Infinite canvas
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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". The concept was introduced by Scott McCloud in his book Reinventing Comics.
Although McCloud asserted that this freedom was one of the most important qualities of the online comics medium, relatively few webcomics have taken advantage of it; most produce work in more traditional formats such as the serialized comic strip and the rectangular page, rarely exceeding two screens in height. The unpopularity of infinite canvas techniques can be attributed to a few factors: a general aversion to excessive scrolling, particularly horizontal scrolling, among online readers; the problem of long load times for large image files; and the difficulty of producing comics with very large dimensions.
In June 2004, an application called InfiniteCanvas (or IC) was released by student Markus Müller, attempting to provide a solution to the common problems of infinite canvas. It consists of a Mac OS X application for creating comics, and viewers written in Macromedia Flash and Java for online display. The introduction of InfiniteCanvas led to a resurgence in interest in the idea of infinite canvas comics, although the problem of long load times (especially over dialup links) still remains.
Artists known for their work in infinite canvas include McCloud, Cayetano Garza, demian5, Patrick Farley and Aaron Diaz.
The infinite canvas movement is the opposite of the constrained comics movement, which applies tightly defined boundaries to the comics' form.
