Hey all,
As Ondrej and I have been working on putting together a (crude) comic of our own for class, I've been thinking a lot about comics and form--specifically, what happens when a comic is liberated from the print medium. Andrew talked in his Here presentation about the mess that came out of the "interactive" e-book version of Here, and Rich showed us that interesting exploratory comic that gave the viewers the agency to rove around the frames.
This short-story comic, "His Face All Red" by Emily Carroll came to mind. Specifically, this page (mild spoiler!), where a character is climbing down into a deep hole, and the panel, rather than being broken into many panels separated by gutter space, just continues on and on as the tunnel does, unbroken, and the character appears at multiple spaces during the descent.
Because this comic was intended to be viewed on a computer screen and not on pages, its axis of interaction for viewers was able to change. We encounter pages laterally, and so the frame at the end of the right page offers suspense--what comes next can't, for the moment, be seen. The reader has to flip the page, literally suspending their involvement in the comic for a brief moment. Here, Carroll still has a page-change in the "next" button, but she also has the option for the comic to spread vertically, not just laterally. In order to see the entirety of the spread, the reader must now scroll, offering suspense both laterally and vertically. This seems so simple, but I was so pleasantly surprised in the experience of this. Carroll's comics were later printed into a book form, Through the Woods, and the effect of this moment in particular, the character descending into the pit, is so much more successful with the surprise of being able to scroll down as he descends, literally descending with him.
So often, I feel like examples of art being taken out of its traditional medium is offered as a failure--what doesn't work, why comics belong on pages and not in e-books with interactive GIFs (still chuckling about that). This was a moment where I felt a screen amplified my experience of the narrative as opposed to detracting from it.
OooOo. That was spooky. The comic doesn't really use the web browser space all that much, but when it does, especially in the last three pages (the drop into the hole in the ground and the two final single frames), it really does work. The most interesting thing about it to me was the way a web browser-based comic can control its own pacing--that's something a traditional printed comic can't do very well (tell the reader how fast they should read). But with this Carroll comic, not only do you get to unveil more frames as you scroll down, but you also get a larger pause when you have to click "Next". Those longer pauses were once again used really effectively, I think, as the story was reaching its climax and needed to slow the pacing and prolong the suspense (and I think my this week super slow internet speed only helped with that ;).
ReplyDeleteSo glad to reach this! I just want to build on your comments by pointing a great read by Scott McCloud: http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/canvas/ . He points out a number of axis-bending, screen-bleeding pieces. I like his notion of distance=time. Time flows in interesting way when panels bleed together.
ReplyDeleteMostly, I was intrigued by his work The Right Number, which works with the Z-axis, kind of like Here. http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/trn/index.html