Hypercomics.net began years ago in the golden age of webcomic creation. Back then, in the primordial bubbling ooze of the Jurassic Internet, the site was dedicated to formalism and experimentation with comics in a digital environment.
Over the years it has been a portfolio, a collective showcase, and a group blog. But all of these incarnations shared the goal of raising the awareness of online storytelling and multiple-path visual narration.
This recent incarnation finds hypercomics.net returning to it’s original purpose- a repository for the archived work of it’s founder, Neal Von Flue.
Neal started making comics online over 20 years ago. His work was used in Webcomics – Tools and Techniques for the Digital Artist by Steven Withrow and John Barber and Character Design for Graphic Novels from Focal Press, as well as the documentary film Adventures into Digital Comics. His work in digital comics has been cited in academic journals and doctorate papers.
He made visually rich webcomics with an emphasis on nonlinear narrative models and pioneering story navigation in the digital environment. His award winning collaboration with Alexander Danner, Five Ways to Love a Cockroach was featured in MoCCA’s Infinite Canvas art exhibition. His comic The Jerk earned him a spot on Scott McCloud’s list of up and coming talent. (Though, admittedly, that was in the early 2000’s). He also wrote essays, interviews, and reviews for early webcomics journalism sites such as Borderwalker, and was a founding member and regular contributor to The Webcomics Examiner.
As the internet cooled and fell into a commercial orbit as a social thing, he moved from being a freelance artist to teaching. He has been a multidisciplinary visual arts teacher for over a decade through schools, civic organizations and private instruction. He was the president of the El Segundo Art Association as well as a guest member of the Advisory Board for the SoCal ROC School of Art and Design. He has juried art shows and is a guest speaker for groups and schools on art techniques and the intersection of traditional and digital media.
His recent presentation The Creativity Diagram is a way of categorizing the internalized resources available to artists to help them grow their ideas and troubleshoot during their process, and is now available. You can view his most recent work in his portfolio at nealvonflue.com.
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