Sometimes, when people hear my proposal that the "comics medium" is literally a visual language (VL), I receive a response of disbelief stating something like, "What, do you expect people to carry around little pads of paper so they can 'talk' in comic form?" Statements like this bring up an important aspect of language that is essential to address in visual language studies: the social and interactive role of language. Throughout this article, I will address how the role of social interactivity with regard to comics contributes to a further understanding of visual language.

Pirate Queen Marianne, written by Katie Henderson-Grady and draw by Stephen Henderson-Grady, is unabashed, dyed-in-the-wool pulp. Katie and Steven Henderson-Grady have created a mixture of science fiction and dime store detective novels similar to Buck Rodgers, Doc Savage, The Shadow and Flash Gordon. Unlike older pulp stories, the main protagonist is female.

Matt Madden has been exploring the limits and variations of the comics medium for years now, shown perhaps best in his Exercises in Style.

Money Matters and the Modern Webcomic

Much as some webcartoonists would like to pretend otherwise, webcomics are not really an industry apart. They are part of the larger online content industry, and any analysis of their business has to take the business of all online content into account.

As with everyone else in the webcomics 'scene,' I've been following the progress of webcomics experimentation with tremendous interest. I track experimental events over on Websnark. I make note of the many and sundry things that webcartoonists do that they simply couldn't do (or at least not do effectively) on paper. And, with time and energy, I've come to develop an opinion about experimentation in webcomics.

Namely, I'm against it.

Looking back on 2004, it's worth noting the changes, or lack thereof, that the year brought to the ever-fluctuating world of webcomics. Keenspot and ModernTales continued to expand and branch into other areas. The fully independent webcomic remains with us. New webcomics appeared, and many of the same have already vanished. A few of the old standbys have come close to retirement, as some cartoonists have had to rely increasingly on reader support to keep their strips alive.

Last month this column focused on two events where well known, mainstream, creators commented on webcomics and webcomic artists. For this column, the aim is to try to do the opposite and gauge the reaction of webcomic creators to two big events from the mainstream print comic world.