Any work of literature includes the medium and delivery as well as the literal content (words and drawings). There is no such thing as disembodied content, no matter how much we might like to think of a webcomic merely as a collection of timeless propositions and vector graphics.
If a musician had performed a marvelous work in a unique context that can never be repeated by any other performer nor even by the artist himself (e.g. the cellist of Sarajevo), should that make his work any less valuable? You also mentioned translating into other media. If the best novel of the year happens to be extremely difficult to turn into a feature film or Broadway musical, is that a fault of the novel? (e.g. Lovecraft's novels have often been considered "unfilmable".)
"Time" was more like a musical performance than a typical webcomic, despite the fact that it was delivered in the form of a webcomic. You had to be in the virtual concert hall at the right time in order to get the most intellectual stimulation out of it. Once it's over, it's over, and playing an MP3 recording of the concert just doesn't compare to the real thing. Moreover, the next time you hear the same orchestra play the same song, it just won't feel the same. It happens all the time in the performing arts.
We who live in a world where anything can be easily mass-produced tend to under-appreciate things that cannot be reproduced. Somehow we're supposed to multiply the value of a thing by the number of times it can be used as well as the number of people who can use it. This is OK for most goods and services, but I'm not sure if it's an appropriate way to judge works of art. After all, reproducible works of fiction are a relatively recent invention. Before the printing press gave rise to the modern novel, almost all good stories used to be performances of one kind or another.
If a musician had performed a marvelous work in a unique context that can never be repeated by any other performer nor even by the artist himself (e.g. the cellist of Sarajevo), should that make his work any less valuable? You also mentioned translating into other media. If the best novel of the year happens to be extremely difficult to turn into a feature film or Broadway musical, is that a fault of the novel? (e.g. Lovecraft's novels have often been considered "unfilmable".)
"Time" was more like a musical performance than a typical webcomic, despite the fact that it was delivered in the form of a webcomic. You had to be in the virtual concert hall at the right time in order to get the most intellectual stimulation out of it. Once it's over, it's over, and playing an MP3 recording of the concert just doesn't compare to the real thing. Moreover, the next time you hear the same orchestra play the same song, it just won't feel the same. It happens all the time in the performing arts.
We who live in a world where anything can be easily mass-produced tend to under-appreciate things that cannot be reproduced. Somehow we're supposed to multiply the value of a thing by the number of times it can be used as well as the number of people who can use it. This is OK for most goods and services, but I'm not sure if it's an appropriate way to judge works of art. After all, reproducible works of fiction are a relatively recent invention. Before the printing press gave rise to the modern novel, almost all good stories used to be performances of one kind or another.