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When Comics Stop Being Comics

No Fly Zone: When Comics Stop Being Comics
© Mania

Greetings, Maniacs, and welcome to another wacky week of The No-Fly Zone—Mania.com’s premiere alternative comics column. We love comics here—sequential art, graphic novels, funny books, and what have you. And that’s what brings us to consider some of the interesting—and possibly troubling—trends that have emerged in the medium. We’re not going to get into the trade paperback versus floppy argument. Everyone in the comic industry has discussed that one to death. Floppies will survive or they won’t. Readers will always find comics one way or another. If they all flock to the web, then that’s what the market dictates. But, be they in print or online, those series of still images with dialogue balloons and captions will be with us for a long time. But, we have to ask when a comic stops being a comic.

Yes, Marvel has comics for the iPhone now. Everyone knew it would happen. It’s not a huge surprise. We here at the NFZ would love to work up our righteous indignation over this one, but the reality is that reading comics is just that. We’ll get into the differences between reading them on a smartphone or computer screen shortly, but the premise remains the same—sequenced images with printed dialogue that tell a story. Tyrese Gibson came up with a fairly innovative way of selling his comic Mayhem—over iTunes, as an album of sorts. It includes the digital comic book, a bunch of behind the scenes videos, and a new song by Gibson called “Mayhem, Take Me Away.” That’s all well and good, but it includes the option to just watch the comic with voice actors, music, and no dialogue balloons. Marvel’s made a big splash with their Astonishing X-Men motion comic. That one’s even more animated, in a style reminiscent of the old Marvel cartoons from the 1960s—not quite as fluid as we might normally expect of a cartoon, but not far from it, either—where still images move across the screen, mouths are animated, and other select parts of the art move for effect.

We have two different approaches here, each with their own differences from the way we’ve traditionally read comics—in newspapers, floppies, and trades. We’re not talking about digital comics, per se. Reading a comic on a PDF or DC’s Zuda isn’t a far cry from reading them on paper. We’re not saying reading all comics on your computer is bad, bad, bad, or whatever. Your eyes still move from image to image, reading the text. The pictures and words combine to tell a story, and your mind fills in the action in between panels. You read at your own pace, your eyes and mind working all the time, darting from panel to panel, speeding up and slowing down the action as the story demands. But, Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, ClickWheel, and the new iPhone thing take away some of this by allowing you to cycle through the panels in sequence with their respective interfaces. You push a button, you get the next panel. Granted, nothing forces you to read the Marvel DCU stuff like that, but it’s an option. With that method, we’ve effectively taken some of the comics experience away from the reader out of convenience. Obviously, you can’t exactly read an entire comic page on an iPhone. The format necessitates the panel-to-panel approach. But still, there’s something lost there in the seamless movement of the eyes and imagination across the page. It almost kills the natural rhythm that a reader develops for each individual story. Reading X-Force probably means scanning across the panels rapidly to keep pace with the action. Reading Tomb of Dracula is an undoubtedly different experience, with its emphasis on moody visuals and melodramatic narration. This whole bit with clicking from panel to panel still gives you the story, but it really deprives the reader of one of the defining and most pleasurable aspects of comics. Comics are animated by your eyes and your mind. Part of that is from the way your eyes move across the page from panel to panel. It’s integral to the experience. Forcing a pause between the images takes something away and makes the experience really stiff.

Now, what separates comics from novels and movies? Novels force your imagination to do all of the work in terms of visualizing the story—not a bad thing, to be sure, but different. Film does all of the work for you (at least in terms of delivering the story) but to entirely different ends. No medium is inherently better than the other—though we at the NFZ often enjoy comics over most movies—but each works on its own terms. Comics aren’t like movies for a reason, in the same way that soccer doesn’t have baskets—different games mean different rules. This leads into this whole “motion comics” business. In short, the more you provide a reader that pushes it closer to film—animation, sound effects, voice acting—the less it becomes a comic, by definition. Comics are meant to be read—even if it means a disruptive clicking between panels. As soon as you add sound and motion, it becomes a movie. “Motion comics” are cartoons. They may not have as many frames of animation as Disney stuff, but they aren’t comics. Frankly, we here find them kind of tedious. It looks like cheap-ass animation—again like the Marvel ‘60s toons—without the charm and natural rhythm of actually reading a comic. Refer back to that whole business about the pleasure of filling in the space between the panels, hearing the sound and dialogue in your mind, and otherwise creating a sort of movie for your imagination.

Comics are a simple, effective art form that have been around for a while now. Controlling the pace that we read them or animating them takes away from the fundamental experience. In a way, it’s kind of a slap in the face of the medium, because it proclaims that comics some how aren’t good enough. And calm down, because it’s not why you think. If you want to read comics on your iPhone or watch them with animation, dialogue, and sound effects, by all means do so. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either experience. Read that again, Maniacs. Once more—there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. We are not saying either format is fundamentally flawed or should be “shut down.” Download and click away if it makes you happy. What’s really troubling is a larger implication for the comics industry—the idea that comics just really need to be movies and cartoons, because the medium is somehow lacking. We saw this in the clamor to get Watchmen filmed. People said it was unfilmable for a reason—it wasn’t meant to be. We see this in upstart publishers that are essentially IP factories for Hollywood (or hoping to be). This week’s NFZ isn’t some kind of nostalgia for the smell of aging newsprint over reading PDFs on your laptop. We here don’t especially like reading comics on a computer, but it’s essentially the same thing. Digital comics—motion or otherwise—start becoming less like actual comics when they take away certain aspects of the reading experience. Clicking to change panels does that, because it interrupts the fluid reading experience. But, it’s really a small issue—annoying in its own right, but mostly a question of necessity. Apple fanatics take note—we aren’t calling you names for owning an iPhone, but saying that reading comics that way is necessarily flawed. No one wants to read tiny images on a screen anymore than they prefer watching movies on a television versus a movie screen—minus annoying teenagers and people on their cell phones. If that weren’t the case, televisions wouldn’t keep getting larger. Ultimately, you’re still reading a comic. But, when your start adding animation, voice acting, and sound effects, you’ve effectively made it a cartoon. There’s nothing inherently wrong with cartoons—be they stills with limited animation or The Simpsons—but one wanders why the comics industry is so hot to distance itself from the medium that created it.

Granted, it’s a huge generalization to say that major publishers now hate comics and just want to make movies. That’s obviously not the case, though Marvel was headed that way in the mid-1990s. But, there is a troubling emphasis on making comics more like other media, and using them exclusively as launching pads for adaptations. It’s not the very idea of motion comics or digital comics, or adaptations of any kind. Radio shows, movie serials, and cartoons based on superheroes came out within a relative few years from their launch. What’s troubling is the implication that comics are somehow imperfect and need to be changed or used as springboards for other media. We love comics at the NFZ, and don’t sit around wishing they could all just become movies. This is part of a larger trend in American pop culture though—the notion that works of art aren’t fully realized until they have been filmed as movies or television. Any book that sells worth a shit is immediately followed by “Why don’t they make a movie out of it?”—even if the work doesn’t lend itself to film at all. And, comics aren’t immune to that. We clamor for film adaptations of comics we like, as if a movie is the best way to realize a story. We act like comics aren’t good enough. Hence, while comics move into the digital age, fans, publishers, and creators should bear in mind the fundamentals of the medium. They should place more emphasis on the reading experience that brought us to comics in the first place, whether that’s in print or online.

You are now exiting The No-Fly Zone.

Kurt Amacker is the writer of The No-Fly Zone, Mania’s weekly alternative comics column. He is also the author of the comic miniseries Dead Souls, published by Seraphemera Books. Dead Souls is available from the Seraphemera Books website, Amazon.com, and at comic shops everywhere. He can be reached at kurt_amacker@seraphemera.org.