Dead Pets Society - Online

I've just spotted that a couple of episodes of Dead Pets Society are now available to read on the Guardian website, episodes two and three, to be precise. They've been put up in a click through format of a panel or so at a time, it works quite well, especially on the build up and ending of the third episode.

It can be difficult to keep surprises and significant moments from view in a comic strip, it's natural and pretty much unavoidable to look ahead or take a page in as a whole entity before reading it, often without even noticing that you've done so. There's ways and means around that but you can't always use them due to space constraints or how the pages fall.

With the format in the newspaper there's only one turn of the page and that happens after the first page, which I think I managed to take advantage of once, or maybe twice, but most of those 'moments' take place towards the latter part of the episode, the weekly format suggests you build to some sort of cliffhanger on the last page and set people up for next week's episode.

Knowing that the reader takes in the page as a whole is also one of the wonderful aspects of comics, allowing for dazzling page layouts, interesting compositions and design, so it's not all bad. It's just one of the many aspects to consider when creating comics. You can choose to ignore it completely - nevertheless a decision has to be made.

Right, I'd better get back to working on the last episode (number eight), I'm beginning to bibble on here anyway...