The infinite canvas refers to the potentially limitless space that is available to

webcomics Webcomics (also known as online comics or Internet comics) are comics published on a website or mobile app. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers, or comic books. Webcomics can be ...

presented on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

. The term was introduced by

Scott McCloud Scott McCloud (born Scott McLeod; June 10, 1960) is an American cartoonist and comics theorist. He is best known for his non-fiction books about comics: ''Understanding Comics'' (1993), ''Reinventing Comics'' (2000), and '' Making Comics'' (200 ...

in his 2000 book '' Reinventing Comics'', in which he suggested that webcomic creators could make a web page as large as needed to contain a comic page of any conceivable size. This infinite canvas would create an endless amount of storytelling benefits and would allow creators much more freedom in how they present their artwork. Journalists responded skeptically to McCloud's idea of the infinite canvas, as five years after ''Reinventing Comics'', the concept had not taken off in large proportions yet. Webcomics were primarily presented in the form of

comic strips A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics ter ...

, which fit easily on a screen. Various webcomic creators have experimented with the infinite canvas, however, and extending comics to beyond what is possible in print has gained some popularity over the years.

Description

comic books A comic book, also called comicbook, comic magazine or (in the United Kingdom and Ireland) simply comic, is a publication that consists of comics art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are of ...

, the panels of each page are laid out in such as a way to fit perfectly on the page, forcing cartoonists into a relatively small set of possible panel lay-outs per page. In his 2000 book, ''Reinventing Comics'', cartoonist Scott McCloud proposed a solution for this situation in the form of the web page. Instead of using the monitor on which a webcomic is read as a "page", McCloud suggested using it as a "window" upon an infinit