By Margaret Wong
Cartoons have been a source of entertainment over many years. Many
forms of cartoons exist, and over the years it has traversed through
different mediums as well. www.magicinkwell.com
is an online cartoon site. It can be summed up in one phrase: comic
online. There is nothing there that you cannot find in a regular comic.
It has a daily strip, a weekly strip, info on the artist, and places
where you can order the cartoon paraphernalia. But that is all there
is. Everything is static, and except for a little convenience of seeing
the archived strips, as well as new strips, without picking up a paper,
it really has no other purpose.
The look and feel of the site is wonderful, but the daily strip can
easily be incorporated into a portal site or other mediums. Having
a separate site for this one set of comics has generated a surprising
amount of traffic as its potential did not seem that great. Since
comics are not commonly advertised in cross mediums, or even in the
medium it is being presented, I attribute the traffic to good old
traditional word-of-mouth. That method has been more successful than
any other method so far. However I do believe the traffic is also
mostly from repeat visitors.
Unlike news web sites like The Times, where a fundamental experiential
difference exists between reading news scrolling across the screen
and actually holding a paper that is solid and permanent, comics online
are less turbulent and creates less contrast from your usual Sunday
Comics. www.magicinkwell.com
especially does not show a contrast, since it does not have animation
or anything that differs from the paper presentation of its cartoons.
Since comics have always been treated as individual objects instead
of one big mass in connection to the actual paper it is printed on,
having an online comic does not effect the experience for the reader.
If they like a specific cartoon, they can print it out and paste it
on the wall or door just like regular comics.
The social impact of the move from paper to web is not specific.
With news, it has had its ups and downs. With cartoon, however, it
does not seem to be as drastically revolutionary. Similar to many
other forms of expression an online comic is a personal space for
the amateur cartoonist to display his or her work without the administrative
process of publication and syndication. But along with this easy access
comes the issues of copyright infringement and the ease of which it
can be done now the comic is publicly accessible via Web. Cartoonists
in the past already had problems protecting their products from unlicensed
reprinting and production of paraphernalia. Now the difficulty is
raised to a whole new level. Similar to the dissemination of amateur
music, maybe it is accessing more people than it would have in a local
paper, but there are downsides to consider. Overall, the online comic
has a chance to survive all this if it can keep politics out of it
and stick to entertaining its readers like it is intended.