Recently, thanks to David Malki, I heard about a new piece of technology called Archive Binge designed to help readers who have just discovered long-running webcomics catch up on all those previous strips. It’s simple: In the words of creator David Morgan-Jar, Archive Binge creates “a custom RSS news feed for a webcomic, which will take you through the archive, at a rate faster than the new comics update”—delivering as many as ten strips a day. (It’s also got a start-stop function, and allows you to move the down markers, so to speak, if you manage to make additional progress reading the website.)
Twenty webcomics creators are already participating in the program, which Morgan-Jar created to make it easier for people to become new fans of his own Irregular Webcomic! We can’t help thinking this would also be a great asset for serialized prose—it’s already not that far off from the DailyLit.com model, except for this: What if you were publishing an ongoing novel or nonfiction work online, rather than a already-completed text?