Webcomic Wednesday: The Long Journey by Boulet

Empty spectacle? Yeah, probably, but no less spectacular for that. The Long Journey is a long webcomic by French sensation Boulet – and I mean long literally. It’s an enormous continuously scrolling strip, the vertical progress of which is mostly dictated by the author-avatar’s freefall through a wide variety of different subterranean environments. The thing goes on and on, and the physical sensation of holding the down arrow or clicking or swiping your way through it – revealing, say, a forest of enormous mushrooms, or an underground Nazi stronghold, or a Devil so large that his facial features register more as geological phenomena – is a big part of the fun. I call it “empty” because that sense of “ooh, neat!” is about as high as the strip aims – the pleasure comes almost entirely from Boulet’s exceedingly lovely pixel art (particularly the glowy colors) and the way the scroll format reveals it bit by bit, rather than any sense that author or reader has grown or changed between the start of the plummet and the end of it. It’s just for fun, basically. But as a “hey you gotta check this out” diversion, it’s as solid an argument as I’ve seen for the vitality of webcomics’ infinite canvas.