Searchable comics

[psyburknehtik]

Greetings, Comic Genesis,

I'm a PhD student in computer science and an intern at Adobe, and I'm looking into ways to make webcomic archives easier to search and explore. I'm hoping to get some ideas from the webcomics community.

Artists: how could search help you locate, manage, or possibly reuse your past work?
Aspiring artists: how might search make it easier to learn from the work of other artists?
Readers: how would you like to navigate the archives of your favorite comics?

I'm familiar with ohnorobot.com (a nice service, if you haven't heard of it), but I'm trying to look beyond keyword search and (hopefully) develop something more automatic. Here's one potential idea: for people learning to draw comic characters, might it be useful to explore all the different facial expressions a particular character has been drawn with?

I'd love to hear your ideas. It would also help to know a little about your webcomics background (professional? hobbyist? longtime reader? etc.)

Thanks!

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Oh cool, a noob who's not a spambot.

Well, off the top of my head, as a reader I haven't really had any problems reading other people's archives. I'd say 95% of the sites I've been to are organized well enough that I can access the things I want to see.

As an artist, I manage my archives on my own- they're in my computer, some on a flash drive, and then I have the original paper copies as well, so I personally would not have a need for an outside party to take care of them

[McDuffies]

I prefere comic archives in a simple html with usual navigation. It may be that I'm used to that, but people making more complicated navigation usually gets irritating after a while of going through archives. I like when the next page is pre-loading while I'm reading the current one. It speeds things up even on fast connection.
An archive page that has links to every single comic page is a lot of help for browsing. I sometimes load a bunch of pages and let them sit there.
Obviously, making reasonable-size chapters makes finding a particular episode moch easier. Most of comics that I read have enormous chapters that make searching through them futile. Sub-chapters would be good.
One thing I'd like to see that noone's done by now is some kind of bookmark, to know where I last stopped reading. Obviously, I could just save the last page I read in my favourites, but if I was reading a comic a few pages at a time, I'd always have to add a new favourite and delete the old one, or have duplicates. Also I don't tend to read webcomics daily, I read archives, then wait for a month or two for episodes to pile up, then catch up. Bookmarks would be great if they saved where I last read, seriously there's a few great comics I'm not reading simply because I've lost the place where I left of in their massive archives. I mean, I could fix all that by timely using of favourites, but it just requires more organizing than I'm usually putting in my webcomic reading.

One thing that could be helpful as an extension of ohnorobot is synopses and descriptions. People often appear on forum, asking for the name of some comic they've read but forgot the name, all they have is very vague descriptions of the story, characters, or particular scenes. There may be a room for improvement in there, parhaps.

I'm not too crazy about re-using material, even as reference points, if I want a pose or a facial expression or anything, I always prefere searching the outside source. Can't say that I make a lot of reference sheets for characters or scenes, but my comics are never of such volume that I'd need a search engine to find what I need in them. I usually just keep all previous images in one folder, and I can always just flip through them if I need to see specifics of some room or a costume.
I think that for an artist, there'd be much more benefit in ability to efficiently search outside reference sources. Not that it's hard to google a car or a horse picture if you need them.

About me - I'm a hobbist, comics have been my passion all my live, but in the end I didn't turn them into a career or anything, so a devoted hobbist.

Say, are there now PhD theses about webcomics?

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

One thing I'd like to see that noone's done by now is some kind of bookmark, to know where I last stopped reading. Obviously, I could just save the last page I read in my favourites, but if I was reading a comic a few pages at a time, I'd always have to add a new favourite and delete the old one, or have duplicates. Also I don't tend to read webcomics daily, I read archives, then wait for a month or two for episodes to pile up, then catch up. Bookmarks would be great if they saved where I last read, seriously there's a few great comics I'm not reading simply because I've lost the place where I left of in their massive archives. I mean, I could fix all that by timely using of favourites, but it just requires more organizing than I'm usually putting in my webcomic reading.

There is code for this, but I'm not sure how it works, myself. I know SmackJeeves has it as an available option.

[psyburknehtik]

Say, are there now PhD theses about webcomics?

Perhaps not about webcomics per se, but certainly about tools and techniques that are useful to readers/creators of them.

[Bookwyrms2]

In my case I have a story based comic, and it is meant to be read in order. It doesn't really need much in the way of additional navigation beyond the ability to find story arcs and pick up where you left off. I can see the benefit of more advanced search options for archival / glossary purposes, but the utility would have to be balanced by the complexity of implementation. Every section of my webpage that requires maintenance is less time that I can spend creating the comic itself.

[[geoduck]]

I use the OhNoRobot service to create a searchable transcription archive of my strips. I have so many now, it's helpful when I need to track down a specific plotpoint.

[robotthepirate]

One thing I'd like to see that noone's done by now is some kind of bookmark, to know where I last stopped reading. Obviously, I could just save the last page I read in my favourites, but if I was reading a comic a few pages at a time, I'd always have to add a new favourite and delete the old one, or have duplicates. Also I don't tend to read webcomics daily, I read archives, then wait for a month or two for episodes to pile up, then catch up. Bookmarks would be great if they saved where I last read, seriously there's a few great comics I'm not reading simply because I've lost the place where I left of in their massive archives. I mean, I could fix all that by timely using of favourites, but it just requires more organizing than I'm usually putting in my webcomic reading.

When I go through archives these days using IE (which I'd much rather not) it asks me if I want to replace my old bookmark, which solves this for me.

As an artist (pfft) my comic is far too small so far to benefit from this, I use my past drawings and sketches for all my references. Even if there comes a point when I have shelf upon shelf of folders with old comics in if I want to recreate a character, expression or effect from earlier on I'd much rather use the original drawings because they're easier to work from than the finished image.

If there were a comic with a particular style of art I'd like to learn from I'd probably want to just flick through, picking images to draw. But I don't really do that so...

As a reader I go from front to back, and if I fancy rereading from the middle afterward there's usually a little dropdown menu for that for select a chapter.

Simple is generally better.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

When I go through archives these days using IE (which I'd much rather not) it asks me if I want to replace my old bookmark, which solves this for me.

The trouble comes from when the comic you're reading works like the ones we have on comicgenesis. That is, the most recent comic comes up as the index/home page. So if you've bookmarked the most recent comic, the bookmark doesn't get saved as comicyouread.com/comic112, it just gets saved as comicyouread.com, and then when you click that bookmark it doesn't take you back to comicyouread.com/112, just the website itself, which may have moved well past comic 112 by now. You can kind of escape this fate by bookmarking the page preceding the one you've read, or figuring out what the url for the comic will be once it's no longer the most recent one on the site, but it's not an automatic thing.

[robotthepirate]

When I go through archives these days using IE (which I'd much rather not) it asks me if I want to replace my old bookmark, which solves this for me.

The trouble comes from when the comic you're reading works like the ones we have on comicgenesis. That is, the most recent comic comes up as the index/home page. So if you've bookmarked the most recent comic, the bookmark doesn't get saved as comicyouread.com/comic112, it just gets saved as comicyouread.com, and then when you click that bookmark it doesn't take you back to comicyouread.com/112, just the website itself, which may have moved well past comic 112 by now. You can kind of escape this fate by bookmarking the page preceding the one you've read, or figuring out what the url for the comic will be once it's no longer the most recent one on the site, but it's not an automatic thing.

Ah. That's a good point. I was thinking in more simple terms of getting halfway through a comic then wanting to come back later. I usually only leave comics for a long period of time when my computer breaks in which case nothing short of online stored bookmarks would save me. If I remember what date I last read the comic its pretty easy to find the right page presuming the comic has a calendar.

What would people think of a comic equivelent of facebook? Adding the comics you read. Seeing who else reads them and what else they read. Getting updated when a comic updates. Just an idea that popped into my head so I don't mind if you think its stupid (I rarely think things through). Maybe something like that exists already.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Well, although obviously facebook is used for a lot more than just comics, many artists create pages for their comics that people can add and follow. It's not a perfect system, of course, as there are perhaps fewer people who like a given webcomic enough to want to add it on facebook, but it's similar to what you're saying.

[Wendybird]

I use piperka.net to read comics. It keeps track of where I am in all the comics I read. It can't handle all kinds of archives but it works well with the more-or-less standard archive styles like the one here on CG. I'm pretty happy with the reading experience I have there, with both story and gag comics. And as a creator of two more story-style comics this is the kind of thing I would like to see become more popular, because it makes it easier for people to keep their place in a story if they want to.

There are a lot of places to find comics, rate comics and review comics but I'm intrigued with the idea of a more multifunctional site, kind of like facebook but exclusively for webcomics, that would make it easier to find comics similar to ones you already like. Once I've found someone's comic I don't have trouble reading but it's the process of finding a comic you enjoy that I'm most interested in improving. A lot of people have already tried this but I think the key may be smoother, easier execution. Most people don't bother to put their comic on all the lists because of all the information that needs to go in. And when less information is collected, the sorting is less effective. Maybe you could find some way of aggregating lists of webcomic URLs, retrieving information from the sites automatically, like metadata, and using it to do some initial sorting?

[McDuffies]

I'm gonna try that piperka thing.

What would people think of a comic equivelent of facebook? Adding the comics you read. Seeing who else reads them and what else they read. Getting updated when a comic updates. Just an idea that popped into my head so I don't mind if you think its stupid (I rarely think things through). Maybe something like that exists already.

It's worth a try like anything else, though I can already think of a few things against it:

1. It has been proven that it's virtually impossible to get entire webcomic scene in one place, it's very prone to dividing into micro communities. I can't imagine a site for webcomics being globally accepted the way facebook is.
2. I'm afraid that, like most of other webcomic promotion sites, it would end up promotiong sites based on popularity, so only already popular sites would get additional publicity.
3. It's another time-sucker, I dunno how much people would use it when there's already dozens of similar time-sucking sites around.
4. I don't want other people to know how often I'm reading Oglaf.

Then again it might also be the greatest thing for webcomics right now, seeing how everything's about social networks these days.

[robotthepirate]

Posted a message similar to this earlier but then my computer went a tad funny.

Well, although obviously facebook is used for a lot more than just comics, many artists create pages for their comics that people can add and follow. It's not a perfect system, of course, as there are perhaps fewer people who like a given webcomic enough to want to add it on facebook, but it's similar to what you're saying.

I already have this. Only 14 fans so far but its early days. It gives me a chance to remind people who have said they like the comic that it still exists. Early today I made an event to advertise the completetion of chapter 1 (which will be finished on Sunday [Exited!]) which is cool.

I thought lots about the social network thing but I wont tell you my idea just because every time i try to I end up waffling.

[McDuffies]

How hard would it be to implement a sistem symilar to Facebook? Without all the apps and farm games and crap it would probably be simpler, but it still looks like a whole lot of code that isn't widely available like wiki or forum code.