Webcomics!

In our last class, we discussed graphic fiction and comics. I was sort of pumped to talk about this, because I thought that I enjoyed reading comics, but it turned out that I wasn’t familiar with almost everything that we discussed. That was cool too, because I learned some “history” stuff on the genre, but it also made me wonder what comics I had been reading that were somehow different from the ones we discussed. Excuse me while I do a little bit of reminiscing:

When I was younger, my comic-knowledge was entirely Japanese; that is, I read lots of manga. I worked my way through the manga section of Barnes & Noble (I didn’t know of any comic book stores nearby), and only around high school did I start to venture into the other, smaller end of the comic book shelf (simply labeled “graphic novels”). I picked up a few books that stuck with me (the BONE series was particularly fantastic), but for the most part I had trouble finding stories that I liked here. At this point, though, it was becoming pretty uncool to read manga, so I started reading a new genre of graphic fiction: webcomics.

I think webcomics are a pretty fascinating subgenre. For starters, just the fact that there are artists creating and distributing comics totally for free is pretty strange. But, of course, that opens them up to countless possibilities. It’s basically the ultimate indie: not only does the artist not have to satisfy a publisher, they also don’t have to stick to deadlines or even worry about pleasing an audience. There’s quite a range of subjects (although in my experience it’s a lot of in video game joke comics, there’s also a weird range of most genres). Besides this freedom, a webcomic is also able to utilize its medium (the internet) in ways that a traditional book cannot. The “comic” Homestuck really pushes this: it tells a story using image, text, animation, music, interactive games, and even the webpage itself. Actually, I wish I’d brought up Homestuck in class, because I think it’s a super interesting evolution of the graphic narrative.

Homestuck!

What’s the difference between the comics I read and the comics we talked about in class? I think another awesome thing about webcomics is that, since uploading a comic to the internet is infinitely easier than publishing one, there are tons to choose from. So, it’s easy for me to find the comics that feel similar to the ones I read as a kid. So, regardless of what you read in middle school, on the internet you can probably find something pleasantly similar.

Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams

Over the week I was gone, I read the two required essays by Stuart Hall – “Encoding/Decoding” – and Raymond Williams – “Technology and Society”. As was promised last class, the essays were both rather dense and hard to understand, and I regret that I couldn’t make it to last week’s class so that I could listen to a discussion about the essays, and hopefully come to a better understanding. Still, after reading both essays as well as doing a bit of extra research, I think I have an idea of what Hall and Williams wrote about.

Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” is about the way that information is given, or encoded, through media and then received and decoded by an audience. The message can be simple: one of the examples I read was of a person on television wearing a sweater. The sweater implies that it is fall or winter outside, and that the person is warm, or maybe implies an autumn walk in the woods, or even that the person is fashionable. The message that was encoded in the image of the sweater may not be the same as the one that was decoded, but it is unlikely that it would be drastically different (excluding cultural differences, which could lead to completely incorrect decoding). The decoder can interpret the code in the way that the encoder intended (in the case of the sweater) or could interpret it in the complete opposite way (a worker who misunderstands how a Bill will affect his wages, either unintentionally or intentionally).

Williams’ “Technology and Society” is about how the evolution of technology (television, in this case) affects society and how, rather than springing up from nowhere, technological progress is a part of society itself. He explains two views on this point: one that says if television had not been invented, society would be different, and another that says even if television had not been invented, some other means of distributing media would have been and society would be largely the same. Williams’ doesn’t quite seem to agree with either of these views; he says that technology is developed out of social needs at the time. In that way, it seems, the evolution of television was destined to occur, and it developed over time and over the course of many technological advances.

It’s entirely possible that I didn’t understand the text properly (I decoded it differently than the encoder intended!), because once I step back and think about what I’ve read, the theories of these two men seem somewhat small and inconsequential. Who cares why television developed, or what society would be like without it? I think I’m missing the bigger picture in these two essays. Hopefully it will come up in class, and I can try and learn what I didn’t get in my first read-through.