The fractal canvas: complexity and constraint in webcomics

The Web browser has offered a development of the comic beyond the page into expansive spaces of the infinite canvas, removing the limits of the printed page. Simultaneously, hypermedia has provided opportunities to generate ever more complex links to supplement or even remove the limits of a linear narrative. However, the borders of conventional comics persist, and some of the most successful webcomics have thrived within the self-imposed constraints of limited panels, limited images or limited resolution. This article will ask how these different forms of experimentation interact and propagate in webcomics, across their content and context, their narrative structures, and the medium as a whole. Considering the experimental modes of creating and reading in the infinite canvas, hypermedia or other forms of webcomics, the article will outline a fractal dimensionality to webcomics.