until creator Marten Toonder*)'s retirement in 1986 and was re-run in some papers for a decade and a half afterwards. The British comic Rupert Bear ran, and still runs, in a similar format, only with verse.

In the late 1990s, there seemed to be a minor revival of the format in the Netherlands, with artist Eric Heuvel contributing a captioned comic to the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper.

As publication went on, I ran up against a problem: I just wasn't that great a prose writer and couldn't churn it out day after day. Over the two or so years that the story ran originally, I ended up diluting the format. So in the end, it looked like every other strip out there.

Drunk Duck doesn't support this format well (there is no option for adding formatted text in the place I need to add it), so I'm using this as an opportunity to learn how to do desktop publishing using Scribus. It's been many years since I last used any DTP software. The new revision will stick more tightly to the format and may or may not have substantial text revisions. There may be an e-book at the end of the process.

*) The characters in Mr. Toonder's work were anthropomorphic animals, and to an English speaker, his name may sound like a furry pseudonym; it is not. As someone who often gets his name misread, I sympathize.

Tags: Captioned comics, Rerun, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, The Corby Tribe

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 8:21 am and is filed under Work: ROCR discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.