THE FORM OF ONLINE COMICS

David Dodd: When I first read about your book coming out I was a little disheartened to hear that you were spending a lot of pages on on-line comics, since comics are in essence writing and drawing, and a lot of the computer world seems most interested in the promise of bringing together as many media as possible. But when I read it I was really impressed that you knew about this other model of information display that was much more powerful for comics than hypertext.

Scott McCloud: And that didn’t rely on animating and adding voice actors to everything.

DD: Well, that would take things away. But you talk about this broader range of two-dimensional displays, matrices of panels. It sounds like what you’re seeing as the future for on-line comics is new levels of design on that level.

SM: Yeah, you have an unlimited space to work in now. And in fact in three dimensions if you want them. I see comics as a temporal map, and to me there’s plenty of exciting design challenges once you blow yourself out of the page. Once you break out of that page, that little 6x9 rectangle, and you have the x, y and z axis from here to eternity, you can create some enormously impressive spatial constructs. If you look at just an average graphic novel, let’s say a 200 page long collection, maybe one of the smaller Cerebus books, 200 pages, 6 inches wide per page, would be about 1200 inches. That’s a really interesting thing. If you imagine that as a mural, that’s a very interesting construction. Now if you uncouple the panels from their page, and lay them out in a string, you have more like about 3600 inches, if each tier is going one after the other, that’s a hundred yards. We’re coming out with those every day. Well, not every day, but every week brings us another body of comics work of that length. So people are continually creating things which from a spatial point of view are huge, wonderful, huge spatial constructions, that have been chopped up. It’s as if you make the world’s longest sandwich and chop it up, put it into little boxes...

Albert Boime: But then what happens to the book, when you lose the sense of the book, is that a loss, not having a book that you read page to page until you come to some kind of closure?

SM: You'll still have the closure, you'll still have the end. You'll still have a sense of the subdivision of the parts. There's nothing to stop you from taking that narrative and breaking it into subsections that are relevant to the narrative. Right now, we break up the narrative every two pages regardless of what's going on. Whether it's a microscopic scene with a gunshot, or it's a long 300-panel, Lawrence of Arabia standing in the desert waiting for the horse to come, regardless of that you have that same bang, bang, bang disco beat of the page, which has nothing to do with the story. You come to the end of the page, you turn the page, that pause, it has a narrative effect. And it's irrelevant to the story that you want to tell. If you want to break up the narrative, for narrative reasons, then you should be able to break it up based on the needs of that narrative, at the end of a scene, or at the end of a particular narrative mood. If you want to break your story into five parts then those parts shouldn't necessarily be the same length. You may want part one to last for 150 panels and part two to last for 30. Why should you be restricted to this technologically mandated rhythm of the page?

But underneath all this is the question of "Don't we want to hold it in our hands?" Is there something important about holding it in our hands? Ultimately, I don't think there is. We can be moved to tears by a great piece of music, we can't hold that in our hands. We can have an enormous emotional relationship with a motion picture, we don't hold that in our hands. We can buy a video, we can have it in our home . . .

AB: But the comic book draws its power mainly from its analogy with reading a regular book . . .

SM: Well I don't think books are tethered to print either. I think that 99.9% of what's so tremendously involving about the written word or comics, is the ideas, the images, the art, the philosophy, the poetry, the prose, the science, all of these things that those media have brought to us. And we have come over our lifetimes to associate those experiences with having something in our hand. Now if instead of print we had been holding little pieces of metal, or little round crystal balls, and getting those same experiences, then it would be the metal or the crystal ball that we'd be lamenting the loss of now. But they were never the point. There are kids growing up now who are going to romance the feel of a mouse, or a trackball or a touch screen. Those things will be fetishized too. But when kids are romancing the idea of the touching of a screen or the moving of a cursor, that doesn't mean that it will be elevated in importance. It will be just as irrelevant. It's always going to be the ideas and images.

AB: Part of it is the experience of isolation, of privacy, you'll be able to do that in any circumstance, but the notion of "curling up with a good book," is a psychological context that makes reading valuable.

SM: There's two components to that, there's the intimacy of reading itself, the solitary enjoyment, and as you said yourself, that's not necessarily going to go away. I think we'll still have that intimacy, it's something that people experience in a solitary context. As far as curling up with it in bed, or in the bathroom, which is probably more likely, that's really just a matter of portability. And we all know that we're heading for a world in which that level of portability is going to be much more common. We're just not there yet. You've always got to remember when you're comparing print to digital media, that you're comparing a technology that's 500 years old that hasn't really evolved much in the basic core technology. The way we create print has changed a lot over the course of time, but the actual experience of opening those pages and reading them is pretty much the same as it was in Guttenburg's time. You're comparing that technology to a technology that's evolving practically by the moment. And things like portability or the clarity of the image are changing at a blinding pace.

When I spoke down at IBM I got to see the Renken display which they've had in the works for a couple of years that's just now hitting the market, that's about 200 DPI. That's roughly 3 times the resolution of a 72 DPI traditional monitor. You would think that that would make it clearer. But when you see it you realize it makes it just unbelievably clearer. It's an enormous difference. You can view a map of the New Jersey turnpike and see every single label in sharp hi-res, small enough to fit 10 of them on your fingernail. It's clear as day. I think most people in hardware can tell you, "Yes, you will have this." You won't have it next week, unless you're rich, you won't have it in two years unless you're moderately rich, but four or five years, yes we'll all have these things. It's just the way computing goes. People ask me, do you really think Moore's Law is going to keep on this relentless pace forever, and of course I don't know, but with all the things that are in the works now, I feel confident it's going to carry us at least another ten years. And we can get a lot done in ten years.

DD: Right now, every form of expression is tied to a particular form of display, which could potentially be made irrelevant by computers, since everything in computers is ultimately in the simplest possible code, of on/off. Do you think that given this future of total freedom of modes of display, that comics, as a particular mode of displaying information, have strengths that they are going to reveal on computers, which maybe they haven't yet shown in their print form?

SM: Absolutely. I think what we're seeing now is, that when people talk about convergence, they're talking about various artforms like the motion picture and sound, and comics and the written word are all converging on a single technology. But what is happening is that as these media are escaping from that technology that gave them birth, we're going to also see them separate on conceptual grounds. We're no longer depending on the technology to tell us what they are. There was a time when motion pictures were entirely defined by this machine that sat on a stand and runs plastic strips with sprocket holes behind a lens and that's what movies were! Well when we lost the machine, everyone still knew we had the artform. The artform had to be redefined as the moving image. But it was still different from television, which was also the art of the moving image, because television still had a dedicated machine. Now if we lose that dedicated machine, and the motion picture camera, and suddenly it’s all zeroes and ones, people will begin to realize that it was all the art of the moving image and the only difference was that one machine favored a different format, a particular length, a particular sort of content. But the medium was the single idea of the moving image. And in comics that’s what’s going to happen, as it’s liberated from the technology that gave it birth, the only technology that could really carry comics from one end of the globe to the other, but that the basic idea of it, of placing one image after another, creating that kind of temporal map, is going to become the new DNA of that artform. And we’re going to have to look past the page to figure out not only what was this artform all about, but what can this artform do that it was never able to do before.

DD: Have you thought at all about genre or what sort of aesthetic will communicate best in this new situation?

SM: It’s a hard question for me to answer, because my orientation is to never discount any possibility for comics. So essentially, the inverse of the question is, is there any genre, any type of subject matter, which comics can’t successfully portray? Or are doomed to always do a bad job at. It’s very hard for me to come up with any, because that’s just not the way my brain works. All I can do is try to come up with ways of doing it. I can say that maybe comics aren’t that good for displaying lengthy mathematical equations, that’s about all I’ve come up with so far. But any form of storytelling, something like MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, just a conversation over lunch, it should be possible to portray that in comics in an engaging way. Now you’ll fall flat on your face if you try to appropriate the tools of the superhero idiom to do it, that sort of hyper close-ups, dynamic points of view, extreme foreshortening, always asserting the physical relationship in space of the two characters. But it’s possible to do a comic that just a thousand pages of two people talking, and do it successfully, if you think in terms of what storytelling tools that idiom has.

AB: How about overt politics? Remember that series, MAO FOR BEGINNERS, MARX FOR BEGINNERS, . . .

SM: In fact, Larry Gonick’s later work harkens back to the “Beginners” series. I think he was influenced by that. It’s actually moving slightly away from comics, it tends to favor, as it goes on, more of an illustrated prose, but very cartoony illustrated prose, with handwritten lettering and such. But’s that’s an example of non-fiction which is growing out of the needs of non-fiction. In other words, an idiom which is learning its strengths gradually, and which is not just borrowing from some other popular form of comics and trying to shoehorn this new purpose in. If you look at romance comics in America, I think even the best of them, say the Simon and Kirby romance comics, were really very influenced by a male, dynamic, action-oriented sort of storytelling style. It didn’t always bring out the subject matter as well as it might. I often compare those to Japanese romance comics, which I think show a more profound understanding of what the requirements of a romance comic are. If you’re dealing with a romance comic you’re dealing with emotional relationships, you’re dealing with internal conflicts. If you’re dealing with internal conflicts you don’t have to keep reasserting where everybody is on the chessboard. You can have collages, you can have faces which are suspended nowhere in particular. What’s going on is going on inside the minds of the characters. You can have the thoughts of the characters represented visually in collage fashion. These are solutions to the unique problems of a given idiom. So to go back to the original question, I think the answer is, if comic superheroes are being trumped by that sort of first-person power fantasy in other media, especially games, which are getting better at it every day, then that does beg the question, if comics are not going to win in that arena, what can comics do? And the answer from my point of view is, everything else. Let’s get started on doing everything else!

DD: To keep pushing in this direction, one of the things that’s interesting about comics is the way they combine art, which for a 20th century viewer is a contemplative experience, with reading, where you just go through it. As you point out in RC, there are possibilities of things like embedding images inside of images, so that on one level you have a very unidirectional narrative, but then the art really pushes the desire to reread it. The fetish of the comic book doesn’t result only from an obsession with objects, but from the actual rewards of rereading.

SM: That’s true, although the rereading aspect of the printed comic is a matter of access. There’s the fact that you can still go get it to read it again and again. That model can be duplicated online. As ephemeral as they are, online comics can still afford rereading. In fact once we’re able to pay for content online, I imagine that there will be two price tiers, one for one-time access and one for unlimited access or downloading. So I don’t think that’s necessarily going to go away.

But to get back to your main point, it’s sort of melody and harmony, isn’t it? It’s the idea of being able to go through a story, but to have those other layers of resonance or meaning beneath any given point in the narrative. I often bring up the idea of a lake, the idea that good narrative you can sail from one end to the other and not feel that you’ve missed anything, but, if you want, you can always dive under the surface, and discover what’s down there too, and there’s a whole other world that’s part of the narrative too. You can choose how much you want to go under the surface. In digital comics it’s possible to take that more literally, and to allow for things like panels embedded in other panels or panels in which you peel back and see things behind it. The possibilities are just endless.

AB: Peeling the panels of a flip book...

SM: I used to make those when I was a kid, you know? I always loved those. Get a stack of 3X5’s and just go. In fact, one of those I may just scan in as an animated gif on my site, just so people can see it. I think they’d dig it. Next Page

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