Gender bender stories that don't exist

I am a big fan of gender bender media. I love storylines in which a man transforms into a woman or vice versa and tries to navigate their life in an unfamiliar body. However, you can only read and watch so many of them before you get completely bored. Gender bender media tends to be highly formulaic. How often have I seen the epitome of masculinity (or at least someone who wishes to be) get transformed into a cute girl and feel like their life is over? There are differences between a body swap and a simple sex change, and sometimes the character will find that everyone remembers them as their new sex, but there are really only so many variations of these tropes. Usually, the character hates the transformation and spend the rest of the story to find a solution. Sometimes a character grows to like their new body in the process, usually with the help of some romantic interest. It can be fun to see someone adjust to the change right away, though it's very often for sexual reasons rather than social ones...

You know, keeping the gender bender genre fresh is hard. I describe a lot of situations above, but there really aren't many stories that stray away from the tropes. I don't think that has to be the case, however. Here are four possible gender bender stories that would be unlike anything that has ever come before.

There are enough of these, alright?

The Great Undoing

Let's get the most tragic option out of the way first. I once read a short story about a woman who had just gotten breast implants. She was looking in the mirror, appreciating how her breasts had increased in a cup size or two, something she has wanted for years. Around this time, however, some completely unrelated character wished that everyone's breasts would become flat – don't ask me why. The woman, in great distress, watches the breasts she had paid thousands of dollars for just fade away into nothingness.

Let's bring this idea to a more impactful scale. Imagine a transgender character, let's call her Alice, who has been going through the various sexual reassignment surgeries and treatments to shape her body as she would prefer it. This is where the magical plot device hits her, however, and her body changes... into that of a boy. I suppose the reason I titled this hypothetical trope "The Great Undoing" is clear, as what I just described is the set-up of what would be a very saddening story.

Usually, gender bender stories have a high dose of fan service. I suppose I do not need to tell you that this concept is a harsh subversion of the genre in that sense, combining a magical sex change with the real world in what may be a horrifying manner. I think there are a lot of directions such a story could take, though honestly, I wouldn't want to run into one often. 

Non-Binary Swapping

To go into a much more cheerful direction, my next trope allows a person to freely change their sex on a regular basis. Imagine a non-binary person, be they agender, fluid, or some less well-defined gender. Let's call them Bill. Perhaps our protagonist is a 17-year old, having grown up as a boy all their life, but has never been comfortable in this role. Bill often feels more comfortable hanging out with the girls of their class than the other boys. Bill saw a definition of the word "agender" on the internet one year prior, and it has been tumbling in their head eversince (though they really don't care too much about labels anyway).

Now give Bill a magic ring that changes their sex whenever they put it on. What will they do with this power? Is it better being a boy or a girl? Does it vary? I believe fiction can explore a huge number of variables if it wanted to. What if a crossdresser got access to such a tool? I'd pay good money to see a storyline in which Haruhi Fujioka could physically turn into a guy. The only piece of media in which this happens that I can think of is El Goonish Shive, but with the number of variables that can be put in this equation, I would want to see more.

Solid-State Fluidity

Perhaps the opposite of "Non-Binary Swapping" is "Solid-State Fluidity" (I'm having a lot of fun making up these names, as you may have noticed). Imagine a genderfluid person, perhaps someone whose gender identity on any given day is basically determined by a coin toss. Let's call him Alex. Alex hasn't been very able to present himself as he likes to, as his environment doesn't really allow him this. As a result, he experiences frequent dysphoria, basically at the drop of a dime.

Then, one day, Alex gets cursed by some ancient Egyptian thingamajig, and not only does his body change to the opposite sex, but everyone in her life suddenly remembers her always being like that. At first, Alex is ecstatic to finally be a "real boy" and for everyone to treat him as one. But the next day, she suddenly feels less happy about her situation.

Getting a non-binary character stuck in a different body is at least as fascinating as allowing them to switch freely, if not even moreso. It would definitely put a refreshing twist on the classic gender swap story.

Real Gender Swap

You know, I've always been bother by terms like "gender bender" and "gender swap". It's a pet peeve, I suppose, but the misuse of "gender" is not making anyone better. What if we could do a real gender swap?

Here we have Jennifer, a cheerleader and, honestly, kinda a bully. One of her victims lays a curse on Jennifer: one that will let her experience a gender swap. However, the next morning, Jennifer doesn't look any different from usual. Did it not work? It did work, but simply not how you expected it, as the curse effectively turned Jennifer into a trans man. Jennifer suddenly feels uncomfortable looking in mirrors, starts to feel uncomfortable with her breasts, her whole presentation. This could get fairly dark as well, of course, as Jennifer may end up in somekind of negativity spiral. But maybe the classmates he once bullied will accept Jennifer for who he is?

And in the end... maybe Jennifer has been transgender all along?

I'm Broken for Not Liking Food

As someone who follows a few Tumblr microblogs, there is a specific sentence I’ve seen pop up multiple times. In the encouraging style users of the website usually bring the message, the sentence is “Asexual people aren’t broken.“ After all, this is an anguish many asexual people feel: if you grow up in a society that greatly values traditional relationships, certain inter-gender behaviors, and reproduction, you may feel like there’s something “wrong with you” if you don’t experience any of that. However, existing somewhere on the aro/ace spectrum myself, I’ve (luckily) never really felt this way. I feel myself being envious, wanting to be in a kind of relationship I’ll probably never end up in, but I’ve rarely felt like there was something wrong with me when it comes to my sexual identity.

When it comes to consuming media, I have a weird relationship with, ahem, relationships. Love Actually quickly became one of my personal favorite all-time films, as its various love stories can really bring tears to my eyes. I don’t know if I watch romantic stories in the same way as other people do, however. To me, a romance is not very different from a common fantasy trope. Romance is like magic: it’s fascinating and beautiful, something worth indulging in.

I am perhaps lucky in how much I can enjoy a good romance, as not everyone can, but I bring this all up because there is another theme I just can’t muster the same feeling towards. That theme is food. I don’t care about food as its own topic, and I have difficulty understanding or even imagining why so many people put so much value on food. In everyday life, this has created some weird social interactions with people who care strongly about what they eat every evening, but more interestingly to me is how it affects how I consume media.

When Digibro described why he found Log Horizon such an amazing anime, he talked for three minutes about how its use of food was “the most true-to-life thing [he] could image,” and here I realized something was going on. In the first episodes of Log Horizon, all the characters in story are transported into a world where all food tastes the same. This was presented in a very over-the-top manner inbetween the more serious scenes, as though it was a gag. Eventually, however, the cast came across a character who had discovered how to give food taste, which was followed by the characters truly ecstatic to eat something with taste again for the first time in days. Digibro said the following about the scene: “So when [the characters] first bit into [tasty] food and literally cried, I felt a well of emotion knowing that I too would have cried my eyes out.” This line, and the ones around it, really stuck with me… because I can’t relate to them at all. When a character in Log Horizon bit into a burger and said “this is going to change the world,” I felt nothing but a bit of amusement. I would have been happy in this world, because the sound of eating wet rice crackers every day doesn’t sound bad at all. I just thought Touno Mamare, the author of Log Horizon, was some kind of food geek when I first watched the show. but when I watched Digibro’s video, I felt like there was something wrong with me…

This is not to say that I don’t like good food! I am actually very picky about my food, in that I really don’t want to eat something I dislike. I have found that simple food, ranging from simple chicken to noodles to literal crackers, are my favorite kinds of food. I would never make something out of a cook book, or order something I don’t fully trust in a restaurant. I will probably never spend the effort of cooking something complex when a simpler meal can suffice. Why bake a cake when you can buy something similar in stores? The way I experience food is fairly mathematical, where I can grade all food on a scale from 1 to 10 and I don’t need to worry of anything ever getting rated higher than the things I’ve set at 10. Sure, you can get bored of certain types of food if you eat too much of it (which is more likely for some foods than for others), but those are pretty much all the variables I need. In fact, allow me to draw up a chart.

Yes, I could live forever on noodles or even crackers (though I don’t think my body would like me much if I tried). I already eat three slices of bread, two of chocolate paste and one with peanut butter, every afternoon for the past ten years. I see no reason to step away from that, because it works. I don't like trying new kinds of food, because I run the risk of getting something I won't like, and there's no value in finding something new I do like because I already like plenty of food.

When I see a scene in which food is the major focus, I try to imagine that what is being enjoyed is music instead. There’s a scene in the first Scott Pilgrim book in which the character Knives Chau experiences rock music for the first time. Watching Knives get entirely overwhelmed by the sound of probably pretty shitty music was infinitely more relatable than the scenes Digibro spoke so highly of above and though it didn't have the same kind of build up as the food scene in Log Horizon, it had way more impact on me because it is something I care about. There’s a scene in episode 1 of K-On! in which one of the characters is deeply inspired by watching a concert on television, and though it was largely played off as a gag, I can’t say I didn’t feel for her.

So what I’m really getting at here is: less food, more music. More importantly, this has been an issue I’ve really been struggling with for a long time now. You cannot believe how much value people put in food in our world. Anime in particular has a heavy emphasis on food, and though I find a show like Shokugeki no Soma positively ridiculous and Amaama to Inazuma is adorable because of its gorgeous facial animations and because social interactions is where the heart of the show lies, these still make me feel… broken.

Webtoons, Turbomedia, and me

Webtoons

"Webtoon" is a movement of webcomics started in 2003 by people like JunKoo Kim, Kyusam Kim, and Kang Full. The movement is characterized by an infinite canvas layout with a large amount of negative space. Reading a webtoon, you will find yourself scrolling passively down a wall of images, each with a large amount of white space or black space in between. The amount of "empty" space in between each "panel" physically induces the amount of "time" one will experience passing. This is a very direct effect. In something like Kyusam Kim's Hive or Son Jeho and Lee Kwangsu's Noblesse, you'll see the whitespace compress and expand depending on the pacing of the story. The panels themselves are huge, big enough to fill an entire page of a book if given the chance. This style of webcomics was not a result of Scott McCloud's marketing of the "infinite canvas" as he described it in 2000, but it can be attributed almost entirely to JunKoo Kim. When Kim started Naver Webtoon (now internationally known as Line Webtoon), he was inspired by how Korean people use the Web pages already: scrolling down to read the text.

Korea's webtoon services have many other aspects to them that experimental webcartoonists love to make use of, like sound and animation. Companies like Naver and Daum established the kind of features that make webcomics like these possible. Webtoons weren't going to stay in Korea, however, and with the worldwide launch of Line Webtoon, works like SIU's Tower of God reached global popularity

Now in English speaking territories, short comic strips have dominated the webcomic market, so "webtoon" became a shorthand for "Korean webcomic". When Line Webtoon became available worlwide, "webtoon" beat "manhwa" in Google results. But I argue that unlike "manhwa", which refers to Korean comics in general, "webtoon" is an internation movement. This becomes clear when you find out about French webtoons, as you may find them on Didier Borg's Delitoon. Reading these webtoons is impossible for me as someone who can't read French, but just looking at them feels bizarre. One thing is unmistakable, however: these webcomics fall in the same family as those made in Korea.

Turbomedia

French webcartoonists don't just steal formats, though. On the contrary, a major movement in France has been Turbomedia. This format, first described by Balak in February 2010, stands in stark contrast with Korea's trademark webtoon format. Rather than taking place on an infinitely tall canvas, Turbomedia is only a single panel in size. Like a slideshow, a reader can click to see the next panel. For this, French webcartoonists use Adobe Flash and various Flash-based tools. This movement has resulted in a lot of gorgeous webcomics, like Paris Pixel by Forky, but like the French webtoons, I sadly can't read many of them.

This format wasn't new when Balak first described it. Artists like Dan Miller (Kid Radd) and even Scott McCloud (The Right Number) have done similar things in the mid 2000s. Whether they fall in the same movement is a different question, however. More modern examples of "American Turbomedia" like Ava's Demon and Neokosmos may take on the storyboard-esque style of Turbomedia (often even to a far larger extent than those inspired by Balak ever did), but they are all created through hyperlinks rather than Flash animations. These American Turbomedia feel more akin to the "adventure webcomics" created by Weaver and Andrew Hussie than their French contemporaries.

Me

So where does this whole thing leave me? See, I have never been able to get into webtoons. I initially blamed this on a thusfar unexplained anti-Asian comics bias. As someone who couldn't get into manga either, I figured there was just something about storywriting in Korea and Japan that I didn't enjoy. After doing research on French webcomics, however, my perspective has changed.

I love Turbomedia. Be it the works of Balak and those inspired by him or the corresponding American genre, I just can't get enough of webcomics with a single-panel format. The storyboard aesthetic and interactive aspects work very well on my imagination. Meanwhile, infinite canvas webcomics, be they the wacky mazes of Scott McCloud or the tall slow burns of webtoons, have never been able to catch my interest to a significant amount. The jungles created with Daniel Goodbrey's Tanquin Engine fascinates me more than Hun and Zhena's melancholically drawn-out Girls of the Wild's, but neither would be able to convince me to keep up with the updates.

Where do you lie on this spectrum, dear reader, and where do you think other webcomics may lie on this continuum? Are webtoons and Turbomedia movements, and how does their format relate to works that aren't inspired by these movements? I hope I've introduced you all to a few interesting webcomics in the process ^_^

A love letter to Voltorb

There's a lot of hate out there. Some are hated for being pure trash or for looking an awful lot like a cone of ice cream. Some Pokémon, however, are hated simply because they are too simplistic. And this saddens me. Whenever I tell someone Voltorb is my favorite Pokémon, people are surprised. It's an unusual pick, so I'd like to explain today why I love it so much.

Beauty in Simplicity
See, when it comes to Pokémon, I've always liked the most simplistic ones, be it Lotad, Luvdisc, or Ditto. There is elegance in being able to create something iconic with only a few lines. You can draw a Voltorb with ten strokes of a pen (assuming the circle and semi-circle are one stroke each), eight of which are needed to draw its eyes. This is brilliant to me: the eyes are the most vital part of a face, and the pointy-ness of them contrasts beautifully with the Voltorb's otherwise round shape. Rather than shaping the eyes like realistic eyes or like simple circles, Game Freak designed the eyes themselves as though they were angry eyebrows, and it works incredibly well.

Perhaps even more beautiful is how they drew something that abstractly resembles a mouth with only one stroke, without making Voltorb look like a Canadian from South Park. Splitting the body up in two parts, while always showing Voltorb from an interesting angle, makes you instantly aware of how Voltorb looks in a 3D environment.


Mimics and Pokéballs
I've always had a fascination for the Mimic, the classic Dungeons & Dragons monster that made its way in every role-playing game imaginable. There is something incredibly interesting to me when a living creature (perhaps a magical one) disguises itself as a man-made object in order to surprise adventurers. The concept alone creates a lot of questions: where did this thing come from? Why does it disguise itself like this? Is this thing a natural result of evolution, or did some wizard make this thing?

Voltorb is a battery. It has a positive pole and a negative pole, and each as a unique color: one is red and the other is white. This makes Voltorb look a lot like a Pokéball. Did Voltorb make itself look like a Pokéball? Or were Pokéballs designed to look like Voltorb?

I'm fine when people criticize Pokémon like Klefki or Seel for looking like household objects or common animals. I never liked Seel either. But Voltorb absolutely fascinates me, because a Pokéball doesn't exist in our world. Game Freak's staff must have looked at their game and thought "how can we make a Mimic-creature if we don't have traditional chests?" And well, I really love the answer they came up with!

Final Thoughts

Now, there are some other criticisms one can throw at Voltorb. For example, Electrode looks way too much like Voltorb. However, I don't think you can criticize a Pokémon because its evolution is too similar. I personally really dislike Rapidash because it's pretty much just a bigger Ponita with a horn, but I really love Ponita because it is a horse that is on fire. How cool is that? Similarly, I don't care too much for Electrode, but Voltorb is just amazing.

An interesting aspect of both Voltorb and Electrode is their mode of locomotion. One of the reasons I like Voltorb overlaps with the reason why I like Spoink: they don't just walk on two or four legs, or float or fly or levitate. No, they move around a completely unique manner - rolling, in the case of Voltorb. I love this because it's not something that exists in nature (safe for some desert salamanders that roll down hills at times). I am always curious how this way of moving around works, and it really touches on my imagination.

Self-destruct - Voltorb's signature move - is such an interesting attack! I mean, Voltorb is completely designed around it, and what creature literally blows itself up as a means of defense? It's fascinating. Yet another thing I'd like to bring up is that Voltorb's blue shiny form is beautiful.

Seriously, though: if you want to know what good design is, look at Voltorb. The first generation of Pokémon generally just has a lot of good designs in there, because of how simple many of them are. Voltorb may not be a Mimikyu, but I love the little fellow regardless.

Should we save These Memories Won't Last?

Begin this year, cartoonist Stu Campbell released These Memories Won't Last, a webcomic that makes full use of the capabilities of HTML5 and current internet browsers. The webcomic has music, minor animations, and all kinds of visual effects. The work is about Campbell's grandfather and his struggle with Alzheimer's. Cambell uses the medium perfectly to create a both a sense of urgency and a strong haze, as if everything is lost while you are reading it. He wrote the piece in part to preserve the life stories of his grandfather in some way, but odd is it then that he picked the medium most susceptible to changes in technology. 

Even as he was creating These Memories Won't Last, browser updates kept breaking his webcomic. A review by The Webcomic Police just a few months after the webcomic's release already complained about their browser not being able to handle it correctly. As I am writing this, I can no longer access the website... Why would Campbell decide to preserve his grandfather's life in such a fragile medium, in such a fragile form?

Well, being able to reach a large audience is part of it. In an interview with CNET, Campbell stated that, for him, "it's important ... to adapt and present our stories in an easily consumable way." But it goes deeper than that. Campbell notes that people rely on their personal devices to keep their memories, be they photographs or contact information. But, to quote Campbell: "as devices die and software becomes outdated, a lot of these memories might be lost. In a similar sense ... [my grandpa] is also a source of memory and one day he will be lost and so will all his memories ..." And, I suppose, this is the sad truth.

These Memories Won't Last isn't really about preserving the memories of Cambell's grandpa; it is primarily about how information, knowledge, and memories get lost over time. This is clearly depicted in the webcomic itself as each panel disappears once it is read, but it is also how the whole webcomic is set up. Campbell's work here is not supposed to survive: it will disappear just like everything else.

This fits the webcomic perfectly. In the 21 years in which webcomics have been an accessible medium, many works have disappeared and become unavailable. However, many popular webcomics have been saved from this fate. Kid Radd, RPG World, and various other webcomics have been downloaded by fans and reuploaded once the website went down. In the case of Kid Radd, some technical changes had to be made to keep the webcomic functional on current browsers, but it works.

As an Eisner-nominated webcomic, should These Memories Won't Last be protected in a similar way? You can wonder if that goes against the whole point of the webcomic. There would be some technological difficulties, but you'd be surprised what big fans can be capable of. I wonder if archiving it goes right against the point of the work. These are all just stray thoughts at this point that I can't make a consistent thread from, but it is an interesting question nonetheless. I do know that I already feel frustrated that I can't reread it while writing this piece.

Mapping out space

What if we could map out the universe like we do with the Earth and the solar system? We know where the continents are, we know where the eight planets are... say, where is Sirius compared to other stars? You know, brightest star in the sky, actually a binary star? Well, let's grab a map of the Milky Way and find out.

Alright, let's have a look, Sirius is supposedly located 8.6 lightyears away from the Earth. The 10,000 ly bar above is 60 pixels wide, meaning that every pixel covers ~167 lightyears. Oh. It seems like we share a pixel with Sirius. Uhm, let's zoom in.

     Andrew Z. Colvin
Here we have our interstellar neighborhood mapped out in 3D space. It isn't really properly to scale - Tau Ceti is actually further away from us than Sirius is, for example - but it sure gives us an idea of what we actually have around us. All of these stars may be less than a pixel of the Milky Way, but these would be the easiest ones to reach if we tried.

Hmm, have you heard of the Heart Nebula and the Soul Nebula? Those are two absolutely gorgeous nebulae. Here, let me show you a picture of the Heart nebula:

                                      s58y

These two nebulae are approximately 7,000 lightyears away from us. I happen to know that these two nebulae lie between us and the central disk of the Milky Way, but the galactic center lies at least 25,000 lightyears away from the Sun, so you wouldn't even be halfway there if you'd reach these bodies.

The Milky Way has a lot of stuff in it, but what can we find outside of the Milky Way? Well, there are other galaxies, but the only one I can think of it the Andromeda Galaxy. Where exact does that lie? Well, I'm glad you asked! The Andromeda Galaxy is actually the largest galaxy in the Local Group:

     Andrew Z. Colvin

What is the Local Group, you ask? Well, it the largest group of bodies that are pulled towards eachother by gravity faster than they are pulled away from one another by the expansion of the universe. This is why the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way will eventually collide. All of the galaxies in the map above, save for some of the galaxies in the upper-left corner (NGC 3109 doesn't like us), are moving towards eachother. In 3.75 billion years, NASA believes the Earth sky will look like this:

The band on the right is the Milky Way, which you may not be used to seeing because of all the light polussion we're dealing with. The galaxy on the left? Andromeda.

But wait, let's go back to the map again. What other galaxies do we have in the Local Group? The third biggest galaxy seems to be the Triangulum Galaxy. Though it doesn't look like much, it should contain about 40 billion stars. Why didn't I find out about the third-biggest galaxy in our Local Group until this week?

If we look a lot closer to our own galaxy, we find the fourth-largest galaxy in our Local Group: the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC if you want to sound cool). If humanity would ever go to another galaxy, this one would probably be a good pick, seeing its size and proximity. It's only ~163,000 lightyears away from us, after all. If we were able to travel at light speed, the ship's crew would probably evolve into a different species from those who stay on Earth before they'd arrive. 

Ahem, intergalactic travel would be a bit extreme, but at least it's nice to know who your neighbors are. To close this off, I want to just show another picture of the Heart Nebula~

Say... what are those bright stars just to the left of the nebula? Hmm, two of them seem to be the Maffei Galaxies: Maffei 1 and Maffei 2. These two galaxies aren't in our local group, and were actually really hard to find. The IC 342/Maffei Group is a neighboring galaxy-group to our Local Group, though the exact distance is hard to tell. The group is kinda hiding behind the Milky Way, in what we call the Zone of Avoidance. To quote Wikipedia: "The Zone of Avoidance (ZOA) is the area of the sky that is obscured by the Milky Way."It's rather annoying, because other groups in the Virgo Supercluster that are farther away from us, like the Sculptor Group, are more easily studied. 

Still though, all these groups are way too far away from us. No matter what we do, humanity will never be able to reach these galaxies. I like to imagine what the Local Group would look like from Maffei 2, but because of that dang expansion of the universe, we will never know. 

The Animated GIF [repost]

Another repost of a Webcomics Commentary post, because... I just happen to lack inspiration right now. In the mean time, I hope you'll enjoy this :)


After last week’s rather poor post about Homestuck, I wanted to talk about something more basic. In that post, I talked about how webcomics are “multi-media” by definition, but I completely skipped one aspect of this: the animated GIF. Animation in webcomics dates all the way back to Argon Zark in the early 90s, and back in the golden age of webcomics, some discussion existed about whether animation in general has any place in comics. Take this article from The New York Times, for example: "Indeed, [Gary] Groth argued, [Scott] McCloud was hankering after something more like animation or film … It’s a great use of the Web. But it verges on animation." This argument is rather dated, but I think it’s still worth examining. GIF images are way more popular in webcomics today than they were back in 2005, so let’s have a look. This will be an image-heavy post, btw ^_^

What I want to argue today is that a traditional animated GIF is an image. It is “animated” by nature, but referring to it as proper "animation" (or especially “film”) is counter-productive. Film has a structure: it can be used to deliver a narrative or to juxtapose different ideas by placing images in time. Mike Rugnetta of PBS Idea Channel described a GIF as a "self-contained moment … one complete action or one complete thought." I think this idea is particularly important when discussing GIFs in webcomics, as it might be more meaningful than the objective length of a GIF. Let’s see where this can take us.



The panel above might be the simplest example of this in practice. No time passes in this image; the animation is used to communicate a sensation of being drunk rather than a sensation of movement (is there a difference?). Homestuck does this kind of stuff all the time, being it to make something glow or to give a character a little more personality by allowing them to blink.



In theory, the order in which the frames are presented in the above examples isn’t even relevant. Describing these images as “video” seems silly: to me, this has become an image on the internet. I think it’s pretty incredible that drawings and photographs don’t need to be static anymore.

This kind of short “animation” can be found all over, like in this Brawl in the Family strip or this one on Tapastic. The order in which the frames are shown may be important to create a fluent animation (oh, we may have an issue), but the character is committing “one complete action” in these examples

Alright, great, but let’s go two seconds further.



We’re clearly reaching somekind of border to my hypothesis here. This animationis pretty complex and a lot is happening here. Surely, the image is a bit unusual for a GIF, and because of this complexity, the loop has to hang a few seconds on the last frame before it can loop back. There is a resolution to this event shown here. On the other hand, we are still witnessing “one complete action”: Jane fleeing the scene. The lengthy animation is used to communicate some fairly simplistic ideas, in particular how much effort she went through to get out of there while it all seeming rather natural for her to do. The image is showing a nice abscond by a desperate character.

And there are other forms of video that are about this length! Take, for example, this piece of video:

https://vine.co/v/iIuZgVXI092 (Vine linked due to Blogspot limitations)

In my experience, Vines tend to be short and are intended to loop. I’ve seen minute-long vines, but those generally just contain cats being pet or some lizard crawling on a wall. Can these really be compared to what we traditionally mean with "video"? These aren’t the kind of shorts you might find on television or as bonus material on a video: these too are depictions of one complete thought or, as may be, one complete joke. But of course, these are obviously video, right?

Maybe the whole idea of something being either an image or video is a simply a fallacy. Hmmm, let’s try to play around with that idea.

I’m honestly not even sure I based the above graphic on. It is interesting, though, because what I’m suggesting is that the World Wide Web has allowed us to explore the point where video meets static images in a completely new way. The language of the internet is interesting because it is all new. Animated GIFs could never have worked in the real-world. You can call the ancient piece of Japanese animation below a GIF, but it was never used as a GIF. It didn't loop, it wasn't presented on a web page, and it was entirely stand alone. (EDIT: Huh, I just read that it was intended to loop. Oops)



To relate all of what I have said back to webcomics (as I suppose I should do as a webcomics blog), what this results in is an opportunity that no other medium has. Webcartoonists can combine what we know as a static image and what we know as video in ways that have never been possible before. The distinction between the two becomes vague in some cases, and often turns completely meaningless. We can tell jokes through this form that was impossible before the World Wide Web came along, and we can reach senses that we could never reach before. Putting boundaries just so we can say "that’s not a comic!" isn’t useful, because in case you haven’t noticed, webcomics are way more than just "comics".

I guess the point of [Webcomics Commentary] is "look how amazing webcomics are" ^_^;