or
Why everyone and their brother should be making comics right now.
(sisters should be involved too.)
Finishing my recent graphic novel The Chairs’ Hiatus marked the end of a bit of a brake I had taken from drawing comics. It had been nine years since I had drawn a page. In between 2003 when I did a six page short story for the Small Press Expo anthology and a year ago when I started preparations for The Chairs’ Hiatus I seemed to have completely lost the ability to complete a comic of any length.
I hadn’t lost the desire to draw comics. I simply kept telling myself that I was going to take comics seriously a little later. I was going to get back to drawing, I was going to draw a longer story, just not right now. Almost a decade alter I was still waiting.
How did I go from a full comic block to producing more comics pages in one year than I ever have in my life? As is often the case, there are a lot of parts to that answer, but the most exciting part is this:
Holly crap!
This is the time to be doing this stuff!
Now stay with me, I don’t mean “This is the time.” as in “You never know which day will be your last so you’re better take advantage of right now,” although that’s true. What I mean by “This is the time.” is that I can’t imagine a more exciting time for creating comics. This year, 2011, is such an unbelievably fantastic time to be getting into the world of comics it keeps me up at night.
In my head, I’m imagining folks already disagreeing with me. I imagine people talking about the death of floppies (traditional magazine like comic books.) I imagine people talking about how fewer and fewer books are being produced by the major comic companies. I can always imagine a million objections.
Frankly, I don’t really care much about any objection you’ve got.
I’m excited about a new frontier.
You know what I’m going to say next right? Mobile devices? You’re partly right.
E-readers, tablets, and mobile devices are unbelievable products that are seemingly everywhere and provide incredible opportunities for people who can tell a story visually. Any cartoonist anywhere can create work for these devices, and it’s quickly becoming true that any person in America will be able to consume that work from anywhere. What could be better than that?
“But wait…” I say all salesmen like. “It’s even better than that.”
I talk to people who are understandably upset that certain techniques used in print comics don’t translate well to the digital alternatives. Full-page print comics are too small to read on an iPhone, the dramatic impact of the double-page spread is lost on any device that only has one screen, etc. I myself have figured out plenty storytelling tricks that don’t appear to work the same way in these new formats. A lot of cartoonists are focusing on the things that they can’t do with these devices or can’t do the same way rather than being excited about the litany new things they never could do before.
The thing that keeps coming to mind is
The Dawn of Cinema.
When motion pictures first came to be they were simply filmed plays: static full body shots of actors walking around the frame. The filmmakers of that time didn’t start from scratch exactly, they had the entire history of drama to draw from, but they took that fledgling medium and figured out so much that we take for granted today. The science and art behind dramatic camera angles, close-ups, the emotional impact of sound, the ways color can affect the story, the incredible power of editing, and on and on. These things seem obvious now, but they weren’t back then. People experimented and continue to experiment to figure out techniques that will seem obvious years from now.
Cartoonists have a similar opportunity today. The next 5, 10, or 15 years, with the advent of millions of little interconnected screens in our pockets and on our laps, may very well see creative leaps equal to or greater than the advances that have been made in film, and I think cartoonists are uniquely suited to be at the forefront of that.
It doesn’t look like neither I or my contemporaries may ever have a monthly book in more stores than the blockbusters of our childhood. But I don’t care. I’ve loved and continue to love printed graphic novels and comic books with all my heart, but I feel like a theater director who just had the first motion picture camera dropped into his lap and told “Here, see what you can do with that.”
When I was in middle school and first discovering the awesomeness of comics, I used to love backup stories. They were like the easter eggs of comics. You get to the end of the newest issue of Amazing Spider-Man and exclaim “Theres four extra pages in here! There’s a bit about some guy named Nova! I don’t know who the heck Nova is but his helmet kind of reminds me of Magneto and Magneto is bad ass. This is going to be awesome.”
Recent comments