Understanding Web Comics

Boris Karloff, drawn in Procreate on my iPad Pro. I’m trying to echo the style of the original 1964 ‘Thriller’ comic.

The Broken Leg — From my homemade comic from January 1965

Boris Karloff makes an appearance in my homework for my latest free online FutureLearn course, Infinite Canvas: Making and Understanding Web Comics from the Comics Studies department at the University of Dundee.

We spent the first couple of weeks defining web comics and discussing how they might be used. There were also practical tutorials, including a run-through of my favourite comic-making program, Clip Studio Paint, plus suggestions for getting started with free programs, notably Madefire, where you can compile and publish your web comic, complete with animations.

Now, in the final week, we’re given the opportunity to develop our own web comic.

The Broken Leg

We’ve been looking at a few medical public information comics, which got me thinking about the first time that I landed myself in hospital. On Boxing Day 1964, when I was aged thirteen, I was hurrying home to watch Fred Hoyle’s Universe when I slipped on the icy pavement and broke my leg.

My spell in Ward G gave me a fresh insight into the world of comics. As a child, I’d always read a weekly comic, starting with Playhour during my infant school days and moving on to the Eagle at junior school. Shortly before starting at the grammar school, I’d been wowed by the use of colour photography and illustration in the new educational magazine Look & Learn, so I’d moved on to that.

The newspaper trolley, which made a daily round of the wards, gave me the chance to dip into American comics for the first time. The black and white Weird Tales was a favourite, because of the variety of stories packed into one issue but it had a rival in Boris Karloff’s Thriller, illustrated in colour.

I’d love to draw a web comic which combined my experience in hospital, as illustrated here in my ballpoint pen and crayon drawings from 1965, and combine that with the escape that I was able to make into the world of comics and science-fiction short stories (I borrowed books from the hospital library trolley). I can still remember a dozen of these stories: performing ants, hypnotic pebbles, post-apocalyptic New York (yes, even back then New York was the go-to city for apocalypses), a dimensionally unstable house, a time-travelling mystery hound, space age weather manipulation, assorted aliens . . .

I’ll draw a few sample frames but I won’t have time to illustrate the whole comic because a week from today I start my next FutureLearn course, Invisible Worlds: Understanding the Natural Environment, based on the Eden Project’s Invisible Worlds exhibition.