Earlier this week, Avatar announced Disenchanted, a new webcomic by Si Spurrier (he's having a big couple of weeks!) and German Erramouspe. The pair will publish twelve pages weekly, and then those pages will be gathered up and put into physical format about twice a year, a system that Avatar, and Spurrier, has already had a certain degree of success with. This sort of serialization is intriguing to me, because it doesn't follow the model of a syndicated newspaper strip, out of which grows the publishing strategies and schedules of most webcomics. Instead, Disenchanted will more closely resemble a weekly digital comic book; a certain number of pages with a clear beginning, middle, and end, comics serialized like television is serialized. This arrangement seems like it might be more narratively satisfying, somehow, although it will be interesting to see how exactly Spurrier and Erramouspe break their story up.
Anyway, Spurrier's description of the project should get you hooked, just in case you don't get off on the relationship between publishing strategies and narrative structure like I do:
Listen: I’m not going to lie to you. There are faeries in it. Actual one-inch-tall faeries with pretty wings, pale skin, a pathological obsession with knotting human hair, an addict’s approach to teeth and all the rest of that floaty pseudo-Victoriana pre-Cottingley arsewater. But don’t panic. What we’ve got here are non-glittery, non-wanky, non-wish-granting faeries. What we’ve got here are substance-abusing, bar-brawling, civil-rights-demanding, murder-committing faeries. The good kind. The old kind. What we’ve got here is a miniature city made of scavenged soda cans, cereal boxes, dirty syringes and condoms. A city hidden beneath the streets of London. What we’ve got here are pixies, brownies, kobolds, leprechauns, boggarts, goblins and all the rest of the twee “Little People” of yesteryear who, despite being forgotten by mankind, have been dragged along by time and trend into the unsentimental Urban Century.
Just like the rest of us.
