Strip Comics doesn’t really have an interface problem, its infact a really great interface. But the one potential problem has been overcome by the use of the internet in strip comics.

Traditional Comic Strips

So here is the comic strips, as seen on newspapers.  As with the english language, it reads from left to right.

So let’s simply break down how we experience these four sequence of images.

The Setup:

This is how the story begins.  We can tell from the helmet and the football that Snoopy is throwing a football

The Development:

We see woodstock, and we can infer that he is trying to catch the said football.

The Plot Twist:

The aforementioned ball crushes woodstock.

Conclusion:

A dog crushing a tiny bird into the ground with a football= funny!

…and so, the followup to the twist wraps up the story. It’s a great interface, because even though the reader knows something is going to happen, this formula works great in comedy.  A simple, strong interface.  If anything can be criticized, is that upon looking at the comic strip, we can infer and predict a certain rhythm(its hard to control where our eyes tend to drift intuitively, although for strip comics I’ve never really had a spoiler problem).

In the case of web comic strip

did that need any explanation? the nifty thing about web comic is the interaction.  We intuitively use the mouse to scroll down, as with any other page, because we are curious what happens next.  This level of control by the user is pretty important in presenting humor material, to “turn the page” in order to find out what happens next.

Sidenote: In case of Japanese Comics, it is read vertically like the web comic, due to traditional Japanese writing being vertically oriented.  However, the point is still the same in that the interactive scroll is the main topic in this article.