Some of you know that I’ve never been satisfied with how comics are presented online. Most of the time, they’re a direct scan of a comic page, with no distinction made for the new possibilities granted us with the electronic medium. It’s a click, read, click, reload, scroll, repeat affair that jars the reader out of the experience of the reading process. Part of this problem is the layout of comic pages themselves, others are what I believe to be a lack of foresight within the comic creating community. Why are we replicating what is already available on the printed page? I’m not knocking print books; I own thousands of them and in many cases, it’s still how I prefer to read comics. That’s why Variables will remain in its current reading format.

But that’s not the only way to present comic books to electronic medium. Early attempts to “liven things up” were made with motion comics but those, by and large, have failed pretty miserably. Taking a static image and animating it creates a hybrid cartoon that isn’t as good as a regular cartoon and ceases to be a comic book. I long ago thought that there has to be a better way of doing it… a way to lose the character animation but still make the comic more dynamic to the reader. Before I started Variables, I experimented with this idea using Adobe Flash but quickly decided that it was too much work for one person to handle. In addition to that workload, Flash has struggled over the past few years. Apple’s iOS devices (iPod, iPhone, iPad) don’t support the software. Given that tablets are quickly becoming a force in the comic book community, going with that solution wasn’t going to work no matter how much work I put into it. So I gave up and shelved the idea.

Then, a few months ago, Mark Waid started rumbling about creating a new kind of webcomic. Last month, he launched ThrillBent, a webcomic-only platform that was to be the testbed for some of the ideas he had for the medium. I immediately fell in love with the idea and saw that the technology they were using was actually quite easy to use and could be replicated for my own site. I thought it over for awhile and earlier in the week, I decided to test out how it would work for my own comic.

The test went really well. I asked a few people in the community to take a look and most of the readers thought it was a great way to read a comic book. Oddly enough, most of the webcomic creators I asked hated the idea, with the exception of Don Garvey of the upcoming comic Echo Rift. Don is also experimenting with a similar system so we were on the same page almost immediately. We bounced a few ideas back and forth and admittedly, this is far from a perfect system right now. I think it takes too long to load a page, my art wasn’t created with this format in mind, and there are niggling problems that still need to be sorted out. But it’s a hell of a good start. It’s a solid proof-of-concept that I think will change the way we think about comic books in years to come. In the coming weeks, all of Variables will be available in this format. But if you like the traditional viewer, don’t worry. That will also be available for those who wish to read static pages of the book.

I could go on for days but it’s probably better if I just show you the work. I hope you enjoy it and I want feedback feedback FEEDBACK on this. Do you love it? Let me know! Do you hate it? Let me know! This is new ground and while I’m excited to be breaking it, I also realize that I’m going to do a lot of things wrong before I do them right.

Without further ado, take a look at Variables: Flux 2002!

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