Links: Beaton, bikes, and bad design

Thank you, Scott McCloud, for saying what needed to be said:

The page designs of most long form webcomics suck donkey dick. Good artists and writers—including some of my favorite cartoonists in the world—force readers to sroll, then click, then read, then scroll, then read, then click, then scroll again for no other reason than a stubborn belief that all comics pages have to be taller than wide, and that all web pages need a metric ton of blinking crap at the top to work.

T Campbell checks in in comments to defend his use of vertical pages, but I remain unconvinced. As Scott says in his response, scrolling is OK and clicking is OK, but the click-then-scroll required for every page is distracting and annoying.

Greg Hatcher has a lengthy but very readable essay up at Comics Should Be Good that considers paper vs. digital comics in terms of both the creator’s economics picture and the reader’s experience. With pictures of his own collection, it’s well worth a click.

The Canadian magazine Mcleans has a nice profile of Kate Beaton, whose loosely drawn comics make history fun. (Via Blog@Newsarama.)

Also at Blog@, Kyle Latino and Lee Cherolis have brief reviews of White Ninja and Kukuburi.

Here’s a nice bit of niche marketing for you: BikeRadar.com interviews Rick Smith about his bicycle-themed webcomic Yehuda Moon. (Via Journalista.)

Space oddity: Japanese sci-fi manga creator Leiji Matsumoto’s latest work, Out of Galaxy Koshika, will be distributed digitally via the Wii Shopping Channel. Readers will pay 500 Wii points for the first chapter and 200 for subsequent chapters. The manga is being published only in Japan for the moment but the online version includes an English translation; no word yet of any print version.

Here’s your freebie of the day: vol. 3 of Oddly Normal: Fignation Times, which the publishers have kindly made available online. (Found via Sean Kleefeld.)

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