Quest to Nowhere

For my capstone project proposal I’ve been reading a lot of interactive comics, and from reading them I’ve found that a lot of them I wouldn’t categorize as interactive comics. Or seem to have interactivity for the sake of it, rather then actually using it to support what they are trying to do in the comic.

An example of this is the Tales of Captain Claybeard, where it is a comic page with buttons on the panels. Pressing the button causes the panel to animate. You can then press the next button to go to the next page when you are done reading the current page. The problem here is that it is basically a motion comic which are basically animated comics, usually with voice acting, that play out as a video. Here animations are compartmentalized within the panels, and the reader controls when or if they see the animation. While this seems like an interesting way to create a multimedia comic experience, it instead produces a comic that will have issues in terms of timing and flow, as well as engagement.

Will Eisner in his book Comics and Sequential Art says:

“Critical to the success of a visual narrative is the ability to convey time. It is this dimension of human understanding that enable us to recognize and be empathetic to surprise, humor, terror and the whole range of human experiences… At the heard of the sequential deployment of images intending to convey time is the commonality of its perception. But to convey ‘timing,’ which is the manipulation of the elements of time to achievee a specific message of emotion, panels become a critical element.” (24)

Gunnerkrigg Court

What Eisner is saying is that controlling the flow of the comic, controlling the timing of the panels, is the most important tool for the writer/artist of a comic. As we see in this example (to the left) from the webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court, they control the timing of what is occurring in the scene. What would maybe take a second or two in an animation showing the one robot backflipping onto the other then killing it, takes up most of the page in order to draw out the reading of it. As well as space out the last two pieces of dialogue, which helps to have the last piece of dialogue have more of an impact. Likewise in this comic from Johnny Wander (to the left) the impact of the punchline is based on the control of time by the writer/artist. By having those smaller panels at the end they are able to convey time quickly passing by, and thus the reader’s interpretation of the characters expression/emotions over that period of time.

Johnny Wander

It also allows the reader to fill in the gaps in the action themselves, which helps to immerse them into the experience of reading the comic. So by animating the panels as the Tales of Captain Claybeard does what it is doing, through its attempt to be interactive, is actually be less engaging to the reader because the animations fill in those between panel gaps that the reader normally constructs themselves. This also means that in order to control the pacing the writer/author has to balance the pacing between panels, but also the pacing of the animation, and the pacing of going from a panel to an animation or vice versa. It’s not even a given that the reader will even look at the animations, which in turn makes them rather useless.

With Claybeard it seems that it would have been better served to have been just a normal comic, with what was animated being presented in comic panels instead. It would greatly increase the length of the comic, but it would allow for the previously animated segments to carry more weight and thus be more interesting to the reader.

When a comic uses interactivity what they should be doing is using it to support, or accentuate, what is going on in the comic. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should if it’s not going to be in the service of what you are trying to do. For example in the interactive comic Zark there are generally two types of interactions the reader can do with each comic. They can either mouse over a panel, which causes it to animate in some way, or they can click on the comic itself and be sent to a sort of non-sequitur page that is some way tied into what is occurring on the comic page, but not necessary to read for the reader to understand what is going on in the comic.

While the non-sequitur page for each comic is an interesting interactive element to the comic, by letting the reader get a little extra information on what is going on, the animation is rather frivolous. This is because the animation is usually something in the background, and just sort of looks flashy while not really adding anything to what is actually occurring in the comic. It serves no purpose to the comic for it to be there, other then to exist because it can.

Now a good use of interactivity in a comic can be found in the webcomic the City of Reality. In the comic at one point in the story the characters are battling a thief who they cannot seem to catch, because whatever they do he seems to have a counter for. After one of the characters manages to get a strange device away from the thief, the reader is prompted to click on it. Doing so causes the previous page of comics to be wiped away and be replaced with a new version of the events of that page, in which the reader and character learn that the device rewinds time back a small amount.

This interactivity, unlike Zark‘s, supports what is going on in the story. It is in service of the comic so that instead of having the reader go to the next page and say that time has rewound five minutes, instead it actually shows the comic going back those five minutes allowing the reader to implicitly understand what has just occurred. In the City of Reality the writer/artist is using the interactivity to make the reader an active part of the story, making them a part of the discovery of what the device does, and in doing so it makes them more engaged in what is going on because it feels to them that they are able to have an effect on the comic.

Citations:

Crestodina, Andrew. (1999). the Tales of Captain Claybeard. Retrieved from http://www.orbitcomics.com/

Eisner, Will. (2008). Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and practices from the legendary cartoonist. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Ota, Yuko and Ananth Panagariya. (February 25, 2010). Johnny Wander. Retrieved from http://www.johnnywander.com/comics/148

Parker, Charlie. (2008). Zark. Retrieved from http://www.zark.com/pages2/az76.html

Samson, Ian (August 15, 2009). the City of Reality. Retrieved from http://cityofreality.com/2009/08/15/02-17-648-1800/

Siddell, Tom. (2008). Gunnerkrigg Court. Retrieved from http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=428