HTML5 Comic
**Update: Best viewed in Chrome. Seems to be extremely glitchy in Safari. Plays fine on my iPad but not on desktop. Will fiddle and fix soon..**
Wahey! My first interactive html5 comic with sound AND animation! We truly are living in the modern age if a scrud like me can make a html5 comic.
I’ve been keeping a keen eye on other html5 comics and interactive webcomics but I’ve yet to find one that really makes use of narration by the artist. I love Bifter and the innovative way they use SVG but I wanted to make a comic that would let me speak and could be more or less understood with out interaction.
Interactive comics have huge potential if done right, I remember seeing on the news about ‘motion comics’ where they cut up lame Spiderman comics and have him swinging between buildings. Wow.
I think the most obvious, easy to implement and powerful application for html5 storytelling is allowing the option to hear the author. Granted my voice sounds like a whiney street vendor but it occured to me that after writing and drawing 100′s of comic pages over the years, nobody has heard me speak. This would definitely help me for some of the nuttier and murkier stories in Spazzmoid that are based in Dublin.
Listen to the funny out takes of the recording process:
This was made in Hype but just as I was half way through it I got a mail from Smith Micro the makers of Manga Studio about their new html5 comic tool MotionArtist so I’m going to try it out for my next html5 comic project. Although their website made me feel ill looking at it.
There are obviously a few snags in the above comic like:
-Audio won’t stop if another panel is clicked
-No feedback to the user about the duration of each panel although it does jump back to start.
If you are a html/Java maestro and would like to collaborate in some coding PLEASE drop me a line. Code hurts me deeply. Like salt on a slug I curl up into a hissing ball on my desk every time I need to code.
More interactive HTML5 comics soon. I definitely want to make one in Flash ( I know, I know…) just for old times. I made this animated short in Flash last week for the design company Wukomi I’m part of and it is a million times more versatile and fluid that either Hype or Adobe Edge the two current leaders in HTML5 animation.