It is brilliant work, but...another way to waste time?

One of the wonders of the internet (and of not having a vast amount to do, now that it's the holidays) is that it's possible to stumble across some amazing creative work that people have put online. Another wonder of the internet is that some people have decided to take advantage of this new distribution medium, even if their work is very definitely paper-based.

In particular, I'm referring to Girl Genius, a webcomic produced by Phil and Kaja Foglio. The Foglios have done a lot of illustration work in the past (they drew the art on several Magic: The Gathering cards, earning them a place in both the most successful and most horrifically nerdy game of all time), and in fact were producing Girl Genius as an actual comic book for some considerable time before making the jump to the web. The reason that the Foglios made the switch, according to Websnark, was that they reckoned they could build an audience much more effectively by giving away their work for free in an online format and selling print collections off the back of that.

Now, I will freely admit that this sounds like a fairly unlikely business model. The fact that it's so easy to set up a webcomic strongly suggests that the quality of the strip is going to suffer if its competition is suddenly "experimental" strips made in MS Paint or the fifty thousand "hilariously mismatched college room-mates" strips that you can find all too easily. What's more, the standard of work that you find in a lot of comic books (well, from what I've seen, anyway - I don't actually buy comic books, so this isn't really an authoritative opinion) suggests that people buy the next issue because they want to find out what happens next, meaning that collections are rather less likely to sell.

If people held such reservations, they were unfounded in this case. The Foglios have done really pretty well out of their new venture. Why? Because their comic is absolutely freaking awesome. The artwork is of a standard that just blows you out of the water. This is especially noticeable when restrictions are placed on it, to the extent that even though the colour strips are utterly superb, I was disappointed when they moved away from the incredible things that could be done with just black and white. (And, interestingly, things look a lot better when the comic moves effectively back into monotone.)

Seriously, I cannot believe that this comic is produced at a rate of three full pages a week. Look at a fairly typical page of Questionable Content, which is generally regarded as having very good artwork (and updates 5 times a week). Yeah, it's nice to look at, but it's just not in the same league. Then if you look at something which is much more story-driven, like Sluggy Freelance, the artwork is definitely taking a back seat to the story (which it has to, given the 6 days a week update schedule), although Pete Abrams can certainly handle a pencil pretty well when the occasion demands.

Of course, conversely, with so much time being spent on the artwork, it's natural that the story won't be quite as good. Girl Genius's storyline isn't bad, by any stretch of the imagination - indeed, there's some really interesting storytelling devices being used, such as the fact that the villains of the piece are multi-layered, intelligent creations who only sometimes remind you that they are also the villains for a reason - but there are also problems. For example, although I'm not about to link to specific story-spoiling strips, there have been deaths, both of very obvious protagonists and possible antagonists, which were apparently meant to elicit an emotional reaction in the audience. The pacing and the experience we'd had with these characters, however, meant that what was actually experienced didn't go much beyond "meh, that's sad". One feels that a little more concentration on the storyline would pay dividends.

That said, I must say, this strip is still rapidly becoming one of my favourites, and will be in my collection of RSS feeds pretty much as soon as I've finished reading the archives. It's also one of the very few webcomics I've seen that I would really like to have in dead-tree format, just to look at it again. Just so long as I can avoid spending ages going through the archives when I'm supposed to be working.

(Take a guess as to how likely that is.)