I’ve always wanted to add annotations to my comics online. I’m generally a big fan of behind-the-scenes stuff. We’re all familiar with the DVD commentary, which is sometimes really good (for example, Guillermo del Toro movies) or crushingly bad (like Empire Strikes Back). Valve, makers of Half-Life, has been putting developer commentary in their games. The little nodes play an audio track about how they chose the color scheme, or how they got the player to look up at a cool scripted event, stuff like that. It’s kind of fun to run through a level looking for the next spinning speech balloon.
A lot of comic trade paperbacks now have extra material as well, mostly from the DC side of things. I picked up three volumes of DC’s 52. After each weekly edition, they have a few pages of commentary and concept art. Very cool!
I didn’t want to add notes to my comics before because it’s a fine line between making myself sound like a pompous ass (“I’m so clever lol!”) and too self deprecating (“I hate this panel *sniff*”). But, part of 24 hour comics is that the act of making them is an integral part of their being. Just looking at them on the web is missing out on this important context. It just looks like a comic that has worse and worse art over time (like Infinite Crisis. Oh! *zing*).
So instead of writing a long blog post about what happened on 24 hour comics day, I’ll sprinkle little notes through Selective Pressure which talk about the comic and the wacky day that made it. I have a working version of the first page with notes done, you can get a sneak peek at it here. There’s no other way to get to it right now because it’s still in testing. Just wave the mouse over the notes that look like this:
and hopefully some text will magically appear!