Last night, I spent 30 minutes saving copies of all of the Cameron images as versions with his suit on. I was using the suit as a paperdoll, top layer and some of the expressions had shoulders that didn’t quite match up so it was just a bit annoying to have to adjust layers to manage that. Now Cam has his full range of emotions at work as well as at home.
(Would that we all could have that.)
Just a little housekeeping – went through and changed all the “[ READ FROM THE BEGINNING ]” links to “[ SH After Dark Archive ]”. The first one worked well when there were only a few strips, but once there was enough that pagination kicked in, the “Forwards” link to the next page would dump someone on page two going backwards. Kind a timeloop, but if you ended up in the middle somewhere.
From the Archive page, you can see all of the strips and choose your own continuity. This seems appropriate to the who “outside continuity” thing going on here.
Translating the format of storytelling from one context to another always necessitates making decisions about what to emphasize and what to cut.
For example, within the context of long-form fiction, you have the space to create nuance. The shadows of what is not said but implied can be used over time to create the shading and contradictions that add up to realism. With a comic, there are only a limited number of panels and limited number lines of dialogue per panel. There’s a pacing between strips and the way that a grouping of strips can add up to a greater sum, but by necessity of the form there is a sparseness to comics that is different from prose.
Which is all to say that as a creator there’s a certain amount of experimenting that happens when trying a new format. And as a researcher (and long-time tumblr user), I was curious what people enjoy. I blazed three posts: one that’s a bit quirky (outcome: 9 notes), one that’s a bit stereotypical, talking about the Breath of the Wild sequel (outcome: 11 notes), and the one that has a flipping Bourdieu punchline (49 notes, including several reblogs).
Never change, tumblr. Never change.
