Proliferating the Comic Strip

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of webcomics. I've been learning a lot about the mobile web lately, and I got to thinking about how some webcomics will probably translate onto mobile devices better than others.

Then an idea occurred to me.

What if you had a site for webcomic artists that put some constraints on the comics that could be published there in order to make them more mobile friendly. In particular, publishing only comics that are one panel wide and progress downward---IE, panel one is on top of panel two, which is on top of panel three. Then the width of the panels would be limited to some amount deemed optimal for rendering on the screens of mobile devices.

Moreover, this would make it easier to proliferate the comics across the regular web. A comic that reads from left to right is a lot more trouble to embed in a blog post, for instance, than one that reads from top to bottom. For a blog template will leave posts with a limited width--I have often found blogger's to be unsatisfactorily small--but by their nature are completely unbounded in height.

I would also want to give artists the option to enable embedding of specific panels rather than just the whole comic.

This would be asking artists to sacrifice the freedom to play around with the shape and size of their comics in order to maximize the comic's portability. It could be construed as sacrificing artistic discretion for practical purposes, but I don't really think it would be a bad thing. First of all, it's the internet, so no one would have to sign onto the site. They could go elsewhere and do whatever they wanted. Second, I actually think that being able to make the most of limitations is what good art is all about.

Think of it as like the Twitter of webcomics.

I have innumerable excuses for why I'm not pursuing this myself. But I just like the idea so much that I thought I'd put this out there. Maybe one day I'll be in a position to make the attempt; maybe someone else will see this and do something with it. Maybe nothing will come of it. But I thought it would be better to have it written down than to leave it in my mind, where no thought is safe from my fickle attention span.