Charles Addams' New York - or- Danana ::Snap:: ::Snap::

Yesterday (January 7th) was the 100th anniversary of the birth of one Charles Addams, a The New Yorker cartoonist whose most famous creations spawned a live action television show (one of my favorites), animated cartoons, movies and, most recently, a Broadway musical. Google recognized the milestone with a Doodle, and I thought that we here at the Long and Shortbox of It! should celebrate the master's birthday by posting a conversation Jon and I started, and never quite managed to finish, about "Charles Addams' New York," an exhibit that ran at The Museum of the City of New York almost two years ago. Enjoy.

Ever since Scott McCloud's brilliant "Understanding Comics" graphic novel was published in 1993 comics scholars have argued over his assertion that single panel cartoons such as most examples of "The Family Circus" and the large majority of cartoons that appear in The New Yorker are not categorically comics because the medium is "sequential art" and "there's no such thing as a sequence of one!" (McCloud, 20)

One of the most prolific cartoonists to work on The New Yorker magazine was Charles Addams. That enigmatic and unique artist whose characters are best known as the inspiration for the famous "The Addams Family" television show (which itself spawned a cartoon, two major motion pictures and, recently, a Broadway musical) is the subject of a new exhibit being housed now at the Museum of the City of New York from March 4th till May 16th. Both his 'Addams Family' cartoons and general delightfully weird cartoons were on display focusing on those that portrayed New York City, as the exhibit's title is "Charles Addams' New York" and attempts to display a sort of semi-cohesive 'alternate universe' NYC springing from Addams' imagination.

On this most recent comics-related foray into the jungles of New York City I was joined by the inestimable Mr. Joshua Kopin. He and I arrived in time for a guided tour of the exhibit given by the dual curators Sarah Henry and Kevin Miserocchi, who is also the executive director of the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation. Because we were both there and we have so much to tell you about the exhibit along with so many open-ended questions about the nature of the medium for us to discuss, we felt it would be great to cover the event in dialogue format, Plato style!

Gorga: I really enjoyed the exhibit. Josh, what did you think of it?

Kopin: First of all, Jon, if this is a Platonic dialogue, than which one of us is Socrates?

Seriously though, I really dug the exhibit. Having had a limited exposure to Addams' work in the past, I figured I would (the morbid absurdity of the cartoons appeals to both to my sense of humor and my sense of wonder), but I didn't realize I was going to like the exhibit as much as I did. I know you had an even more limited exposure to Addams' cartoons than I had had, Jon, and I'm curious: what was it like going in cold?

Gorga: You know... A bit weird, yes, but after the first two or three cartoons, I just began to laugh with you. The wonderful 'Pete's Place' one got me right in the funny bone and after that it was pretty smooth sailing. I really dug the "alternate universe" concept the curator's were trying to put forward.

Kopin: Is it an alternate universe, though? Or is it just a vision of our universe that's a little strange?

It seemed to me that what Sarah Henry was telling us when she emphasized the normal observer in Addams' work (and he or she isn't hard to spot- just look for the figure that seems in place rather than out of it) was that Addams' world is our world- and that's part of the reason his cartoons are so jarring and funny. When its considered in addition to the amount of detail that the artist gives not only to the subjects of the cartoons but also to the backgrounds this becomes even more clear- the normal is contrasted with the abnormal, the strange with the everyday, and what results is less of a window into an alternate universe and more of a commentary on our own.

Gorga: Now Joshie, you wouldn't be challenging the Official Museum-Certified Statement of the Nature of the Artist's Work, would you? I think you're correct, at least in part. We did discuss during our visit the way in which certain cartoons and strips appeared to be depicting an alternate universe, while some were merely a weird POV on our world, and others played on the borders. 'Stan's Place' being of the last type, while this wonderful four panel strip of a woman 'decorating' the advertising in the NYC's subways is entirely plausible to my mind! And the one that had us most excited was a very cool eight panel strip we will get to soon.

Kopin: I'm not sure the distinction you make between the "Stan's Place" cartoon and the bearded lady strip (incidentally, are we sure its a lady?) are necessarily meaningful- in their own way, aren't they both plausible? In fact, I think that's what I like about Addams' work the best: when he's at the top of his game, all of the cartoons are plausible, and they all sort of lull you into a false sense of normalcy. There's a kind of double take that's essential to appreciating these cartoons (and we'll return to this double take in a little bit.) With that said some of the work, particularly those images that lack the "normal observer", is just a little bit strange, isn't it?

Gorga: I think there's a slight but important distinction between the cartoons that live entirely in that 'strange and wonderful' space, i.e. the cartoons living in the Addams 'alternate reality' and the ones somewhere in-between on the spectrum, but that's a pretty fine difference and I won't hesitate to admit a pretty esoteric one.

Speaking of esoteric, I noticed that some of the strange and spooky elements that Charlie Addams allowed to interact with everyday New Yorkers were borrowed from Horror or Science Fiction Cinema and Literature. The Wolfman, for instance. Or the robot hilariously doing his Christmas shopping at Macy's! In a way, Addams was creating an intersection between fiction and reality here not unlike what we find in a lot of contemporary comics, like those I talked about in this post a few weeks back.

Thoughts, Josh?

Kopin: Yea, I think that's true: whatever reality its supposed to take place in, its not so weird as to be bizarre or even all that out of place. Everything fits so well partially because we're so familiar with all of it. It could be that what we were struggling with above has to do with this intersection- where do we place work like this? It's not exactly a traditional cartoon, is it? But if its not a cartoon, what is it? Or is it a cartoon? Or something else?

~ @JonGorga
~ @IamJoshKopin

What Makes the Art Sequential?

"Being in a sequence," you're probably saying to yourself after reading that title.

I posted this on Flickr recently:


So... is it comics?

A few nights ago at the house of someone who's work I'm editing I was reacquainted with my Bard College senior project. I'd e-mailed it to her on request months ago and she printed it out. I wrote over two years ago:

"In his ground-breaking book with a textbook approach to explaining comics, Comics and Sequential Art, Will Eisner defined comics immediately as “the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea” but then far more simply as “Sequential Art” (Eisner 5) i.e. visual art in sequence. Scott McCloud followed Eisner’s lead in his own Understanding Comics when he put forth his suggestion for a dictionary definition of comics: “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud 9) and continued in the following pages of Understanding Comics to demonstrate how his definition broadened the world of comics both historically (McCloud 10-17) and artistically (McCloud 18-20) by demonstrating that many things were comics, simply because many things had not appeared to be comics by old, restrictive perceptions. This thesis borrows McCloud’s definition, attempting to simplify it nearer to Eisner’s compact version, synthesizing them to: visual art in deliberate sequence to create meaning. McCloud’s “juxtaposed” is the first to go as there are several kinds of juxtaposition in comics (left to right panels, top to bottom panels, pages left to right) and not all are key to the medium, McCloud’s “pictorial and other images” falls under the umbrella of “visual art”, McCloud’s “deliberate sequence” is the most important part of his definition, as images in sequence are to be found in a few cases that are not comics but not in deliberate order, and is thus retained exactly, and McCloud’s “convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” can be summed up as the creation of informational/aesthetic “meaning.” Simpler, more concise, and more accurate: visual art in deliberate sequence."

Putting images into a sequence. Is it enough?

~ @JonGorga

Talk Over Balloons: comicsmith Brendan Leach

Among the independent comicsmiths I became acquainted with at Big Apple Comic-Con, only one of the few who really stood out I asked to do an interview, and his name is Brendan Leach (@iknowashortcut), a recent alumnus of the Masters of Fine Arts Illustration as Visual Essay graduate program at the prestigious School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Will Eisner taught at SVA. As did Jerry Robinson. (Although, I believe in the undergraduate arena.) It is one of the few, almost definitely the oldest, places in the United Sates one can get an education in making sequential art. NOT illustration, but illustration in the service of "visual essay", usually expressed as sequential art storytelling. There is a difference. It's definitely the only place you can graduate with the amazing David Mazzucchelli for your MFA thesis advisor.

Our early interviews here on The Long and Shortbox Of It have been with a writer and an artist. This time, for our third interview, we give you a true comicsmith: a man trained to do it all.

Jon Gorga: I'm here tonight at Soup n' Burger in New York City, Lower Manhattan... Lower Manhattan isn't quite accurate. Near Astor Place.

Brendan Leach: Below Fourteenth Street.

Jon Gorga: Below Fourteenth? It flies? It flies. Cool. I'm conducting the first recorded interview for The Long and Shortbox Of It with Brendan Leach...

Brendan Leach: Hello.

JG: ...artist and writer of "Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City" a very cool indie self-published comic. So jumping into the trenches, which is how I like to do interviews: How did you come up with the brilliant idea of having the cover be a mock newspaper?

BL: It was just practicality. I knew I couldn't make a mini-comic on a Xerox machine because of the ink washes in the art. So I realized I had to get it printed. The cheapest way to print anything is newsprint. And I said: Newsprint's okay because it's set in a time period when newsprint-- newspapers were the main form of news and media. And then it just made total sense: Why would I do a cover that was anything but a newspaper? I researched newspapers from the time period. Also, I could use the text on the cover to jump-start the setting and the story. So it just made sense on every level.

JG: How many of these great little blocks of text are actual reprinted period newspaper columns? These are from 19o4? You copied them and blurred them out?

BL: Everything. I copied the 19o4 front page from the day after the General Slocum ship sank in the East River.

JG: I haven't even heard of it.

BL: It's an insane bit of history. A bunch of people got on a boat, most of them were from a congregation, kind of around here, more like Sixth Street. There's a church, near where all the Indian restaurants are, there's a little plaque that commemorates it. They all got on this boat to go sightseeing up-- I guess it was the East River because they got about as far as Heart's Island-Riker's Island up there. There was a fire on the boat and it started to sink.

JG: I see. It is here, it's legible in one place: "Slocum Catastrophe Recalls A Like Disaster".

BL: The crew was not trained in what to do in a disaster. The life boats were painted to the deck. Everything was wrong so nobody survived, basically. Because there was no preperations for an actual disaster. The life preservers were rotten and falling apart, couldn't get the boats off the deck. So everybody died in the fire.

JG: And you would have a proper amount of concern similar to your plot, which is, by the way, a delightfully cool concept of pterodactyls terrorizing Lower Manhattan and the story of two brothers in an ongoing rivalry who work for the 'Ptero Patrol'. Would it be pronounced PE-ter-OH Patrol?

BL: No, it would be ter-OH Patrol I think. It's a visual alliteration. You'll never say it, but you're reading to yourself so it looks like alliteration.

JG: Now, the brother's rivalry is pretty unique in that you never quite see why Declan (is it pronounced DAY-clen?)...

BL: It would think DEH-clen.

JG: ...why Declan resents Eamon other than some of the surface-level stuff: that Eamon is kind of a hero, but we don't really see their past, we don't really see them growing up. I was wondering where the inspiration came from for these characters to be in a rivalry and what you think about their motivations for the rivalry.

BL: Do you have a brother?

JG: I don't.

BL: I have a brother and I love him to death, we have no tension between us, but on the few things that we both do, that we're both into... he's my older brother so the main motivating factor is to do it better. He's a little bit older, he always did it first. You're always playing catch-up and I just exaggerated that feeling that I assume everyone has. And I have a good relationship with my brother so it's not that odd.

JG: That makes sense.

BL: So I imagine, if you're in the same line of work and you're already stressed out because the line of work's not going to last, as the pterodactyls get fewer and fewer. I imagine there's a high amount of stress where the older brother is interested in getting rid of them, the younger brother never really had a chance to hunt them, so there's a lot of animosity connected right there.

JG: It's one of those cases of a human being groomed, in a way, for something that all of a sudden then becomes obsolete and the pain of that.

BL: Yeah. Absolutely. 100%.

JG: I love this page (what is this, the third page?) the first time we see a pterodactyl slain.

BL: Maybe fourth.

JG: It's really gorgeous and the image of this pterodactyl falling through the sky then landing right in front of a pharmacy on a downtown Manhattan street, dead as a doornail. It's pretty hilarious. It's hilarious as well as sad, but maybe more than anything striking. You've got a really interesting technique in what I assume to be a sort of a riff on the idea of a thought balloon: as Declan walks down the street in Manhattan, you're seeing a textual representation of his thoughts like a thought balloon, but they're kind of smudgy, they're kind of wavy and you can see particles of the previous conversation that he just exited. So I was wondering if you could talk about where that came from and how you perceive it, and (if you can imagine me doing air quotes) how you 'read' it.

BL: Maybe it's not exactly like this, but this sort of thing is done all over comics where there's something buzzing in somebody's ear. Not exactly the same, but you ever read "Night Fisher"? R. Kikuo Johnson? It's a good little book. They live in Hawaii and this kid tries drugs. They're smoking meth at one point. His ears are buzzing from doing it. He keeps drawing these hornets. Not really flying around, but just floating next to the chracter's ears. So you just know what's going on: his ears are buzzing, he's got that feeling in his head and it's not really a part of reality.

JG: Kind of the equivalent of the flies around the trashcan as Scott McCloud writes about in "Understanding Comics", an iconic representation of something. [NOTE: This phenomenon has been called "emanata".]

BL: So you know there's thoughts going on inside his head. Even in a movie it's kind of hard to depict. You have an actor making scowling faces and you're like: 'oh that guy's thinking, I know he's thinking'. But in a comic it seems like this is a much better thing because his head is literally buzzing. You just need to know he's conflicted, he's got a lot going on in his head. There's literally a lot going on around his head.

JG: Come to think of it, what you've done is combine the thought balloon with the old 'storm cloud'.

BL: Exactly. It's the 'Charlie Brown storm cloud'.

JG: That's really cool. We're kind of going chronologically through the comic, since that's the easiest way for me to just say 'Oh yes, that's something I wanted to talk about!' I love that their father is painting a New York City sky with pterodactyls in it because it's his world and it's his world that's dying, and he's trying to capture it through memory.

BL: Yeah, that comes from talking to my adviser about: 'I got these characters that have got to say a lot of stuff, I don't want to have a page of just heads moving'. So he said: 'Well, what are they doing while they're talking?' In the time period and the tenement they live in, he's a retired guy so maybe he's drawing. What would he draw? He'd draw the pterodactyls!

JG: Cool. One of the things-- one of the very, very few things --that didn't work for me was the few times where you draw something twice to reflect speed, old-school like The Flash or Spider-Man in a mainstream superhero comic. Quite honestly, my first reaction was that it was a printing error and then only after I saw one of the pterodactyls do it, did it finally became clear to me.

BL: It's two moments in time.

JG: Yeah that it's the classic: The Flash moving at super-speed that we saw a million times, Carmine Infantino-style. But a human doing it somehow just felt really unnatural, and I overheard you talking about the way the comic was done, which we'll get to in the next question, so I thought it was a left-over from that process.

BL: You didn't like that? I get a lot of compliments on that. More on the pterodactyl one.

JG: The pterodactyl one works.

BL: I see what you're saying. I used it because, like you said, it happens all the time in comics with the Flash and everything. You're just trying to do as much as you can on a page, in each panel and when things are happening fast sometimes it's hard to notice things.

JG: I really want to know a bit about the process because I overheard you talking about the ink lines versus the washes, and that you literally created two layers and had to match them. Which must have been a PAIN IN THE ASS.

BL: It was an extra DAY of work.

JG: ONLY a day?

BL: Yeah, once I got the system down.

JG: Explain the process as best you can since this is recorded. There'll be some images accompanying the interview.

[A left, a preliminary drawing for "Pterodactyl Hunters" similar to the ink-lines layer.]

BL: It's not even that difficult to describe. I did a pencil draft first, very rough, then a tighter draft of pencils, and I did the pencils at the size that the final art would be drawn. So I could take the pencils, put them on a lightbox, take the nice paper and work with the solid black ink directly onto the nice paper, straight from the pencils on the lightbox so there's no penciling done on the final art. I use watercolor paper. So that's all straight ink and then I ink the whole book in just the black ink. And then took a second separate sheet of paper over the ink on the lightbox and I did the wash on top of that.

JG: I did figure that you would need to have the ink first and then the wash. But you had them on separate layers.

[A left, the final panel as it appears in "Pterodactyl Hunters".]

BL: They're on separate sheets of paper. So the way the art looks in the book doesn't exist on any 'original art'. I have 36 pages of ink-line and 36 pages of wash.

JG: Yeah, I suspected that was true. Here's another gorgeous page. I had at one point imagined that you had literally drawn them entirely separately and them combined them in Photoshop.

BL: Because I did them on the lightbox, I did them in InDesign. The file sizes were exactly the same and the original art is the same so when I put them into InDesign they just fit perfectly, I didn't have to adjust them.

JG: That's what I would screw-up: the file sizes. I also noticed that at several points, you really smartly have text that can't quite be read because of distance, creating a great aural effect, an off-camera sound. And that's something I noticed in the work of someone that I know you drew heavily from: David Mazzucchelli. Was it something that was suggested to you, was it something that you realized through his work or was it something that you came to separately? To create this text that's background text, so to speak? Illegible text that represents a sound that can barely be read? Heard. Ha. Synesthesia. Tough.

BL: No. No, it wasn't suggested to me but it's something I definitely picked up from reading, you know, not only Mazzucchelli's work, but I guess in more modern comics it's pretty common. You think about, not replicating other media, but trying to achieve effects that comics can give that other media can't. But they relate: if you were reading a novel, the author can just write 'this character said something that couldn't be heard' and you know what's going on, and when you're watching a movie you hear the muffled sound so you know they're saying something but you can't hear it. So how does that happen in comics? The small balloon that is far away that you can't read.

JG: I have seen it done differently. I've actually seen empty balloons.

BL: I think I've got some empty balloons in here.

JG: Do you?

BL: I think so. But not full-size.

JG: Tiny buggers?

BL: Maybe they're not totally empty.

JG: At any rate, the end is intentionally ambiguous because we don't see what should be the final beat. You end just before the conclusion, you end before the final action beat. So I presume that's a case of 'leaving it up to the reader'?

BL: Right, because getting up to it is the interesting part of the story. He's got to get to the point where he can make this decision and he gets to that point. The best parts of a story are what gets left out, right? You know, you build it up... It seems to me any reader in any medium is going to like what they think more than what I think, you know? So I made all the other choices, but this thing, the ending, it ends the way YOU think it ends! It ends without a decision.

JG: If I ask you, in your imagination, which decision does he take, you going to give me the deflection?

BL: I would like to give you the deflection.

JG: You absolutely have that right to, as the creator, to leave the ambiguity! But I'm curious as to what you'll answer-- we have a disclaimer about spoilers, I don't know if you know that-- does the character take the shot, in your imagination, in the next beat that isn't in the comic?

BL: I've been asked this before. When I think about: If I were to continue this story, how would I tell the story in order to continue? You need to know what happened. If I was to continue the story, I STILL wouldn't let you know what happened until the end of another 36 pages. But in my mind, I think he definitely takes the shot but... he takes the shot, he pulls the trigger but you don't know if...

JG: Oh, that's great! Ambiguities within ambiguities! Great.

BL: I think he would have the courage to pull the trigger, but he may or may not have the tenacity to hit his target.

JG: Cool! It's a great hanging moment, because the last page is another gorgeous one. So part-and-parcel of that, is there a possibility of a continuation: a "Pterodactyl Hunters 2"?

BL: Man, I've thought about that and it was always: THIS was the story. It's really not about pterodactyls it's about the brothers, that relationship. And the story of that relationship, what's interesting to me about that relationship is already in this 36 pages. And I like it as a one-shot. To get things picked up by a publisher, sometimes they be 90 or 100 pages long. So this is not really going to get published the way it is because it's too long to be short and too short to be long. And I've thought about doing two more 36-page chapters.

JG: Continuing the story of the brothers, giving ambiguity about what happened in this moment perhaps?

BL: Actually, I imagined there'd be a chapter before when their father is more like their age, and they're kids and there's more pterodactyls, and there's more action. And it would have to be a different story with a different emotional tone. And then a story set maybe twenty years after this story, when it's the late 20s almost the 30s, the world is more modern, and what would happen after that. But those aren't important, what was important to me, was that this story is about things becoming obsolete, at a time when things are changing. 19o4 is when New York City is really turning into a modern place: they built the subways in 19o4, they started the sewer system, the fire patrol's getting organized, the unification of all the boroughs either just happened or it's about to happen. It couldn't have been set at any other time, to me. So it's about those changes. Major changes happening. Everyone has to change. When it's not a choice: It's happening, things are changing, can you do it? And that's what, to me, this story's about. And another chapter or an earlier chapter doesn't really fit for that.

JG: If you do create more, this story will still be the hinge, so to speak, just as it's the hinge moment in New York City's history?

BL: Right, or they would be totally different and have a different emotional process.

JG: The final question I have for you is, again, related to that one: What is the next project? What's coming for you? And what do you want the Long and Shortbox readers to know about?

BL: I have some short comics that I'm working on for some anthologies. One is for "Ferocious Quarterly". The Twitter account is @WeAreFerocious and the blog is fe.rocious.com. I've got a short comic in that which is set in a small town, contemporary times-- more character based. I've got a comic that I'd like to work on about greasers in the late 1950s. That one I haven't really worked-up yet.

JG: Oh, that sounds cool.

BL: I've got some things in the hopper.

JG: Always a couple plans on the back burner that could be moved to the front burner at some future point.

BL: Looking for outlets to publish it or make some mini-comics. Nothing so concrete yet. I really wish I had a better answer to this! I've got a lot of stuff in the hopper.

JG: That is, first of all, better than nothing and, second of all, exciting to me because I really liked "Pterodactyl Hunters". And hopefully exciting to our readers who may or may not have checked out "Pterodactyl Hunters", yet! If you know me personally, I'm probably going to put this in your hands pretty soon because I think it's really awesome. I think that mostly wraps it up. Thank you Brendan for making the time, for doing this for The Long and Shortbox Of It.

BL: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

JG: Absolutely. And thank you guys for reading.

__________________________________________
You must seek out "Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City". All you have to do is send Brendan a little bit of moolah ($2.00 I believe) or if you live in New York City just go to any comic-shop in Brooklyn OR ask Brendan what other stores across the nation are carrying the book.

Brendan's website is at iknowashortcut.com

You really should do yourself the favor and go check his stuff out.

Digital Comics Part 2: The Death of the Great Prints?

On April 3, 2o1o Apple Computing publicly released their latest... computing thing: the Apple iPad. Technologist Kevin Kelly called it "a portable portal" and said "Don't think of them as tablets. Think of them as windows that you carry." (WIRED, April 2o1o, Vol. 18, #2) Well, through the window of my iPhone's camera (ironies upon ironies) I saw a printed comic-book disintegrating on the wet concrete of New York City in a rainstorm and I fear that it may have been a portent of the world we shall see through this all-hailed 'window computer'.

Two days before the iPad's release (in what many must have thought was an April Fool's joke) Marvel Comics had its own special release. It deployed on the Apple 'App Store' (a web-based program that allows users to purchase 'apps,' i.e. small programs designed with simplicity in mind) its own Marvel Comics app for iPod Touch, iPhone, and, of course, the iPad. [It looks like the screenshot at right, on an iPad.] (IDW released one a long time ago, as did Archie Comics.) One iTunes Store app reviewer named "brianmhite" wrote: "I've looked for a place to buy comics in town. Wasn't sure if I'd enjoy them though. This app solved everything." This was echoed in another user's "No more trips to the comic store for my fix!" One "pixelslinger" went so far as to say: "Wow. Marvel just killed comib [sic] book stores."

The most amazing/inspirational statement was by someone going by "Jakeoster": "This may just get me into comics..."

The most terrifying was: "I'll probably never purchase a paper comic book again."

What a strange frickin' world, right?

Almost a month before the iPad's release, on March 11, Apple announced that they would soon begin to include comics and graphic novels for paid download in their iBookstore as a 'top tier category'. What this really ended up meaning for anyone or anything is still unclear.

Two years earlier, in November of 2oo7, Marvel announced Digital Comics Unlimited, a subscription service with a huge number of comics available for streaming, non-download-able reading on a PC. But that interface was pretty clumsy and slow. Worse, to some people's minds, is the fact that those thousands of streaming comics are inaccessible through the new app portal. Someone would have to pay for the subscription service AND download individual comics for a dollar amount per issue to read the same comic on the iPad and on their personal computer.

But what does this mean for comics? Or for print comics in specific?

A user named 'T. C. Ford' on ComicBookResources's article on Apple's March announcement commented: "From the publishing point of view, it's not Print vs. Digital, it's Print AND Digital."

Yeah, there's undeniably a time when they coexist. Like... now. Will these digital-comics-version of print comics programs kill print comics? Well, probably not. The fact that genuine webcomics and illegal digital scans of print comics have been available for years and the print comics industry hasn't keeled over yet is a good sign. Plus it should be noted that Marvel is not offering their brand-new weekly comics over the internet in either areas they are dipping their toes into. Certainly, having both sources of income simultaneously is what the publishers want! So they are going to be in favor of pushing one with the left hand and one with the right. But for how long? We won't know until we know.

I'd LOVE to tell you what's it like to read a comic on the iPad hands on. But I can't. Because it's a fucking $500 device, right? That's more than two-thirds of my rent, thank you very much. And upon visiting the 14th Street Apple Store here in Manhattan I discovered that the display iPads had absolutely no way to read comics and I was told I could not download new apps to the display devices. (There are video reviews, like this one from BoingBoing.net. Jump to 2:01 if you're just interested in what it really looks like to read a comic on an iPad. But before I would sink $500, I would want to feel it in my hands.) I can tell you that it's a pretty hot mess on the old iPhone. Marvel's app is actually an almost exact clone of Comixology's app "Comics", which has been around for a long time, but with Marvel characters sprinkled into the background. Worse, as it is a clone of Comixology's app it has the same features and defaults. The default setting is something called 'guided view' and I HATE it.

Essentially 'guided view' is a mode in which a virtual camera POV pans from a part of a comics page to another part of a comics page at your controlled pace. It often crops part of the image out and makes awkward choices as to what you should see when. It creates a little frame-by-frame animated movie out of the panels of a comic. I suspect you'll have to try it to really understand it. One of those iTunes Store app reviewers named "SullStyle" wrote: "Finally I can read panel by panel without seeing what's coming on the next page." Yeah, you control the pace of this little animation, but not the exact content. It's like the old pan&scan videotape to film trade-off. You can own the thing digitally, you can control the speed, but you've lost part of the picture.

I can also tell you that Panelfly, one of the competing programs, doesn't force the reader into any bullshit 'guided view' on the iPhone unless you want it to.
This is something I can get a little more behind. Comics being shown page by page and easily read panel-by-panel OR page-by-page. Best of both worlds. (It's also all done with a nice design sense.)

Using the iPhone and iPad and everyday computers as a delivery system for comics is a great idea. Maybe even 'the future' of sequential art, if such a thing can be said. If new people are getting interested in sequential art storytelling through these programs and devices that's fantastic. That's a win-win. Will it kill print off entirely? Yeah, maybe it will. Well, I think us comicsmiths have to be prepared for that possibility. But there's a much bigger problem:


While this is sequential art. This is not.

Note the lack of sequence. And that's a damn shame. Especially when the original panel in print looks like this:


You'd think this is just someone asleep at the switch, but this is the norm and the default setting! Losing visual information with so little an effort to retain it in digital form is sloppy at best and criminal at worst.

Now someone who's never read comics before may not have much of a problem seeing a comic cut-up to make a bad short movie, but people who read print comics and see this 'guided view' usually react with an immediate: 'Why would I read a comic that way?'

In this writer's opinion, this 'guided view' cannibalizes new and existing comics into a weird user-controlled movie of still drawings. The sequence of 'man's face' and 'awe-inspiring mountain' in visual juxtaposition creates the scene 'man stares at mountain in awe'. Losing that visual juxtaposition loses so much of the concept of 'the comics page' that has been evolving since Winsor fucking McCay!

Over 1oo years ago on July 26th 19o8, Winsor McCay printed this!

Now, if we let comics go from that to this:
...we've lost something huge there.

Scott McCloud was probably pitching a fit somewhere on April 3. And rightly so, as he believed that going digital would allow sequential art an expansion to an 'infinite canvas'. (See his TED Talk video here on YouTube.com. Jump to 12:50 for his demonstration of this concept. Note that he says: "look at the monitor as a window".) Not a regression to a badly animated single-panel-at-a-time!

For years, people spoke of a hypothetical 'iTunes for comics': a single free-to-download program that could allow people easy access to official digital copies of their favorite comics for a price and to read digital copies they already own. For my money, Panelfly is half of that equation. Marvel's stuff is on there, a bunch of the other big print publishers' stuff is on there. The only thing missing is the flexibility of the files themselves: I can't move a comic I bought on my iPhone to my MacBook Pro. Which would be great as it has a much bigger screen, doesn't it? Now the program ComicBookLover allows you to read files you may have already downloaded (more on this in the next part) and move them between your desktop and their app, but it has no system by which you can download new comics. Someone needs to combine these two platforms and develop a better system than the fucking 'guided view'. Then we may have the 'DVD' of comics, iTunes for comics. A digital comics delivery system that works.

Until these problems are solved, and something at least partially like McCloud's 'infinite canvas' is encouraged, I think digital comics on the desktop, on-demand is not much more than a mess. But technology is technology is technology. Paper printing combined with saddle-stapling makes a comic-book. In McCay's day, before saddle-stapling and before the comic-book, comic-strips were in large, folded pages inserted into newspapers. Before that they were woven into fabric or carved in stone or painted on walls. Graphic novels are now made more or less like prose books, with glue and binding and high paper-stock and all that nonsense. A digital delivery system is merely another step in the evolution of media. But for it to be an evolution and not a devolution it has to allow the medium to do more and not less. Print publishers would do well to take a harder look at how the webcomicsmiths do what they do.

Hopefully, the publishers will allow and encourage technological evolution to happen in all areas while striving to keep hold of the stuff that already works... on paper.

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One more section of this article is planned to wrap things up.

UPDATE 4/16/2o1o: I would be remiss in not mentioning Wowio.com, which works on an entirely different platform. You can download comics, graphic novels and prose books from their website for for very cheap or sometimes for FREE on a rotating basis because they have sold advertising 'sponsorship' to various brand-name corporations. Intelligently, all their files are PDF format allowing you to save them to your computer, move them to ANY mobile reading device.

Their comics main page is here.

Honestly, I forgot about them until they sent me a newsletter today.

UPDATE 4/27/2010: I just discovered ANOTHER one. Eagle One Media's store allows you to use a credit card or Paypal to buy and download PDF files directly from their website. Simple!

UPDATE 5/6/2o1o: Forgot this one. It's called Longbox and it appears to be not quite ready for prime time despite being announced years ago. The beta o.7 version can be downloaded here. I have downloaded one and will try it out and get back to you.

Quick Announcement and Quick Note on Semantics

If I may be allowed a small plug, I have recently re-branded my old personal blog
"Gorga's Thoughts" into "The Comicsmithy" A Place Where Comics Are Forged(TM... not really).

"Comicsmith" is the only word I've ever come up with to adequately describe what we do. We who make comics.

Writers write, painters paint, filmmakers make films, but people always seem to stick to "comics creator" or "comics artist" to sum up the position of a person who makes comics. We're ALL "artists". None of these do it for me. The nearest one is "cartoonist", but that word technically refers to a style and not a medium according to Scott McCloud; "an approach to picture-making" as he puts it in "Understanding Comics", (McCloud, 21) and I agree. I heard a discussion of this problem just a few weeks ago at a panel on "Brooklyn Women in Comics" (on which there is an article covering it coming, I swear) and I wanted to say it out loud... but I didn't. It would have been obnoxious of me.

"Comicsmith" is great because it resolves the "s" at the end of the word "comics" with a word that denotes creation: "smith", like a "blacksmith", a "metalsmith", or, more importantly, a "shipsmith". A shipsmith makes ships so a comicsmith makes comics. I also feel like it's, therefore, a better translation of the Japanese word mangaka. A bit antiquated, yes, but after realizing that comics is, more often than not, a "forging" of disparate elements into a work, I've fallen even more in love with the word. I'll even go so far as to say that if my word (or one better, but equally unique to the medium), gains enough popularity it would help to consciously/subconsciously affect the way people treat comics as a medium.

So I'll be putting a bigger effort at putting my simple photo comics up for all to see. Soon I hope to include more elaborate comics written by me and drawn by others as well!