UCD15 Talk - Daniel Whiston - The relationship between comics and digital content design
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How has digital technology and media influenced the creation of comics? Do the benefits of new models – production, distribution and design – compensate for any pollution of the form? In what ways has the older, paper-based technology of comics influenced digital over the past 30 years? What can digital learn in future from the narrative structures and visual storytelling mechanisms of comics?
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UCD15 Talk - Daniel Whiston - The relationship between comics and digital content design
- 5. Impact of digital on comics
- 10. ‘Not possessing the nuances of a comic or the visual flair of a cartoon… Motion comics are designed for people who are too lazy to read a graphic novel.’
- 11. ‘Comics, consumed as a technology, is older, and has become much more sophisticated than digital comics, which are something new. I felt it would be a mistake to try to “enhance” things that the comics medium was probably doing perfectly well on its own.’ (Alan Moore)
- 14. Impact of comics on digital
- 16. What more can digital learn from comics?
- 21. Sources of inspiration: • Daniel Goodbrey (Herts University) • Scott McCloud (Comics theorist) • Alan Moore (Wizard)
Notas do Editor
- Hello everyone. My name’s Daniel Whiston, and I’m both a digital scriptwriter and a writer of comics and graphic novels. Which hopefully puts me in some kind of position to talk about the relationship between the two today, from the perspective of both a practitioner, and someone who’s thought about aspects of this stuff on a theoretical level for arguably far too long. So. What’s my thesis here today? Well, basically I think that the two forms have had an intimate relationship, as digital content has evolved in the recent past. From my perspective it’s been a somewhat troubled history in terms of what comics have gotten out of the bargain over the last 30 years. But from the beginning, digital has taken a lot of basic design tools from comics, and could potentially learn a lot more on top of that by reflecting on how the ‘language of comics’ works in terms of narrative design. The relationship between digital design and comics. What is it? What are its roots, and where is it heading? What can we learn from it as designers? Or in other words, what light can each medium cast on the other? One literal example of this that I came across recently centred on Wikipedia. Now – let me pause for a minute to ask everyone a question: Hands up who’s ever read a comic. Come on, don’t be shy, we’re all ‘creative types’ here. [pause] OK. One or two. Now, hands up who’s used Wikipedia. [pause] OK. A few more. Great. I get the feeling that this example might just work.
- So. I should probably also have mentioned that this example features He-Man, from the Masters of the Universe. (But I’m not going to ask anyone to put their hands up about that one…) Now. As you can see, here’s He-Man’s Wikipedia entry. It reads: ‘…’ So far, so good. But wait, there’s more…
- Some editing seems to be going on… [‘…’] – but this doesn’t seem right? Who’s writing this?
- Ah-ha. Skeletor at work again. OK, the serious point here is that comics has a very powerful ability to combine words and images to convey a powerful, nuanced message very economically – about reliability issues on Wikipedia, or any other subject. Now, I’m going to look at what digital can learn from this very soon. But first I want to look at the relationship from the other perspective…
- What has been the impact of digital on comics? Well, on a very high level, I’d say that the encounter between an older medium – comics – and a newer one – digital media – hasn’t always worked out too well for comics over the course of the last 30 years. And by the way, that strange skeleton thing in a kind of weird space armour is ‘digital’ and the big red monster thing with tentacles is ‘comics’ – just in case the subtlety of the symbolism escaped you. In essence, I’d venture to say that digital has sometimes polluted the form when it comes to comics – at least in the early years – but that there are also possibilities for new storytelling approaches.
- Now, let me just clarify what I’m not talking about here. I’m not talking about the publishing and distribution of what you might call ‘pure’ comics online, and through Apps like Comixology. Comixology, for example, has been great for the comics industry in terms of reaching new readers on a global basis. It’s had downloads in the hundreds of millions, in September 2011 it was the highest-grossing App in Apple’s App Store, and then it got bought by Amazon last year. All to the good, I’d say.
- And ‘webcomics’ also allow individual, non-corporate creatives to reach a global audience without being mediated by commercial interests and constraints, such as this example from ‘Formal Sweatpants’. Pre-digital, as a cartoonist you’d have to be one of the lucky few picked up by a newspaper or a magazine. Well, as with so many other creative industries – not any more. And that’s a good thing.
- So what I am talking about today – what I’m critiquing - is the adding of somewhat basic digital effects to comics that are viewed onscreen. Since the 1980s, comics have been given elements of animation, sound effects and interactivity and gameplay. Quality has obviously improved since early efforts like the example you can see here, taken from Silhouette Software’s Redhawk…
- …culminating in efforts like this, which is what you might call a ‘motion comic’, in this case presenting a comic called Watchmen, in animated, voiceover style. But. However sophisticated the effects get, I think that digital runs the risk of polluting the ‘form’ of comics, in a fundamental way, by importing narrative and design devices that clash with the underlying language of comics, and what it ultimately does best.
- So why is that? There are many reasons, and although I think that the Robot’s voice are maybe being a little harsh on people’s motives here, I would like to focus on their reference to the ‘nuances’ of a comic. I’d say that the visual element to comics is a little misleading here, in that people often tend to compare them to films. But I’d say that in many ways they share more in common with novels. Readers supply their own voices when characters speak – making sound effects clumsy, and intrusive on the reader’s private world. And perhaps more fundamentally, comics – like books, but unlike films – do not have a fixed, externally-enforced timeline. You read at your own pace, subconsciously slowing down or speeding up as scenes impact on you. But with animation and an audio dialogue line, you’re dragged along at a one size fits all pace. And I think that this ultimately ends up with a clunky comic, or a poor cartoon.
- By way of concluding this particular strand, I thought this quote from the influential comics writer Alan Moore was quite interesting, taken from a very recent discussion where he was framing his own experiments with digital storytelling – which I’ll be covering on the next slide. But viewing comics as a form of technology is I think an intriguing perspective – and to the extent that it suggests deconstructing such a technology’s processes more forensically – and seeing how they can be applied to other mediums – it’s a theme I’ll be returning to in a moment, by way of framing my conclusion.
- So – despite what I think about clumsy digital comics, it’s not all doom and gloom. When done thoughtfully, I believe that digital comics – truly native digital comics rather than clumsily souped-up versions of traditional print comics – open up interesting new narrative possibilities. Now, I can’t claim to have a comprehensive overview of those, but one fascinating new venture – as of a couple of weeks ago – is the new electricomics venture by writer Alan Moore, and others. This is a very early days, ipad-only experiment in developing new ways of storytelling that are driven by technology, and I’ve only had second-hand reports so far. But, for example, one story – Sway – sounds fascinating. It’s a time travel story where – within the story – people move back and forth in time. Apparently, the narrative can be interactively driven by tipping the iPad forwards to read a ‘future’ strand of the story, or vice versa, moving into the past. This facilitates exploring the story in a chronological direction driven by how you orient the device – which itself mirrors the perceptions of the characters within the story. Approaches like that seem very much worth exploring – although in the end we may need to come up with a new name for what might ultimately become a new medium.
- Such a new medium might include aspects of what Scott McCloud calls the ‘infinite canvas’ approach to comics – which could also have interesting implications for digital design.
- So. That’s one look at aspects of the impact of digital on comics. But what about the other way around? Well, here I’d argue that the relationship has been a lot more positive. Let’s start with approaches to design. I’d say that comics has generated or at least heavily influenced some of the basic narrative tools that digital uses on an every day basis. First off, there’s storyboarding. A lot of digital content – games and animations, for instance – is heavily storyboarded before development begins. Wireframes – quick sketches of what might work in terms of interface design – are also part of this approach. Now, clearly films use storyboards a lot too. But I’d argue that comics was the original driving force in terms of level of detail, and breaking things down into visual chunks that are then arranged in a narrative sequence. Walt Disney is sometimes credited with the first use of storyboards in their modern form, which apparently evolved from what he called ‘story sketches’ – or something rather like comic books. Which, in any case, have been around since at least the 19th century. Another example comes from the fact that comics panels are slices of time, that present the world on an atomised basis. So, in that sense, thinking about – indeed, modelling – our experience of the world on that basis has arguably influenced the breaking down of digital content into ‘blocks’ or ‘chunks’ that make sense on their own, but can be combined – and re-combined – into a larger whole. One example of this is provided by e-learning, where ‘learning objects’ often equate to specific screens within an overall learning experience. Comprehensible and complete on their own, but part of a larger whole when assembled into narrative sequence.
- Now, in a narrower sense – but also a commercially supercharged one – comics generates a lot of the character types and mythologies that are successful in contemporary global mass culture. Superheroes are a very obvious example of this. As of 2014, the Marvel comics movies outranked the Harry Potter films as the most lucrative franchise in history – and there’s more to come. This infographic – wonderful, or terrifying, depending on your perspective – shows the roster of currently planned major superhero movies for the next 5 years. Now, movies aren’t strictly-speaking ‘digital’ in the sense that we’re discussing today, but the indirect influence is enormous in terms of online marketing spends and supporting content – plus the associated games franchises which, although not as equivalently powerful, are still generators of hundreds of millions of ‘online dollars’ over time.
- OK. ‘What more can digital learn from comics?’ As I’ve said, I think that the historical relationship between comics and digital design has been a little uneven. For the most part, comics have often been polluted by pointless digital over-enhancement when they’ve gone online – although digital publishing has been a massive boon for traditional comics. On the other hand, comics have provided the digital medium with some fundamental design approaches such as storyboarding – and a wealth of commercial properties. But from the digital perspective, what does the future hold? What more could digital learn from comics? From my perspective it’s all to do with making a closer examination of the underlying narrative structure of comics – what you might call the ‘visual language’ or ‘over grammar’, as Scott McCloud and Alan Moore have variously referred to it. Let’s look at three examples in terms of how words and images work together; composite images; and visual pacing.
- Alan Moore refers to the ‘over grammar’ of comics in terms of the interaction between words and pictures, rather than viewing them as separate things. Take a minute to think about your own experience of reading comics. Children don’t seem to find it an issue – their minds are more malleable, perhaps. But many adults, especially those who haven’t read comics for a long time seem to find it a little confusing. ‘What do you look at first? The words, or the pictures?’ The answer, of course, is that you look at them both simultaneously – both in terms of the individual panels, and the overall spread on the page – without consciously deciding to look at either. What can digital learn from this? Are there new ways of laying out onscreen content to allow parallel processing of different kinds of content, in a more natural, synthesised way – each element in harmony with the others, on both a micro and macro level? Can we produce a more integrated experience of consuming content that simultaneously engages the verbal and non-verbal parts of our brains? Infographics seem to be making a step in that direction, but they’re often quite standalone, isolated assets. Can we do more, and spread the approach more widely? I think we probably can.
- Something else that comics can do brilliantly is to have a composite image made of smaller images, providing a bird’s eye view of an area of content containing more detailed elements that form – and are also defined by – the whole. So there’s a mutually-constitutive relationship between individual content items and ‘the big picture’. Whatever that might be. Now, digital design has plenty of examples of this – but could returning to the source yield fresh insights, and new techniques? Online menu structures are often graphically striking, and approaches such as mind maps and infographics go part of the way. But could we not take more graphically dominant approaches that allow people to retain sight of the larger whole at all times – even as they drill-down to increasingly specific content? I’d like to think so.
- And finally, there’s visual pacing in terms of the way in which the language of comics relates to how time is portrayed. In comics, the assumption is that one panel is a distinct moment in time – and time is, in a subtle way, perceived spatially. In this example, I think everyone here can tell that it’s in slow motion. But how do we ‘know’ that? It’s communicated by a series of small panels with incremental changes. In comics, ‘lots of small panels’ is often used to signify this ‘slow time’ effect – which is something its readers instinctively understand.
- Conversely, wider panels convey a sense of increased, or extended time. In this extract from Alan Moore’s comic From Hell – and I hope you can make out enough of the details here - the first page is an intimate conversation between two men on a beach, told in real time. But the broader panel at the top of the right hand page is intended to communicate a sense of time stretching out, of the moment becoming extended as the men contemplate the long walk back from where they’ve ended up. So here, perhaps digital design could consider again how screen layouts prompt a sense of pacing in viewers, in terms of how the content is arranged. How can we prompt a sense of speediness? How can we provoke viewers to linger – or at least feel that they are? Why might we want to do so? Again, analysing how comics achieve these effects could, I hope, produce some useful insights.
- OK, well, that’s it from me. I’d just like to conclude briefly by acknowledging some of the people who have influenced my thinking on this, and provided many of the examples I’ve drawn on. Daniel Goodbrey is an academic working in the field of comics and digital at the University of Hertfordshire and is involved in the electricomics experiment I mentioned earlier. Scott McCloud is the author of the seminal Understanding Comics – which anyone interested in this field should definitely check out. And last but not least, Alan Moore – perhaps the greatest living writer in the comics medium, a driver of the electricomics App – and, of late, a visionary practitioner of the mystic arts. Which makes him even more worth listening to. So – many thanks for listening, and I hope it’s been interesting. Thank you, and good afternoon.