Artists like Bill Watterson and Winsor McCay were eager to use every inch of space they had for lush landscapes across which action rolled and sprawled in lavish, kinetic detail. But that’s about as adventurous as the layout gets. Occasionally she’ll have a slightly different format: for instance, a strip about Vikings collecting souvenir-illuminated manuscripts from sacked monasteries is eight panels arranged as two pages of four-panel blocks. Beaton’s certainly do almost all of her strips are three or four panels, like a daily, or else two tiers of three-or-four-panels, like a Sunday. Some creators have picked up on the hint-McCloud himself has made some comics in this vein-but for the most part, webcomics look a lot like newspaper comics. Creators could take advantage of what McCloud called an “infinite canvas” to produce sprawling images that scrolled across multiple screens. In the dim, pre-historic Internet dawn of 2000, Scott McCloud in Reinventing Comics proposed that the Internet would allow comics to spread and morph into fabulous shapes. The most striking thing about seeing the strips on the page is, perhaps, how un-striking it is to see the strips on the page. If you’re not familiar with webcomics, there’s a good chance that Kate Beaton will be one of the two or three examples of the genre that you’re familiar with.īeaton came out with a collected book of her strips last week published by Drawn and Quarterly. But, especially with Achewood on hiatus, Hark a Vagrant is probably the hippest web strip around, combining popularity with almost universal critical acclaim. Hark a Vagrant may not be the most popular strip online-I doubt it’s overtaken Randall Munroe’s xkcd or Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins’ Penny Arcade. Kate Beaton is the rock star of web cartoonists.

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