It's fascinating to watch a new medium
gathering its legs beneath it. First it needs to
figure out what unique characteristics it has to offer over
well-established media like film or television, then
determine what characteristics it will keep from its
ancestors and what it will cast aside, and finally discover
how to use the resulting combination of old and new to
create really memorable stuff. Early films and
television shows were frequently recordings of stage acts,
and early CD-ROM games were often little more basic
interactivity grafted onto bad B-movies. Today's new
"new media" almost all arise from one common question: how
to use the twin developments of cheap, ubiquitous video
devices and the Internet to tell stories in new,
interesting and hopefully profitable ways.
Among the most common of these new forms are webisodes
(online-original shows like Joss Whedon's
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along
Blog) and
mobisodes (shows designed explicitly for consumption on
mobile devices like the 24 spinoff 24:CONSPIRACY). The latest contenders to emerge, and
perhaps the most interesting to comics fans, are motion
comics.
The premise is simple: take still comics, add in some basic
animation and voiceovers and deliver them to small screens
over the Internet. You can almost hear the giddy pitch: "We
blend the best parts of comics with the best parts of
animation at a fraction of the cost, with almost no
delivery overhead! If comics-inspired movies like
The Dark
Knight can rake
in over half a billion dollars at the box office, then our
new motion comics are a surefire hit!"
Not exactly.
Motion comics are still very, very early in their
self-discovery process, and they have a long way to go
until they find their footing, if that even turns out to be
possible. This is demonstrated by three high-profile
motion comics which have appeared in recent months: an
adaptation of Robert Kirkman's Invincible, developed by MTV; Stephen King’s
N, an adaptation
of a short story by King developed by Simon & Schuster
and Marvel; and an adaptation of Alan Moore's
Watchmen, funded by Warner Premiere (the imprint
of Warner Brothers usually tasked with developing
direct-to-DVD movies). All three series are available
over the Internet from both stand-alone sites and through
Apple's iTunes service, and all three seem designed to be
easily consumed on small screens like that of Apple's
iPhone, which suggests a close genetic link to both
webisodes and mobisodes. Motion comics differ, however, in
that they have less in common with animated shorts than
they do with animatics, the rough sketches often produced by
directors when preparing a screenplay for shooting.
And therein lies the trouble: while these motion
comics are certainly interesting experiments, they seem to
be fumbling blindly for a market that may simply not exist.
While motion comics may offer interesting differences from
both animated shorts and actual comics, they arguably offer
real advantages over neither.
This isn't to say that these motion comics aren't
entertaining. Far from it – there is a definite
thrill to hearing Rorschach's low growl in
Watchmen, Invicible has moments of real giddy lunacy just
like in the paper versions, and Stephen King’s N
delivers a few suitably
spooky chills. Still, each of these three projects is
rife with the earmarks of a new form because of their
obvious awkwardness. The creators themselves are
certainly aware of this. As King himself describes
his own foray into the field on N's official website, "N is kind of... I'd have to say
the Birth of a
Nation of this
particular medium, and it does something that is a
hybrid -- you can't really describe it until you've seen
it."
Well, I've seen all three of these, and I still find it
difficult to to describe them. Perhaps the best way
to try is by outlining the three key issues that I think
motion comics currently face: framing, time, and voice.
I. The Issue of
Framing
If there's one thing that motion comics indisputably offer
over traditional comics, it's the introduction of motion.
It is certainly an interesting sensation to watch the
'camera' swoop and slide over each panel of a familiar
comic like Watchmen. While regular comics ('still
comics', perhaps?) have certainly learned the fine art of
framing a shot, it's still difficult to capture the mood of
truly great cinematography. By adding simple panning
and zooming into the comics experience, motion comics do
kick it up a notch, but this is where the animatics issue I
mentioned earlier becomes truly apparent.
Stephen
King’s N and Watchmen both have a nifty cinematic feel to them,
framing each image to the dimensions of the hardware.
The trouble is that for all the dynamism these series
try to inject, all too often it comes across as little more
than a Ken Burns documentary. It becomes difficult not to
lose interest in the screen after the tenth zoom or push
transition—after a while, these motion comics start to feel
like over-labored PowerPoint presentations.
Invincible, however, feels more like a comic
because it keeps the panels of the comic intact, opting
instead to treat the viewing device as a page instead of a
screen. Invincible does some neat tricks with assembling
entire pages on the screen as panels come into view,
instead of merely doing simple animations inside the
existing panels as in Watchmen. Of the three, Stephen King’s N
feels the least 'comic-y' and
feels more like a simple animatic, in part because of its
very limited animation but also because of its abandonment
of text balloons, which I'll address in a moment.
II. The Issue of
Time
If Scott McCloud is to be believed, then one of comics'
greatest strengths is the idea of closure, or how readers fill in the gaps between
panels. Motion comics do this for the viewer with extra
sound effects and time. An unfortunate side effect of this
is that while traditional comics enable us to read at our
own speed, motion comics lock us into fixed durations.
Perhaps it's simple personal preference, but only when I
sat down to watch these motion comics did I discover how
much faster I expect the consumption of a comic to be;
apparently I skim over most comics pages at a pace much
faster than I expect from watching television. This
awkwardness could also be due to how writing for print has
a drastically different sense of timing than writing for
audible media like television or radio, and since these
motion comics weren't 'adapted' for the screen as much as
they were directly 'ported' there wasn't a lot that
appeared to have been cut out for flow. Of course, it
could also be because really solid timing on TV shows
like Buffy the
Vampire Slayer or 24 are the result of actors and directors
knowing how to establish a sense of urgency and rhythm, and
the creative teams behind these motion comics simply
haven't developed this yet. Whatever the reason, the
pacing in N, Watchmen and Invincible all felt oddly stilted and occasionally
dragging.
Another issue facing motion comics is that the form, like
mobisodes and webisodes, are still trying to find their
'sweet spot' for both duration and frequency. All
three series vary in both.
So far Watchmen has only released one 25-minute episode,
which premiered on July 14th; it's unclear as to whether
its further absence is the result of a tepid response or
the Fox-vs-WB lawsuit currently plaguing the production of
the feature film, but I'm guessing the latter considering
that an article in the New York Times
claims there are "a dozen
22- to 26-minute Webisodes [planned] to help make the
complex story [of the film] easier for the uninitiated
to digest." Running the numbers, this equates to
around four and a half hours' worth of this stuff, which
is a decent length for an audiobook but makes for an
awfully long PowerPoint presentation.
Invincible has released three episodes and a
behind-the-scenes promo episode, three of which were
released on iTunes on July 22nd and the fourth a week later
on August 5th. The three regular episodes ranged from
fifteen minutes to nearly twenty minutes. Since then
nothing's appeared on iTunes, which means that, as
with Watchmen, any fans of the motion comics wouldn't
have any idea when to check back again.
The one of the three to really get the frequency issue
nailed down is Stephen King’s
N.
According to the initial announcement on the
project's official site, "the first episode will be available
Monday, July 28th, 2008 with a new one released EACH
weekday until August 29th. Blocks of five episodes will
be released on iTunes each Monday until August
25th."3
This enabled viewers
to know exactly when to expect the new content.
Unfortunately, since each episode was only about
two minutes long, I was left with an almost constant
feeling of dissatisfaction. Like it or not,
audiences have been conditioned to expect their content
to arrive in certain durations, so while half an hour of
uninterrupted slideshow (as in Watchmen) feels too long, two minutes feels
way too short. Invincible seems to have gotten the closest to
the mark on this front, since each episode feels about
as long as the length between commercial breaks on a
standard TV show. This may well be one of those
things motion comics should choose to inherit from its
ancestors.
III. The Issue of
Voice
Another primary characteristic of standard comics is that
they are inherently silent, which allows readers to imagine
what characters' voices sound like. These three
motion comics series fill in those blanks for us, with
varying degrees of success. One of the simplest
things that differentiate comics from storyboards (and, by
extension, animatics) is the inclusion of speech bubbles -
but what purpose do speech bubbles serve in animations?
Stephen
King’s N does
away with the speech bubbles altogether, which again is
probably largely to blame for my earlier description
of N
as being the most like an
animatic. Both Invincible and Watchmen, on the other hand, animate the text
appearing. In Watchmen this serves a particular purpose, because
all the voices are performed by a single actor in the
tradition of an audiobook (the female voices sound
particularly jarring) and thus gives viewers a sense of
who's talking. In Invincible, however, the text appearing at the same
time as the actors are performing it simply feels as
redundant as watching a film with both the sound and the
same-language subtitles turned on.
Are there issues with the qualities of the performances?
Sure – none of these voice actors or actresses are
likely to be nominated for Oscars anytime soon, but it's
only the male actor trying to do the women's voices
in Watchmen that comes across as truly painful.
The voice acting in motion comics has the same
quality potential as voice acting in standard animation,
radio dramas, audiobooks or video games, but motion comics
may be more likely to benefit from using the same voice
actors as in other media, since comics are so frequently
cross-media franchises these days. For example,
a Batman motion comic might want to capitalize on
the existing audience from Batman: The Animated
Series by
including Kevin Conroy as the Dark Knight and Mark Hamill
as the Joker. Given the attraction of motion comics
over standard animation as a low-budget medium, however,
ponying up for such established voice talent might not be a
choice many motion comics creators opt to make.
Are Motion Comics
Really the Future?
The biggest issue of motion comics may be that they're
trying to fill a niche that simply doesn't exist. If
we consider the original question, "how do we use the twin
developments of cheap, ubiquitous video devices and the
Internet to tell stories in new, interesting and hopefully
profitable ways", the active word for motion comics becomes
'video'. However, it's unclear whether comics need motion
at all.
Arguably, the question of how to reinvent comics for the
web might have already been answered by webcomics
like Diesel
Sweeties, Achewood or Penny Arcade, all of which are maintained by
independent creators with devoted followings and
sustained through banner ads, T-shirt sales and print
editions made available through retail channels and/or
online storefronts. Each of these series are
providing high-quality content on a reliable schedule
with relatively low overhead. While many webcomics
are done in the style of newspaper comics (frequently
done in black and white and in three-panel format),
series like Templar, Arizona, The Rainbow
Orchid, or
the video game-themed Looking for the
Group.
Best of all, series like Scary Go Round
or Questionable Content
show that hybridities between the two
formats, like daily pages of a comic with punchlines,
work extremely well. It's incredibly easy to
imagine publishing houses like Marvel or DC creating
webcomic versions of their big properties, as
Spider-Man, Batman and Superman have all graced
newspaper comics pages in the past.
Customizing this content for mobile devices might be as
simple as resizing each panel to a standard size and then
moving from panel to panel with a simple click or, in the
case of the iPhone, a swipe of the finger. Best of
all, a beta test of this model is already in circulation,
even if its legality is somewhat questionable: in late
August an enterprising anonymous fan scanned the entirety
of Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's Wolverine #67 and reformatted it for viewing on
widescreen monitors. As the remixer himself notes, "I cut up the original
pages and relayed [sic] them out on a 1280×800 pixel
space. The result: individual panels fill up the screen,
allowing for a more cinematic reading experience and
greater appreciation of the details and nuances of Steve
McNiven’s beautiful artwork." The results aren't
perfect – the biggest splash panels often result in
lettering that's painfully difficult to read – but they
certainly are promising.
Long story short, the primary challenge facing motion
comics is determining what benefits this format has to
offer. If the primary benefit is its low cost, then
simply creating still comics in a format better suited to
mobile devices may be sufficient. If the primary
benefit is motion, then it remains to be seen what motion
comics can do that standard animation (or even relatively
low-budget Flash animation) cannot. While I'd be
hard-pressed to call any of these three examples a
masterpiece, the cumulative effect of watching all three is
still a sense that there is something interesting
developing here. It's disheartening to note that all
three have either wrapped up or been put on hold, because
there is clearly still a great deal left to discover about
this medium.
Finally, it's interesting to note that both
Watchmen
and Stephen King’s N
were developed at least in
part as marketing materials for more traditional media
forms as opposed to stand-alone original content. That may
be where motion comics fit into the greater media ecosystem
for the immediate future: as commercials masquerading as
experiments, or, to be a bit more generous, as experiments
subsidized through advertising budgets. Like
webisodes and mobisodes, motion comics are still stumbling
their way towards becoming an established form of their
own. Let's hope there will be enough sustained
interest from both audiences and creators for them to get
there.
Note: between
the time of this article's writing and publication, both
the second and third episodes of Watchmen were
released on the iTunes store in relatively rapid
succession, on October 7th and October 20th. While
there haven't been any major announcements explaining the
13-week wait between the first and second episodes,
according to MTV's Splash Page blog (link
this phrase to http://splashpage.mtv.com/2008/10/01/new-watchmen-motion-comic-hits-itunes-next-week/
), future episodes will be "hitting
the iTunes store every two weeks after that point in the
run-up to the March 6 release of the live-action
'Watchmen' film". Further good news for motion
comics: according to Sci Fi Wire
(link that phrase to http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=5&id=61150
), DC
has announced that motion comics are also in the works
based on
Batman: Black & White
and
Superman: Red Son.
Watchmen
is currently available on iTunes, the Sony PlayStation
Store, Xbox Live and Amazon Video on Demand; the new series
will presumably be made available through the same
channels.)
