Infinite canvas

The infinite canvas is the idea that the size of a digital comics page is theoretically infinite, and that online comics are therefore not limited by conventional page sizes. An artist could conceivably display a complete comics story of indefinite length on a single "page". Scott McCloud introduced the concept in his book Reinventing Comics.

Artists known for their work in infinite canvas include Scott McCloud, Cayetano Garza, demian5, Patrick Farley, David Hellman, and Aaron Diaz.

The infinite canvas has been used in comics such as Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire, where artists are easily able to change their standard format from one line to two when desired. Likewise, Megatokyo made a smooth transition from traditional four-panel comic strip to full-page graphic novel. Webcomics such as Narbonic take advantage of the medium on occasion for special effects (e.g. the time-shift effect in "Dave Davenport Has Come Unstuck in Time"), and even sometimes use the "gradualism" effect McCloud describes.

Recently, it has been proposed to extend the notion of infinite canvas to an infinite number of surfaces including minimal surfaces, orientable, and non-orientable surfaces in order to produce stories that share common ground with sculptures and comics. As a result, topological graph theory can be used to extract information about stories when the story time line structure is perceived as a graph and the canvas is perceived as a topological space.

See also

• Constrained comics, an opposite approach
• Subnormality, an example
• Krita, a digital painting application that features infinite canvas from version 2.6 onward

External links

• The Tarquin Engine by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey
• The Infinite Canvas: An Interview with Scott McCloud, the Google Chrome Comic Guy at Xconomy
• [2] by Felix Lambert