Jan Misali had that post recently describing Homestuck as a visual novel. Forgive me if this was being humorously wrong on purpose to provoke a reaction but like. It's a sprite comic. it's a forum game combined with a sprite comic. that's what ms paint adventures was.
"it has nothing stylistically in common with a webcomic"
have you never heard of kid radd.
admittedly most sprite comics have more than one panel per page but like,
they're all stylistically aping video games. that's not an abnormal thing for a sprite comic to do. MSPA was incredibly blatant about aping ye olde text adventure games specifically, which inspired the format.
Insonicnia had animated flash pages!!!! not sure this was before homestuck but are we gonna say *this* isn't a comic now?
like perhaps the only point of contention i could see with this is that Andrew Hussie themself drew the sprites. but that'd be a very silly distinction to make and also look back at kid radd.
those sprites are original! and hell kid radd also has html narration and dialogue, too.
fuckin, homestuck is a visual novel though. because it has a glorified bookmark that it calls a "save button" to keep in the video game theme.
i do not think it makes sense to categorise homestuck as a visual novel i'm sorry. the creative lineage it's drawing from is really clear to me. it has some elements of a VN in some ways but, it's clearly more sprite comic, (a subcategory of webcomic) shaped than visual novel shaped.
oh yeah page 100 of insonicnia was definitely before homestuck lmao. a good 2 years before *any* ms paint adventure.
sorry i was looking around for what the first Forum Game Combined With Sprite Comic was, (because MSPA definitely wasn't the first either lmao,) and
sure
RUBY QUEST. I WAS THINKING OF RUBY QUEST LOL
bwuh this comes off a lot more dismissive and meanspirited than i'd like. whoops
god i'm still thinking of this. i'm still rotating around in my mind all the ways homestuck could possibly not qualify as a comic. like even outside of any of the ways jan misali brought up.
pages largly only consist of one single panel? dialogue and narration primarily exist outside the bounds of said panel?
well fuck me dead i guess family circus and the far side aren't comcis then.
has animation, like at all?
captain underpants is a light novel series to begin with so this is entirely irrelevant.
elements themed after video games? fuckin, every two gamers on a couch comic doesn't count then, not to mention scott pilgrim.
too much dialogue???
this is just me being shitty and stupid i know. all i've done is bring up singular examples of things to show that No Singular Element Of Homestuck In Isolation precludes it from Comic Status. It's all these things together, that create an experience that is very unlike *most* comics. I'm plato pretending to not know what a sandwich is, arguing about whether or not a hamburger counts or if it's its own thing.
to be fair though the thing that sparked this train of thought in my mind was someone arguing that a hamburger is actually a kind of yorkshire pudding, so i think i'm allowed to be a little up my own ass about this.
i genuinely think my delineation of MS Paint Adventures as "Sprite Comic heavily themed around Adventure Games (text and graphical) and often motivated by Forum Game" is one that makes, more sense than a lot of others.
some might balk at the idea of it being a sprite comic because it doesn't *primarily* make use of borrowed assets, but with how most sprite comics to some degree or another rely on Sprite Edits, I don't think "How original is *too* original" is a question we're ever gonna have a satisfying answer for.
and also, y'know
gfdhgjkdhg anyway i think Wholly Original Sprites are fair game for sprite comic territory. Otherwise we might invoke weird hypothetical discussions like "if Keiji Inafune guest wrote a strip for Bob and George, would it no longer be a sprite comic?"
... that'd be a fun and stupid conversation to have actually
"homestuck doesn't count as a comic because sometimes it expects you to stop reading and start playing some flash game"
