Owen Williams
English 351
Website Critique #3: A Website Genre Analysis
Preparing for my creation project, I searched the web for examples of non-traditional web-based comics. After finding many examples of traditional linear comic strips, I found an article by Simon Sharwood entitled “TheRebirth of Comics” that helped me clarify my intentions for this project. In the article, Scott McCloud is quoted saying, “When digital media comes into collision with an art form like comics, it has the ability to bring out what is unique about the medium…In comics, things change right away. You're no longer confined to a rectangle. You can create a map of time that you move into and navigate through in ways unlike any other art form.” These ideas lead me to ask: how can I best take advantage of this pliable canvas known as the web?
Through this article I also found a collection of new media work by the artist Daniel Merlin Goodbrey ( that helped me begin to understand how I might be able to answer my question. His work caught my eye because of the experimentation with the medium and the uniqueness of his work. Of most interest to me are his hyperfiction pieces. But his collection of work goes back about five years and presents an interesting evolution. His work isn’t necessarily the epitome of all web-based art, but he has developed a technology, the tarquin engine, that especially draws my interest. But before I dive into this specific technology, I want to look at examples of more traditional web-based comics, and the evolution of his work that led to the tarquin engine.
One of his regularly updated pieces, “Brain Fist,” is an example of a traditional linear narrative. Each piece is six panels, two per row, three rows total, with each panel the same size. It’s what’s been used in comic books and the newspaper funnies for years. This is an effective means of telling a story but it really doesn’t take advantage of the medium. You could print it out, hand it to someone to read, and they’d probably get the same thing out of it.
In “Rust” he uses animation and the frame of the web browser window in non-traditional ways. He moves the cells down or across in different directions. Page five is especially of interest to me because he uses the table cells to create a series of boxes much like the traditional comic strip, but instead intermixed text and images.
It’s with this next piece you begin to see hints of the future tarquin engine. In “The April Murders” he uses a vertical canvas, with lines the guide your eye down the page, much like the tarquin engine, but you need to use the scroll bar to move up and down. This method works, but seems cumbersome compared to some of his more recent work.
Going in a completely different direction, I’m really impressed with the piece “Brain Slide.” The navigation of the story is unlike any of his other work. You’re presented with what appears to be a traditional linear comic strip, but the text in the four panels informs the reader that “the comic is all around you.” So you start moving your cursor around and more panels appear around the first four. You click on those and the space shifts. Panels are adjusted to give the reader navigational clues about which direction to go. There are definitely a finite number of paths you can take, but the method of delivery creates a surreal feeling of infinite navigation, like you’re swimming around in the dark. I think part of this feeling comes from the music playing in the background of this piece, a repetitive ambient snippet of audio. The sound reminds me of something sliding around. This piece feels more like an experience than a story. I really love it.
He has a much more work on his website, but I want to focus on two pieces that use his Macromedia Flash based tarquin engine. The engine, as he describes it, is an “infinite canvas.” The technology behind this is a Macromedia Flash file containing a series of Action Script routines. As I have little to no experience with Flash, I’m not exactly sure what that means and will have to take his word on that one. Or as another web artist, Austin Kleon, described the tarquin engine, “you can make huge, labyrinth-like comics with dead ends and web-like paths, that automatically zoom when you click the panels.”
The piece “PoCom-UK-001” was the debut of this technology. This piece was originally presented on a wall as a series of panels, read from right to left, like the web-based version of this piece. Initially, it seems like the two are a complete contrast. But if you consider how the eye follows the story for both means of presentation, they seem more alike than different. On the web, clicking slightly disrupts the user’s experience when they have to click to move along the story. But compared to the navigational means of other types of web-based comic, this method seems so much more fluid, like moving your eye around the giant physical wall.
I had a novice web user test this page for usability. To start, I had the site at the welcome screen. The user immediately clicked on the box to load the main part of the site. They stated they had “no idea what to do” after the story loaded. She commented that she felt like she should locate the box with the picture from the welcome screen, but she wasn’t sure where it was. She thought it was on the right side, but wasn’t sure where exactly. She wished she had seen where the box flew. Because she wasn’t sure where to click, she wondered if she was just supposed to click anywhere to start the story. She thought the fourth box from the right might be the place to start because it was darker than the others. She started to click on the right side of the box and eventual found the house she recognized from the welcome screen. After reading the first cell she clicked on the arrow between the two cells but found the screen zoomed out. Again she felt disoriented and lost. Her next comment pretty much summed up her experience: “This site wasn’t designed to make me feel dumb, right?” After trying to figure out the arrow system and getting lost a few times, she finally got the hang of the navigation and made her way through the story quickly and easily. A couple of times she wanted to zoom out to see the entire structure but couldn’t figure out how to do that. After finishing the story, she commented that when the story first loaded she thought it wasn’t a story, but more like the diagram for a programming language or storyboard. Overall, she felt it wasn’t efficient and had to click way too much.
This next piece, Icarus Tangents, is a more recent example of Goodbrey’s work and uses the latest version of his tarquin engine. I really like the feel of this piece. It combines the traditional series of panels with the infinite canvas concept he creates with his engine. I’m not sure if this is from an update in the engine, but I like how panels can be contained within panels. I had the same user test this site with much more success than the earlier piece. She commented that she was much more comfortable with the story because she was familiar with the traditional linear comic structure with the four primary panels. She also felt like the sub-panels were much easier to follow because they were within the larger panels. She commented that the line that connected the first and second boxes helped her understand the navigation of the story. She felt like the cursor giving the user directional feedback was biggest improvement between the first and second piece.
As Goodbrey states on the first page of his website, he’s just “trying to figure out what comics are what they might become.” I think my intentions for this project are similar. I’m repurposing an excerpt of a story I wrote several years ago, but my primary interest in the project, similar to his comment, is to discover a new way to tell the story. Through close consideration of a number of his pieces, I have begun to form a response to the question I posed to myself at the beginning. I think the most enlightening point of this critique came from my usability study when I realized my user was so frustrated with the technology that she essentially abandoned the story the writer was trying to tell. So, while I’m trying to break out of that rectangle, I need to keep my reader in sight, and like we’ve said all semester, don’t make them think.