11 replies to this topic

[Adam Masterman]

Depending on who you ask, digital comics are

1. The wave of the future,

2. An exciting new creative opportunity

3. A hollow gimmick, or

4. The root of all evil

By "digital comix", I am referring to any form of reading experience that is uniquely digital; be it comixology's app which simulates scanning a traditional page, a panel by panel flip through, or basically anything beyond simple jpegs of traditional pages. I am excluding motion comics, which aren't really comics, and which are the root of all evil.

Anyway, I'm sure there are tons of threads on this out there; I've seen a lot that talk about the market/business angle. I'm more interested in the creative side: is this a fun and useful tool for comikers looking to tell a story. And I did a little dabbling to attempt (in a lazy way) to answer this question for myself. I downloaded the Simple Flash Comics Engine , formatted a chunk of my own book, and plugged it in. Total time: about 2 hours. I'd read Yves Bigeral's fantastic About Digitial Comics, and had some ideas about different effects I wanted to try, but basically I just plugged in the art, and sequenced the speech balloons.

Anyway, I wanted to get some reactions to the comic in this format, AND, to invite creators to do the same, and post it up here for us to see. Its a bit of a time commitment, and to go the route I went, you will need Adobe Flash (CS3 or better). However, if those conditions don't daunt you, I for one would love to see what people come up with. And, if you already have a digital comic of some kind, even better; post it here and let us have a look.

Anyway, here's mine:

Echo Flash Comic

And, for comparison; the same material in traditional page layout format:

Part 1

Part 2

[Furious Nick]

Personally, I don't see digital comics as such a bad thing. Nor do I see it replacing print entirely. There is a market for both. As technology continues to improve, I believe we'll see more things being done with digital media in general.

I enjoyed the Flash comic, but I did read the traditional first. I wanted to see what the difference in the two would be and I started with what was most familiar first. I thought your Flash comic had some areas where it really seemed to sing, but there were also areas that didn't do it for me too.

I like the way the thought bubbles/dialogue bubbles where handled. The way you transitioned from a panel without words to one with dialogue or a text box, seemed strange on some slides. This was most apparent on the one with the LOTR. If you were going for showing off the artwork and leaving off the bubble/text, you could have handled it like you did with the dialogue. To me it just seemed like there was an extra slide or something just didn't flow through as the rest of the story did.

Over all, I liked both formats. The digital comic was more fun to read for me for some reason. I don't know if it was because it was something new and fancy or something else.
Great work on putting something like this together. It looks sharp!

I also agree with your statement of encouragement to other artist to work on their own material and experiment. Great work!

[Yncke]

I'm very much a fan of digital comics. But I'm afraid I don't agree with the flash approach you're using as an example here. Not only because I dislike flash - it requieres a plugin, becomes browser dependent (your comic doesn't work too well with Opera, btw, so I've only seen the first handful of panels), you loose the readers using iPad, etc.

But because to me, a click/swipe/flip/... for the next page is as much as I'm prepared to do for the reading. Give me the whole page, and I'll decide what flow I follow on the page (that freedom of choice is an illusion if the creator knows what s/he's doing, but you know what I mean). Comics to me is about panels divided by space, not by a click or a 1/24th of a second.
Your example of 'about digital comics' is about the only time so far I came across a flash comic which I felt worked, but I'm not quite sure I'd categorise it as a 'comic' instead of a flash movie. Your comic, for example, worked great as a PDF, I'm afraid it doesn't grab my attention as flash. (And I don't think it's because I know how the story goes. )

I'm sorry if this feels harsh, it's just my two cents. But I feel it's an interesting topic and I'm curious how others feel.

[Adam Masterman]

I knew I'd get some good insight here.

Nick, you are correct that this could be put together better. Its honestly pretty fast and sloppy. But... I figured that I needed to throw it out there and see what worked in order to get a feel for the format. So basically, yeah, some pretty poor transitions.

Yncke, that doesn't feel harsh at all; you are definitely one of those whose opinion I was hoping to get. Honestly, I would have agreed with you a year ago, so its not like I don't know where you are coming from. But I've definitely got the fervor of the recently converted. Things I like about this format:

Every panel is a surprise for the reader. No more need to hide important stuff behind page turns, and even then the immediate "future" is still in the peripheral vision. I think it gives more latitude to shock the reader.

Balloon sequencing. I just love it. No need to conform balloons to a left-right orientation, nor to squeeze out all the art in a dialogue heavy panel. Its still needs to be used well (which I didn't do so hot at in my version), but the possibility is fantastic.

Layout direction can go backward now, with no reader confusion. I can have a panel appear on the right of a black screen, and then another on the left, and it will read correctly because of the sequence. I am envisioning some back and forth conversation possibilities that seem cool.

Also, I agree with Bigeral that these are still "comics". Its a really important distinction that the reader navigates the story, decides what to look at and how long, when to back up and re-read, etc. To me, those make it comics, and the reading a comics reading experience. But... it is different, for sure. And I don't even go so far as to say I prefer this to the traditional experience. What I'm inching towards, however, is that I prefer this experience *on a device* to the standard format. In other words, if I'm going to read it online, or on my phone, I think I prefer this format; but that doesn't mean I wouldn't rather hunker down with a dead-tree graphic novel (though I find pamphlets annoying in my old age). Anyway, thats for the input, its all good food for thought.

[Adam Masterman]

Here's something that you might find interesting, Yncke; sort of a mixture of click-thru and page layout:

http://www.turbodefi...ng/1/tdk001.php

It also occurs to me that the super tall comix that you usually find on deviantArt are uniquely digital; certainly there's not a practical way to have them printed out. Here are two of my favorites:

[Yncke]

Adam Masterman, on 02 April 2012 - 08:30 AM, said:

Yncke, that doesn't feel harsh at all; you are definitely one of those whose opinion I was hoping to get. Honestly, I would have agreed with you a year ago, so its not like I don't know where you are coming from. But I've definitely got the fervor of the recently converted.

I've lost enthousiasm for them. A couple of years ago, I still might have agreed, but not any more. Funny, that.

Adam Masterman, on 02 April 2012 - 08:30 AM, said:

Things I like about this format:
Every panel is a surprise for the reader. No more need to hide important stuff behind page turns, and even then the immediate "future" is still in the peripheral vision. I think it gives more latitude to shock the reader.

It takes away freedom from the user to take away the need of planning for the creator. Sorry, but this feels a bit of a lazy creator's argument.
If I want to be spooked every other second, a horror movie is much more functional choice.

Adam Masterman, on 02 April 2012 - 08:30 AM, said:

Balloon sequencing. I just love it. No need to conform balloons to a left-right orientation, nor to squeeze out all the art in a dialogue heavy panel. Its still needs to be used well (which I didn't do so hot at in my version), but the possibility is fantastic.

One of the things I hate as a reader. With a classic comic it forces the creator to make a series of panels with different angles building up the atmosphere, with body language acompanying the conversation, with facial expressions matching the balloon. Now you get one generic image with a lot of conversation layered over it time and again. Yes, it can be done well, but most of the times, it's yet again an excuse for the creator to go lazy. Conversation scenes are often annoying to do, but they're important too.

Adam Masterman, on 02 April 2012 - 08:30 AM, said:

Layout direction can go backward now, with no reader confusion. I can have a panel appear on the right of a black screen, and then another on the left, and it will read correctly because of the sequence. I am envisioning some back and forth conversation possibilities that seem cool.

Could be interesting. Could also grow boring. Dunno. Certainly not the killer app for me.

Adam Masterman, on 02 April 2012 - 08:30 AM, said:

Also, I agree with Bigeral that these are still "comics". Its a really important distinction that the reader navigates the story, decides what to look at and how long, when to back up and re-read, etc. To me, those make it comics, and the reading a comics reading experience.

I guess the difference is how much emphasis you put on the meaning of the gutter/spatial separation of panels, how much that is an integral part of a comic. What elements make a comic a comic?

Adam Masterman, on 02 April 2012 - 02:55 PM, said:

Here's something that you might find interesting, Yncke; sort of a mixture of click-thru and page layout:

http://www.turbodefi...ng/1/tdk001.php

The turbo version doesn't work here, I'm afraid. So I can't really see what you're trying to illustrate.
(I've started to read the html version, though. Looks like a nice comic, thanks for the link.)

Adam Masterman, on 02 April 2012 - 02:55 PM, said:

It also occurs to me that the super tall comix that you usually find on deviantArt are uniquely digital; certainly there's not a practical way to have them printed out.

Ah yes! Those I really like. Make sure it's not one of them progressive jpgs, and you can just let the browser load the page while reading the comic. On banner comics, I very much agree with you.

A practical way... hm. An old fashioned scroll instead of a book. I might be tempted to give that a try if I saw that lying in my comic store.

[Biram Ba]

Yncke, on 05 April 2012 - 04:12 AM, said:

An old fashioned scroll instead of a book.

Now, that sounds cool.

[Rocketpig]

Adam Masterman, on 02 April 2012 - 08:30 AM, said:

Balloon sequencing. I just love it. No need to conform balloons to a left-right orientation, nor to squeeze out all the art in a dialogue heavy panel. Its still needs to be used well (which I didn't do so hot at in my version), but the possibility is fantastic.

Layout direction can go backward now, with no reader confusion. I can have a panel appear on the right of a black screen, and then another on the left, and it will read correctly because of the sequence. I am envisioning some back and forth conversation possibilities that seem cool.

See, I really disagree here and I don't think it's me being persnickety. By breaking left-to-right transitions, you are going against the grain of thousands of years of written language; some right-to-left, others left-to-right, top-to-bottom, but ALL ingrained in a child at a very young age. This isn't only applicable to comic books. This applies to movies (ever notice how a left-facing character is often struggling while a right-facing is breaking free or advancing heroically?), images, everything we look at as a culture. Written language dictates far more than just words. Its linear progression pervades nearly everything we look at and how we look at it.

You're not going to suddenly break that indoctrination just because comics can jump around now that they're digital. It's going to piss off readers and not just because they're used to comics being that way; everything else works that way, too.

Adam Masterman, on 02 April 2012 - 08:30 AM, said:

Every panel is a surprise for the reader. No more need to hide important stuff behind page turns, and even then the immediate "future" is still in the peripheral vision. I think it gives more latitude to shock the reader.

There is an advantage here but I question its overall importance. How often do you need to surprise readers and it can't be worked into a page flip? How often does "seeing the future" really hurt your page?

On the other hand, you're completely losing page layouts with this new tactic. How many times have you stopped on a page and taken the entire thing in at once, marveling at the overall beauty of the layout, the images, the bubbles, everything? I bet it's a lot more often than you've run into the problem of letting your readers see the future.

Edited by Rocketpig, 07 April 2012 - 05:55 AM.

[Rocketpig]

Anyway, I think digital comics are a neat experiment. After reading AvX #0 or whatever it was called, I was surprised at just how many obvious things the creators missed (like the right-to-left transitions) and how gimmicky some elements felt. Over time, I think the bugs will work themselves out as people realize what works and what doesn't. But there are other things that work well from a creative aspect, like focus transitions. That and being able to re-use elements again in consecutive panels will help reduce the workload from creators. Smaller workload equals more content created. On the flip side, it can also create laziness and complacency.

Edited by Rocketpig, 07 April 2012 - 06:28 AM.

[Adam Masterman]

Thanks for the insight, RocketPig. I was grabbed by your statement on page layouts, because I actually *don't* like fancy, elaborate page layouts. I think that, while they can be interesting visually, they also are a reminder that you are reading a comic, and thus, they pull you out of the story a little bit. I have also wondered if the shaped panels really do make action seem more dramatic, as is generally assumed. And I got thinking about it so much that I ended up drawing a sample page with two different layouts to have a comparison. And then writing a little essay about it (weird, I know). Anyway, here it is, let me know what you think:

[Biram Ba]

Personally, I definitely prefer the simple layouts, as I see it more like a movie in my head. Same reason I don't use sound effects. Less is more, I think. I mean, we all know Superman flies fast. Changing the shape of the panel to show it kinda feels like when they add 3D to every movie.

[Adam Masterman]

Biram Ba, on 09 April 2012 - 02:02 PM, said:

Personally, I definitely prefer the simple layouts, as I see it more like a movie in my head. Same reason I don't use sound effects. Less is more, I think. I mean, we all know Superman flies fast. Changing the shape of the panel to show it kinda feels like when they add 3D to every movie.

This is really becoming one of my strongest story-telling convictions: the less the reader is aware that he or she is reading a comic, the better. Ours is the McCloud generation; in that he gave us all a real pride in our medium, and a sense of its inherent value. But I wonder if the downside to this the sentiment that the medium is more important than the story.