Working Inside The Box

This is a reworking of the talk that I gave at the Digital Comics Symposium at University of Hertfordshire, UK on 14 October 2015. Big thanks to Daniel Merlin Goodbrey for hosting, to the Electricomics team, and everyone else who contributed to a great day out.

The theme of the talk was constraints and creativity, based on my own observations of using a highly digital workflow to create traditional page-based comics.

When talking about digital comics, we often state that constraints have been removed - we can now animate, use sound, make "pages" as big as we like or abandon the "page" completely, add non-linear storytelling structures (even generate the pathways dynamically), etc. The sense of freedom can be dizzying.

Technology, Economy, Time

I gave an overview of the constraints facing print-based comics, based on the technology available to them, and how these were worked with (note "with", not "against") creatively. Constraints shape the creative process, from the 4 colour CMYK printing process helping to shape the storytelling, from brightly coloured superheroes with recognisable colour signatures to the long-held prejudice that colour comic art was superior to black & white because of the higher physical production costs.

Technology exists as one point of a triangle along with time and money, of course. Time and money are huge constraints in comics, and in any creative activity. Technology is often not enabling new approaches per se, but rather enabling them to be done in a quicker, or more cost-effective way. And, regardless of the impact of technology, creatives often expend considerable effort figuring out how to do things quickly or cheaply (usually because the alternative is not to do them at all). I'm into creating comics primarily in order to tell stories.

Capturing nuances of facial expression and gesture, which requires considerable artistic talent, is a big part of storytelling, but that's the extent of my interest in visually recording the human form. I can draw passably well, and capture a reasonable likeness repeatedly, but for me, the use of digital photography and photo-manipulation were adopted as a technology that let me get on quicker, and dispense with a lot of the drudge-work of drawing. Initially at least - where I've ended up by adopting those techniques isn't where I expected to be, as you'll see.

There's a whole "science" of productivity and efficiency, starting with the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor. His Time & Motion studies broke down repetitive actions into their constituent parts, and tweaked them individually. Taylorism in it's pure form is no longer a thing (it survived 40 years, at most, from 1890 - 1930's), but his legacy survives.

I find myself timing and measuring my actions when making comics. I know how many pages I can turn out a month, how long it takes to do a single drawing in a particular style, how many panels I can produce in an evening, and so on. And, on the whole, I find that recording and measurement rather irksome to my creative process. A big part of me kicks against these economically-imposed constraints.

My main assertion here is that it doesn't have to be that way. Constraints and creativity aren't enemies, and this is the case in at least two ways.

Virtuous Circles

The first one is rather prosaic. My standard workflow, with a given technique, is to do it manually, tweak and refine the process, and then, when I'm happy with it, commit it to code as a plugin. (I use GIMP, and write my scripts in Python. If you use Photoshop as your tool of choice, that can be automated using Javascript in a similar way.) Once a technique is scripted up in this way, I can apply it more effortlessly, and quicker, without having to let the setup stages get in the way of my creativity. Doing an appropriate amount of Taylorist measurement and reflection helps me fly further.

Self-Imposed Boxes

The second synergy between constraints and creativity goes deeper. Looking across a lot of stories that I like, I find that the artists involved often voluntarily adopt constraints. Here are a few, picked from comics, film, prose, etc. - I try hard not to restrict my comic making influences to just other comic creators. So, a few examples.

David Mazzuchelli's "Asterios Polyp" uses the CMYK printing process in a very deliberate way, assigning different colour schemes (and line styles) to each character - Asterios is blue, angular and geometric, whereas his partner Hana is magenta, and defined by softer, more blurry-edged cross-hatching.

In Ray Fawkes' powerful graphic novel "One Soul", 18 different life stories, from different locations through time and geography, have their life stories told. Fawkes sticks to a 3x3 panel grid throughout, with each life allocated a particular place in the double-page spread. The stories build up alongside one another, and the page gradually goes dark as the characters die.

In Peter Greenaway's film "Drowning By Numbers", the numbers 1 to 100 appear, in order, somewhere in the elaborate sets. Completely incidental to the (rather bizarre) main plot of the film, it's possible to watch the film as a sort of arthouse "Where's Wally", follow the story, or do both.

In Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee & Cigarettes", the entire film is made up of short vignettes in which assorted characters meet up to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. The unusual combinations of famous actors ad musicians playing warped versions of themselves, and repeated motifs hold things together in a strange way. (both Tom Waits and GZA from Wu Tang Clan are, in their semi-fictional forms, skilled medical doctors as well as musicians, for example.)

In Jon Sladek's short story "A Game of Jump", a tale of murder, lust, betrayal and insanity is told using only the 700 words defined in an old Ladybird dictionary for children, to startling effect. Randall Munroe of XKCD performs a similar trick with the diagrammatic "Up-goer 5", describing the technical functions o the Apollo 5 rocket using a very limited vocabulary.

Richard McGuire's "Here" shows the same scene from a fixed viewpoint, spanning thousands of years of history, and interleaving the different time periods within floating "windows" to build up a historical tapestry of a particular room in a house. (FWIW, I disagree with the second review entirely, I don't see anything in the book that can be read as an urgent ecological fable. It's a mirror, I think the reviewer may have seen her own very valid concerns reflected back at her.)

Poetry is full of formal constraints - especially rhyming poetry, in t's multiple forms: sestinas, habbies, quatrains, sonnets, haikus and limericks. (Yep, limericks. Poetry might be sen as a rather serious business, but sticking to a rigid set of constraints can be fun too.)

Formalities

These are all what I'd call "formalist" constraints (and I'd describe my own approach as very "formalist") - let me explain what I mean by that. Here's the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition:

Full Definition of FORMALISM. 1. : the practice or the doctrine of strict adherence to prescribed or external forms (as in religion or art); also : an instance of this. 2. : marked attention to arrangement, style, or artistic means (as in art or literature) usually with corresponding de-emphasis of content.

Often, I'll get the starting point for an idea from some specific external form, rather than from a specific story.

"Tell an entire life story in one page" (I ran this as a challenge on the Millarworld forums several years ago, and had a huge and varied response)
"Tell a story using cut-ups of paintings by a famous (out of copyright) painter"
"Divide each page horizontally, and tell two parallel stories along the top and bottom, which bounce off each other in interesting ways"
"Tell a story composed of several interwoven narratives on a broad topic (e.g. 'problems') coming up with the topic first and writing the stories to fit afterwards"

The definition has a point, that a formalist approach can overlook content, and there are plenty of formalist exercises out there that end up rather dry and shrivelled, and other online definitions are rather more damning of formalism in this regard. I try not to fall into this trap - I do want to tell meaningful stories too - it's just a matter of pedalling a little bit harder in the right places. (My success rate's probably better than 50%, if I'm honest. Sometimes the content's played second fiddle to the form.)

Technology & Improvisation

This was a talk delivered at a symposium on digital comics, so I wanted to round off by coming back to digital technology, and the initial assertion that it had an impact on the non-creative constraints of the time & money variety. In my own work, this was the biggest initial draw of technology for me, as I said.

Experience has proven otherwise, however. Taking photos of people as a starting point has influenced my work in quite different ways.

• Working with screen-caps from youtube etc. (as I did initially, to try the techniques out), I have no control over the movements/gestures of the people, so made up stories around the available images.
• Working with other real-live people, who were investing their time for free (notably my collaborators at Kendal Community Theatre), it didn't feel right to turn up with complete scripts and work through them, but to work with them on the day, and create stories from that.
• Much of the video that I recorded was of people talking (there's also a fair bit of action/dramatic conflict), so I gravitated towards a "talking heads" style.
• Having "talking heads" on the page helped me to come up with the idea of split pages as a way of introducing more visual elements into the story.

I've developed a style here that's quite different from most comics I've seen, and one with a lot of potential and variety, that I feel I could spend at least a couple more years exploring.

I'm therefore tempted to conclude that the boundary between practical and creative constraints is somewhat artificial, or at least, we have a degree of choice in how we view the constraints under which we work, and turn them to our advantage.

A short video demonstrating my current workflow for turning photos into comic art, at high speed, can be found here.

Subhumanising

Preamble

I've just been up in Kendal installing an exhibition for the upcoming Lakes International Comic Art Festival. I was paired up with YWCA Kendal, who operate the cafe & business resource centre that I'm using, as well as providing accommodation for young homeless people upstairs, via Impact Housing Association.

The exhibition tells a number of interweaving stories, centred around the themes of home. I wrote this when preparing the Questionnaire that I used to elicit input into the stories from various users of the building:

Home is an essential human dignity

Home can be a building

Home can be other people

Home can be a state of mind

Home can be a place of safety

Home can be a place in which to grow

Home can become a suit of armour

Home can lock people in - or out

I've been writing and illustrating these stories for the last two months, and it's been a turbulent awful two months for a lot of people, as the refugee crisis in Syria and elsewhere has ramped up to unexpected and entirely predictable proportions. It weighed heavily on my mind while writing around the subject of homes and homelessness. Initially, I tried to focus more on homelessness in the UK, but that didn't feel right either. In the end, I've worked on the universal underlying issue, which is seeing other people as "other", attempting to take away their humanity. We do it because we're afraid.

Main Course

I'm not writing this post to promote my exhibition. I should be working on something else this afternoon, but this won't wait. I need to rant. I read an article just now (thanks to Tauriq Moosa for bringing it to my attention on Twitter - I highly recommend his twitter feed for uncomfortable ethical issues, he does a great job)

So, here's the article. In summary:
- in Hungary, a camera-woman was filming refugees being held back by police
- the line broke, and the refugees ran through, towards the film crew
- the camera-woman panicked, and kicked out at a young girl running towards her
- this was caught on film
- camera-woman loses her job, faces criminal trials, and becomes subject of an internet witch-hunt

While I condemn her actions completely - what she did was stupid, disrespectful and small-minded - my heart goes out to the camera-woman. My heart goes out to the refugees too, of course, what they've seen on the journey this far beggars belief. Oh, and my heart goes out to the police tasked with holding the line, and the one-dimensional saps hurting in their witch-hunt.

We kick out when we see a rabid animal running towards us. We kick out in our nightmares. We stamp on snakes, cockroaches and other vilified creatures. The camera-woman got confused between a small, vulnerable child who's been through hell, and a dangerous nightmare monster. Not an easy mistake to make, you say? Various arms, legs and tentacles of the international media have been promoting that exact confusion for the last few months (google for hopkins cockroach norovirus sun Roszke, just for starters). And it gets under our skin, even the best of us aren't automatically immune to the gradual erosion of common human decency when faced with a barrage of hate-n-crap.

This isn't a new trick, by the way. The US soldiers in Vietnam referred to locals as "gooks" to encourage dehumanisation. The Nazis in Germany depicted Jews as sub-human. Trace the line back out through the twentieth century and beyond, through Machiavelli's advice, backwards into antiquity. (Certain sections of the Old Testament and other early literature probably have some good stuff in this vein?) Demonising the other is part of who we are. (Yes, it is "we" - "they" don't do it, "we" do. Geddit?)

Faced with this barrage of hate-n-crap, we all need to be on guard more than usual to counter the confusion between human and monster. The camerawoman in this story failed that test. She deserves the criminal charges. Being fired? I can't decide. The witch hunt? Definitely not.

Her employers, who fired her, and saw a bad PR event running towards them, kicked her out with a similar reflex. (I can't find out much about Nemzeti TV just now - their website's been hacked, google just turns up variants of this story... so no idea what their general ethos is). They've distanced themselves, for the sake of their reputation. Anyone taking pot-shots at her from the comfort of the internet has also drawn an ethical line between "us" and "them".

Don't believe the hype. Everyone involved in this chain of events is human. And that means everyone's got the capacity to be a monster, by letting fear replace our view of the other person with some demonic image, some nightmare rabid-rat-snake that only exists in our heads.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's old quote seems an appropriate point to end this rant on:

"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

When (not if, because this is big enough to engulf us all) I'm faced with the split-second choice of whether to kick or not, I hope like f**k I make the right choice, and don't have to face the many internal and external consequences. I don't feel complacent about doing so, and - whoever you are, dear reader - neither should you.

Electricomics 103 : First Code Dropped, Thoughts on Visual Styles & the Comics Ghetto

UPDATE: Wrong end of stick fully grasped here. The file "hammer.js" is a third-party event library, coincidentally with a similar name to the title of the story.

The source code for the first electricomic is up. This is "Grandfather's Hammer" by Daniel Merl Goodbrey, electricomics' co-conspirator and long-standing (long-standing as in, back into the last millenium) guru of non-linear digital comics. It's not one of the stories from the demo app.

Aesthetics

For the keen techies, I'll dig into the code a little bit at the bottom of the article. First, let's have a look at the end-product. It's a simple, meaty, powerful story, and a near perfect example of how the simplest of graphics can serve storytelling. Leaving aside the fact that it's electronic, it's top-notch. (Note to our international readers, that translates as "very, very good").

The narrative is linear, unlike a lot of Goodbrey's work. Nonetheless, there are two innovative features to the storytelling that I'd like to point out here.

Use of Space - the majority of the story's a conversation between grandfather and four grandchildren, with a "flashback" sequence depicting other events, in the middle. Early on, the convention is established whereby each character has their own space on the page, but not all characters are present on every page. There's therefore a lot of white space, but also a neat rhythm to the story. This would work fine as a 30-page printed book. As a digital comic, the structure has some extra impact, as the page transitions preserve position more accurately, so when Grandfather looks from left to right, it's almost like a flipbook animation.

Graphic Style - the graphics here are minimal, and beautiful - both as static pictures, and as a narrative. Shapes are used to convey characters' emotions and thoughts, nothing else. (The colour and texture are decorative, it's not completely spartan.) If Mr. Goodbrey permits, I'll post a couple of images here, in the meantime, go here to see a sample of the art. The closest things I can think of in comics are Lorenzo Mattotti's expressionist works, and the minimal lines of Simon Moreton.

After reading this, I'm struck by how the official demo Electricomcs' artwork all looked like conventional comics, being either scanned physical art of digital art made to look like coloured in pen & ink. All of it was high quality, for sure, but it all said "comic" very loudly. Goodbrey's abstracted stuff, in contrast, is more reminiscent of data visualisations or editorial illustrations for a popular science magazine.

In my previous post, I made the point that electricomics are not really comics, nor are they movies or games, they're something else, a new hybrid. Ironically, "Grandfather's hammer", which probably diverges from the narrative form of a print comic less than any of the demo stories, looks less like a comic, and may therefore be more accessible to a mainstream audience, because it doesn't follow the visual tropes of traditional comic books.

It's a great shame that the public perception of comics is what it is (in the Anglophone world at least). There is much cause for hope - publishers like Top Shelf, Self-made Hero, Jonathan Cape, Fantagraphics, Blank Slate; events like The Lakes International Comic Art Festival; bookshops like Page 45, Gosh! and Astral Gypsy; groups like the Applied Comics Network  (random off-top-of-head picking here, apologies to many others I've omitted)- are all doing a lot to reintroduce comics to a broader mainstream, and the stigma is much less than it used to be, even five years ago. Final shout-out to Karrie Fransman here - I attended her Guardian masterclass recently, and breaking out to reach a much bigger audience than current comics-readers was a major discussion point. A lot of creators have been deliberately pushing at these boundaries too, of course, or choosing to ignore them.

(Quick aside: I just wrote "comics reader". Isn't it weird that that doesn't look odd. I don't describe myself as a "television watcher", "novel reader". I suppose "moviegoer" is a word, and "gamer". Time to shrug and move on, I think...)

Electricomics don't need to carry the "comics" stigma. Electricomics don't need to distance themselves from that stigma either, and can help play a part in the de-stigmatisation process that's already underway. It's great to see, in "Grandfather's Hammer", such boldly un-comic-book artwork being used so well.

PS: "Electricomics 103" I ask you! I'll get fed up of this idiotic naming scheme soon, I promise. :)

Techie Stuff

What have we got to play with here, then? Let's ask the computer for a summary...

dave@deimos electricomic-hammer (master) $ tree .

.

├── README.md

└── hammer.elcxproject

    ├── comic.json

    ├── cover.png

    ├── css

    │   └── style.css

    ├── images

    │   ├── hammer30001.png

    │   ├── hammer30002.png

    │   ├── hammer30003.png

    │   ├── hammer30004.png

    │   ├── hammer30005.png

    │   ├── hammer30006.png

    │   ├── hammer30007.png

    │   ├── hammer30008.png

    │   ├── hammer30009.png

    │   ├── hammer30010.png

    │   ├── hammer30011.png

    │   ├── hammer30013.png

    │   ├── hammer30014.png

    │   ├── hammer30015.png

    │   ├── hammer30016.png

    │   ├── hammer30017.png

    │   ├── hammer30018.png

    │   ├── hammer30019.png

    │   ├── hammer30020.png

    │   ├── hammer30021.png

    │   ├── hammer30022.png

    │   ├── hammer30023.png

    │   ├── hammer30024.png

    │   ├── hammer30025.png

    │   ├── hammer30026.png

    │   ├── hammer30027.png

    │   ├── hammer30028.png

    │   ├── hammer30029.png

    │   └── hammer30030.png

    ├── index.html

    ├── js

    │   ├── comic.js

    │   ├── electricomics.js

    │   ├── hammer.min.js

    │   ├── jquery.min.js

    │   ├── picturefill.min.js

    │   ├── raf.js

    │   └── storage.js

    └── project.json

4 directories, 42 files

So there's a standard electricomics javascript library, a "comics.js" containing some more boilerplate code and a little bit of orchestration for this particular story a minified "hammer" library (that I haven't dug into at all), presumably bespoke to this project, and the standard HTML structure defined in the electricomics living standard. According to the README, the project can be loaded into the composer (not released yet), or downloaded into the app (interesting! I didn't realise that it did that.) But the quickest way to read it is to open index.html in a web browser - I did so from the file system, not even mounting it on a web server.

The app is quite a straightforward structure, telling a linear story, with advances from page to page via tap/click. This is reflected in the <ec-page> elements in index.html - the narrative structure's fairly easy to discern from the markup. As I said, the javascript is minified, so no idea what that is doing, yet.

Electricomics 102 : Anatomy Lesson

In the previous post, I suggested that "digitally-enhanced" Comics weren't so much an "enhancement" of existing comics, but the start of something different-but-related. Personally, I find it much more exciting to think of them like this, than as some "comics evolved for the 21st century" guff. Comics are doing fine (and adapting to the 21st Century fine, thanks to Comixology, Sequential and others). Electricomics and their predecessors are something different, able to borrow storytelling techniques from comics, movies, games. And, crucially, to invent their own idioms.

In this post, I want to do a quick tour of the anatomy of this new creature. Oh, and speculate about the near future ("near" as in next 12 months) in a way that'll make me cringe with embarrassment when I go back to read it :)

So, what's changed with this new creature, then? The sample Electricomics give us a number of hints that highlight different ways of interacting with the comics, such as "tilt", "swipe" and "soundscape", indicating that something different is going on. These are specific interactions, and I'm assuming that the software library will allow tech-savvy users and third-party developers to create additional new interaction modes. The current provisional standard for the structure of an electricomic contains a space for user-defined javascript libraries, so all looks good on that front.

Rather than trying to examine tilt, swipe & friends one by one, I'm going to propose a broader classification. Digital comics can be enhanced in one of three ways, which I'll present in increasing order of power. (By "power", I mean how much it can alter the storytelling experience, not how much it'll drain your batteries! I'm easily excited by techie stuff, and proposing grand classifications is an inherently techie thing to do, but I want to keep an eye on the storytelling as the ultimate goal here)

Here we go...

Type 1 : Special Effects

Using digital effects, we can introduce movement and sound in various ways, to dress up an individual panel or sequence of panels. The principle use of this is to establish mood, or sense of place. There are "obvious" uses - changing a character's facial expression or body language to convey a change in emotion, animating a bodaciously cool fight move, watching a building/planet/giant cosmic sandwich collapse in slo-mo, and so on. We can do somewhat more subtle stuff too - parallax scrolling on a long shot can give a sense of depth, changing colours can show the sun setting. Music or sound effects can be used to add to the narrative - something well established from movies.
(Here's a well-known example - warning, horror & sound effects!!)

Impact on Storytelling: pretty much mood/sense of place, unless my imagination's failing me. (Looking forward to being proven wrong here)

Type 2: Presentation & Layout

Physical comics are restricted to the size of the page. You can pick a size for a book (6x9", US letter, A4, etc., portrait or landscape), and then you're stuck with it. Syndicated strips are stuck with a fixed amount of real estate in a newspaper. It's possible to play with this a bit - double page spreads, switching between portrait & landscape (e.g. for several issues of Dave Sim's Cerebus "Church & State" run), mega-sized pull-out pages (e.g. recent issue of Fraction & Ward's Ody-C, Mick Inkpen's "Blue Balloon" childrens' book). There's an episode of Alan Moore & JH Williams' Prometheus, and a recent issue of Silver Surfer by Dan Slott & Mike Allred that both used Moebius strip structures - for example.

Early digital comics (i.e. everything that we've seen so far) tend to follow the fixed-page conventions of their paper ancestors, in the same way early movies stuck with a theatrical proscenium arch. In both cases, adhering to the restriction is a security blanket, that will be discarded as the new medium matures.

Scott McCloud coined the term "Infinite Canvas", to describe this new freedom. Drew Weing's "Pup Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe" is the go-to example of this technique, and is funny and deep with it! On an infinite canvas, the user can move around freely, up, down, sideways, to follow the story. One thing I haven't seen explored much yet is the ability to zoom in and out. There was a powerpoint-like tool called "Prezi" that did the rounds of a place I worked at a few years, that made great use of infinite zooming to jazz up business presentations - imagine a comic strip that can be read like these sample presentations. Computer UI guru Jef Raskin, one of the people responsible for the modern GUI, via his early work at Apple, proposed a similar zoomable interface for file management on desktop computers. Google Maps and it's ilk use a zoomable UI too, (and support a rich enough API to tell a story!!).

At the other extreme, it's possible to increase the control over the user's travel. The zooming panels in Scott McCloud's The Right Number, and the regular beats of Bryan Talbot's Metronome expanded edition, comixology's guided view, all walk the reader through the story, one panel at a time.

Impact on Storytelling: Allows the writer to grant more, or less, freedom to the reader. What effect does it have on the reader? Guiding the reader may help to establish a smooth flow. In the case of Metronome, it's done to enforce the rhythm of the story (and the story's very much focused on rhythm). There's a danger of disempowering the reader. On the other hand, giving too much freedom risks losing the thread, and pulling them out of the narrative (which may be intentional, if you're looking to instil a sense of disorientation or unease, but is generally bad news if you're loking to tell a conventional, immersive story).

Type 3: non-linear Narrative

Given an infinite canvas, there's an obvious temptation to "fork" the story, and head off in more than one direction - yep, it's Scott McCloud again. In algorithmic terms, our story is no longer a linear sequence, but a "graph", that is a series of "nodes" (panels) connected by "edges" (paths from one panel to another). Graphs of nodes can be represented visually as series of panels on a flat plane, although not all can do so without edges crossing over. McCloud's early experiments often make the edges explicit (e.g. this), as guidelines between the panels, rather than the standard convention of putting panels right next to one another.

A graph, though, is just a data structure, and can be used to drive other modes of presentation too. There are precedents here in Hypercard, an early software tool for creating non-linear presentations (used heavily in development of the early puzzler game Myst, apparently), and in the paperback adventure books of the 1980's. Two of the demo Electricomics (Sway, and Cabaret Amygdala) use non-linear storytelling, activated by different mechanisms. Sway "forks" the story by tilting the character into the past or future, whereas Cabaret Amygdala uses hyperlinked objects (phones, notebooks, TV screens) as gateways to different pages. Visually, both of these organise the story visually in conventional page-sized chunks - perhaps a wise move to help ground the fledgling electricomic reader in a bit of familiarity?

Remember, the reader, as well as the creators, are very much figuring out this new medium right now. Look at how film storytelling has continued to adapt to an increasingly sophisticated audience, with once-innovative techniques like Nic Roeg's cut-up rapid edits being absorbed into the mainstream storytelling repertoire.

Looking outside comics, we won't find non-linear narratives in movies, but they're a staple in games, of course. Some enhanced comics look/play/whatever?? very like games (e.g. Daniel Merl Goodbrey's "Duck has an Adventure"). Once I'd figured out how to read Sway and Cabaret Amygdala, I frequently felt a bit disoriented, and concerned that I wasn't going to find all the ways through the story. I don't play computer games - maybe if I did, I'd feel more at home here?

At the same time as these kinds of electricomics are currently moving closer to games, there is a growing sub-group of games that are moving closer to comics - typically independent, or small budget, with a greater emphasis on narrative, drama and suspense, and less on action (here are a couple of random examples that I've heard good things about). These games still tend to rely on more fluid animation than you'd find in comics, but are encountering similar issues in straddling the divide between puzzle and immersive narrative. As a storyteller, we want our audience to be immersed within the story. As a puzzle-maker, we need to awaken the critical thinking & logic centres that immersive storytelling needs to suppress. I certainly felt the tension while reading Cabaret Amygdala and Sway - with my attention on figuring out the underlying graph of the story, I don't think I really empathised with the key characters at any point. But, as I said, maybe I'm just showing my age there...

Impact on Storytelling: In short - Immense :)

Other Stuff

As with any good three-point summary, there's a lot that doesn't fit in the three categories. Here's a few more thoughts I'd like to get out of my head and onto the internet...

Useability

There's a mature discipline of User Experience testing (UX for short) in software development these days, the findings of which may be useful to Electricomics creators. One key term from UX is "Discoverability" - in the absence of instructions (either because there aren't any, or because the user didn't bother to read them), how easy is it to figure out how to use something? Rules for good discoverability differ greatly depending on how the user uses the tool. Complex, powerful tools of the trade will be expected to be difficult, require training, and time to learn. Apps designed for intermittent or occasional use, such as Dictionaries, calculators and notepads, ought to be intuitive, and require no training to master. Typically, an Electricomic falls into the second category, and it should be obvious how to read it. Again, that's going to depend on the creators' intent, and whether they want to immerse the reader in a story, or challenge them with a puzzle.

Responsive Design

Many ipad/android applications will adjust to either portrait or landscape mode as the tablet is rotated. Android apps in particular need to work on a variety of screen sizes and shapes (well, different kinds of rectangles - star-shaped touchscreens haven't caught on for some reason). The Electricomics demo has wisely side-stepped much of this for it's initial release, by limiting distribution to the iPad, and also by restricting each comic to either landscape or portrait viewing. Within these constraints, it's possible to position panels on the screen with pixel-perfect accuracy, giving the designer easy control over the look, proportions and layout of the story.

Early graphical user interface design tended to position buttons, text boxes etc. pixel-perfect, whereas most modern user interface systems position elements relative to one another, to accommodate a variety of form factors. With a typical user interface, utility is king. Electricomics are a utilitarian user interface and a Work Of Great Art all at once, so the hurdles to adapting to different form factors are significant, but I'd expect some capability to resize dynamically to become part of the toolkit at some point in the future. The hurdles are there, but not unsolvable.

With the rise of mobile devices, touch screens, etc. the practice of "Responsive Design" has been a hot topic in recent years. This goes further than simply shrinking or growing the elements to fit the layout, to actually switching between layouts to match the form factor. Hence an email app might show list and details side by side on a big screen (e.g. tablet), and one or the other as tabs on a smaller screen (e.g. phone).

Could an electricomic take advantage of responsive design? From a purely utilitarian viewpoint, a panel-by-panel guided view such as the digital version of Talbot's Metronome might be a good fit to the smaller form factors, whereas a grid layout would work better on a bigger screen. But could responsive design also be used artistically? Imagine a story that could be read portrait or landscape, in which tilting the screen to portrait mode revealed a wider viewpoint, and details/clues that altered the reader's perception as to characters' motives etc.

On The Fly

There's one final bit of crystal-ball gazing that I want to indulge in, based on the history of the web. Web site design, from one perspective, had three main stages:

1. in the early days of the web, pages were composed of static words and images, which were authored, then uploaded to a web server.
2. the content of a web site was held in a database, and assembled into a page of content on request. Most often, images were still retrieved wholesale from a file, but could be created on the fly by a computer program
3. the web server would deliver a page containing text, images, and code (usually javascript), that could modify the page dynamically, and talk back to the server to fetch more information while staying on the same page

This third model seems to me to be the most interesting path for Electricomics to take. A non-linear narrative could contain a program that generates the story graph in response to a user's actions, rather than being limited to predetermined forks and "jumping off" points. (If this sounds very much like a weird way of describing a computer game, then it's because it is!)

Using modern web technologies, images can be composited and rendered on the fly. What are the storytelling possibilities here, while sticking within the panel-based constraints of a comic? We could:

• change the tone, colouring of a panel based on some story-based criteria
• make panels longer, taller or shorter, if the background can be generated dynamically
• certain characters, props or other visual elements that only appear at certain times of day. How about a ghost story that injects extra scary elements to the plot only after it's got dark outside?! Or only on Christmas Day/Halloween/etc.
• multi-player stories that change depending on how many other people are reading them, and what they've done
• a chase scene with different outcomes depending how quickly you swipe from panel to panel

Computer-generated panel layout will be a challenge to artists. Some new freedoms appear, other restrictions will apply too. It is feasible, as proven by early experiments such as Grg Borenstein's "Generated Detective", which uses face detection on random images to work out where to place speech balloons.

It's going to be a wild and interesting ride. And hopefully not all like the one I've described above!

Electricomics 101

In case you hadn't heard, the Electricomics project launched it's first preview this week, showcasing several demo apps made by "big name" writers and artists that explore the storytelling possibilities of digitally enhanced comics.

The project is much bigger than the demos released this week. The intention is to provide a set of software libraries that can be extended by anyone with the technical chops to create new effects, and a graphical user interface that makes it possible for non-technical users to make use of the effects libraries in the service of storytelling.

I'm not officially involved in the project. I beta-tested the sample app for them, and have chatted to most of the team on twitter at some point. I make comics, and program computers, both well enough to delude myself that I know what I'm talking about. So if you've come here for wild hearsay and uninformed speculation, settle down and make yourself comfy :)

Lowering the Barrier

Digitally enhanced comics are nothing new. Pioneers like Daniel Merl Goodbrey and Scott McCloud have been exploring this space for over ten years, but it's a hard path to walk alone. (If you've been making digital comics, or know any good ones, tweet me a link and I'll add it to the list here).

If you think about it, making traditional comics is already a multi-disciplinary art. A creative team needs to be able to write well, draw well, get along so that the art and writing work together, and master the elusive art of panel-based-storytelling. The world's littered with beautifully-rendered stories that fail to engage, and with engagingly-written stories let down by bad art. Oh, and beautifully finished art that betrays a lack of anatomy, facial subtlety and all those storytelling nuances, beautiful words failing to mesh with beautiful pictures, great art let down by poor lettering, great lettering let down by poor art, etc. Yadda yadda.

Now try adding a bit of digital wizardry into that mix. When corporate behemoths like Microsoft, IBM, Apple et al. can - and frequently do - turn out unusuable, clunky software, what hope has the struggling wannabe-e-comic artist of creating a smooth, engaging experience? To work well - to enhance rather than detract from the storytelling - the user interface has to get out of the way, or suspension of disbelief will follow. The aim of (most) comics is to tell a story, so keeping the reader engaged in the story is of paramount importance.

Electricomics, then, is an attempt to lower the barrier to entry to the under-resourced digital comic artists of the world. It's an open-source, freely available tool. Anyone can download and modify the source code, to improve, extend, and enhance the system. The only constraint is that improvements must also be made freely available to all - no freeloaders adding 2% froth on top and trying to resell the gift to the world. (This is a sensible, time-honoured way of making software, by the way, going back to Richard Stallman's GNU project, which started in the 1980's.)

The Electricomics team - Alan Moore, Leah Moore & John Reppion, the techies at Ocasta Studios (Dan Goodbrey in an advisory role, I believe) - have given a marvellous free gift to the comics world here, and invited us all to join in. So let's do what the internet does with such daring acts of largesse, and whinge about the 10% it doesn't do (yet), without saying "thank you".

I hope those sarcasm-o-meters that are a mandatory part of access to the internet all went off there. In case they didn't, let's pause and raise our glasses to the Electricomics crew, and wish them, and the nascent community, well.

>chink<

The Toolkit

Ok, so what's in the box, then?

The editor program, used by creatives to make comics, will run on Windows and Mac. (And Linux should be possible, I'm guessing, with a bit of community help perhaps to stick a suitable wrapper around things...). The editor hasn't been released yet, I'll report on it when it has...

The sample comics to read are available only on iPad for now, and only on recent iPads too, I think. That's caused a few howls, and I've done my tooth-gnashing about it too, but got over it now. The iPad-only bit is quite a thin wrapper of code. The core engine is written in Javascript, and HTML5, an open, ubiquitous technology that can easily be wrapped up for Android, web pages, and whatever else. The initial iPad only launch was a matter of limited resources and expedience, not tribal loyalty or elitism.

I'll review the comics themselves in a follow-up post in a few days time.

And, let's stop to look at what's not in the box.

Electricomics is not an app store. It isn't a Comixology or Sequential of interactive comics, although it could be used as a component in one, maybe run by Ocasta & co, maybe by Sequential or Comixology. Hey, maybe even by you? The standard format for an electricomic has been published in draft, meaning that comics can be created, and distributed by their creators howsoever they wish - as iPad/Android apps, on the web, for download, etc. The project has delivered a very flexible starting point, which is, in my opinion, the right way to go.

Reflections

It's easy to get excited by the tech. It's easy to make frothy pronouncements about liberating comics from the printed page, bringing comics into the 21st Century, etc. I think comics are having a pretty liberated time right now, in the 21st Century, to be honest. Most of the comics I make are digitally created, and restricted to that static image/fixed page size thang so I can sell the as physical books. I'm not going to throw my existing workflows away shouting "hot damn, you're so last year!" and turn into a tilt-n-twist storyteller overnight. But I'm certainly going to have a good play.

Also, I think the jury's out on whether the things that Electricomics will help us create are comics or not. A good analogy is the growing culture of intelligent story-driven and indie games. These games aren't liberating movies from linear narrative, they're something else. Electricomics and their predecessors are something else too. Something with a potential to be fascinating and engaging in their own right.

And we're in a very early stage of exploring these right now. The sample app barely scratches the surface of what's possible (that's not a dig - it'd be rather boring if they had done everything one could do with the medium at the first attempt). The open source nature of the system, and publication of a standard format, is strategically brilliant, in my biased, deluded and uninformed opinion.

I think the next few months could be rather interesting.

Overshoot & Collapse

Little bit of system dynamics 'n' wildlife ecology sneaking into one of my comics...

Who Makes Art?

Unreviewed along the way in this article:

• The Death of the Artist by Karrie Fransman
• The Dawn of the Unread project
• Frontier #6 by Emily Carroll
• Exit Wounds by Rutu modan
• The Park by Oscar Zarate
• The Motherless Oven by Rob Davis (again! I like this one)
• The Applied Cartooning Manifesto by The Centre for Cartoon Studies
• The Generated Detective by Greg Borenstein
• Six Word Story by Ernest Hemingway (and others)

What is Art? It's a huge question with very little boundary or frame of reference. In fact, it's massive - it has no edges whatsoever. So, I'm going to sidestep it altogether here, and look at something much more tractable. Who makes art, and why?

Our society generally subscribes to the myth of the Lone Artist - a special individual with a unique vision that they need to impart to the world. And having subscribed to that idea, we see what we want to see, even when reality is otherwise. Even our publishing institutions get stuck in this way of seeing things - as Sarah McIntyre's recent writings and campaigning on the treatment of illustrators ably demonstrates.

Art can indeed be made by remarkable individuals, or even by collaborations between small huddles of remarkable individuals such as a writer and an illustrator, but even that isn't the only model.

Art can often work when it reaches out beyond the originators' own concerns, to touch a wider audience. Good art often works by requiring audience participation, letting the reader/viewer/imbiber (you are au fait with these new edible comics, aren't you? they're all the rage!) bring something to the table, to actively engage in the experience. A bit of ambiguity or open-endedness can be very satisfying - recent examples I've come across in comics include Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds, Oscar Zarate's The Park and Rob Davis' The Motherless Oven - all of which leave the reader guessing as to what happens after the story's finished. In the case of "Exit Wounds", a fraction of a second after the story finishes, as we leave the protagonist jumping/falling out of a tree. In the case of The Park, even the parting symbolism is ambiguous - are we looking at a heart, or a broken heart? Either could be very apposite, depending on how the conversation we've just drifted away from concludes.

One can go one step further, and engage with the audience during the creation of a work. Surrendering control early on in the creative process can be a remarkable experience. The Applied Cartooning Manifesto is certainly an eye-opening read, pointing to uses of cartooning in service to the community, as well as to the inner artist.  The Dawn of the Unread project, which released it's final section yesterday, is a great example of this, harnessing a diverse collection of creators in the service of public libraries (which perform a great service to us all), in a completely bananas, un-po-faced way (head on over to their site for details: in a nutshell, famous figures from Nottingham's history rise from the dead to stalk the streets in search of boooksss!) There are a number of stories, covering quite a range of styles, and a variety of local characters including thieves, preachers and of course, being Nottingham, Robin Hood. It's all available to read online, at the link above.

Community-driven art projects like this de-emphasise the role of the individual artist, but I don't think they diminish them - when an artist engages with the community, something quite powerful can happen. Joe Sacco, Daryl Cunningham, "Bad Doctor" Iwan Williams and Ravi Thornton all spring to mind.

(Quick aside and plug: this has been my own experience with the work I've done with Kendal Community Theatre at the Lakes Festival last year, in improvising a photo comic strip. I decided that I had to surrender control before I met the theatre crew and photographers, and arrive without a clear storyline or plot, just a bag of themes and ideas to get things started. It's been eye-opening, and really helped me grow as an artist. Watching key episodes in the story I'm creating unfold from the antics of a teenager, a middle aged person and an older person, for example, has been way better than pulling things out of my on creative pipe. I'll write more about the process of that project some other time - back to the topic at hand now...)

I've been sitting on this article for a week or so, and have come back several times with further examples of creative work that wasn't undertaken by a lone heroic artist. In the interests of space and time, I'll just list them here:

1. Tribal art e.g. Australian aboriginal art. This has become quite collectible in the international art world in the last few decades, but the art world really has struggled with the concept that the art isn't the product of an individual, but of the community, the language group, and spiritual traditions.

2. Loveable graffiti-ist Banksy's work has become collectible in spite of the fact that it's often rooted to large immovable structures, and he's had quite a bit of fun with the fact that he's anonymous and an art-world celeb, and blurs the line between vandal and  high artist.

3. Lennon & McCartney published all their songs for the Beatles as co-written. There's an endless fascination with dissecting these, figuring out who "really" wrote which ones. Does it really matter?

4. 1930's mathematician Nicholas Bourbaki was actually a pseudonym for a group of well over a dozen mathematicians, writing collectively about Set theory (and yes, I'll argue interminably that maths is at least partly a creative venture!)

5. Cut-up and repurposing of old art in new forms can be powerful. Pioneered by the surrealists (Max Ernst's Week of Kindness is a good comics-related example!), this has made it's way into fairly mainstream culture with, for example Steve Martin's (and Carl Reiner's, and Rachel Ward's, and many others...) Dead Men Don't wear Plaid. Often still the work of one or two auteurs, drawing on older material from previous creatives takes the artist outside themselves, and brings in other influences.

6. Digitally-generated narratives such as Greg Borenstein's Generated Detective take the cut-up approach of injecting random outside influences a step further, by surrendering control of the elements of the art to a computer-driven algorithm. (I've dabbled with this too, FWIW, although it appears not to have aged very well, with several panels since being removed from Flickr!)

7. Karrie Fransman's comic book experiment The Death of the Artist is a collaborative piece of work between five artists, each telling part of a true story - in radically different styles - that involves them all as protagonists. Or is it? Or (...wait for it...) is it?!

I'm going to take a detour into Fransman's work at this point, and look at it in a bit more detail. Trust me, by the time I'm done, I'll be back on-topic. (Oh, and the next road sign reads "spoilers ahead", I think that's part of internet etiquette these days, isn't it?)

The Death of the Artist is a contentious, polarising book. Gut reaction first - I didn't enjoy reading it, I didn't like the characters, with their petty self-absorptions, artistic pretensions and back-biting. In the final chapter, with Vincent's death, something big and portentous has happened in their lives, and it doesn't seem to be processed by any of them properly. Along the way, drugs are consumed, casual hook-ups are had, and they wallow in their own unpleasantness. After the first reading, I was scrabbling for some connections between the pieces, wondering what they all made of each other after telling their stories, whether they'd moved on at all from that overarching point of view that life ends in your mid-twenties, that responsibility and creativity are mortal enemies. I wondered why it had been written, why only one of the five contributors had her name on the front ("and friends"), what the royalty split was, what the owners of the cottage (who are named) would think about the debauchery going on at their place, and so on. My buttons were well and truly pushed, and I realised that I was really enjoying the awful spectacle of it, and the grubby little feeling of superiority! So I went off to wash the dishes until I got over it.

A couple of weeks or so rolled by, and Richard Bruton's excellent review of the book came out, and got me seriously wondering whether the five characters were real. I'm tempted to say the other four - Karrie Fransman's real, she does courses for the Guardian, and I watched her very good TEDx talk on youtube a while back, before getting the book. But I've also read an interview with a couple of the other protagonists in it - they fight amongst themselves rather realistically, don't they, but it's almost too neat? And there's no reason that the real Karrie Fransman is the character called Karrie Fransman depicted in the book - Paul Auster's played that game before, and I doubt he's the only one. Coleridge blurred the lines between fiction and reality in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner's original introduction. Italo Calvino and John Fowles played cat and mouse games with the reader in some of their writings (and if you like horror, check out Emily Carroll's XXXX industrial-strength-fourth-wall-breaking scary story in Frontier #6, which made me switch on the night light at night for a couple of days after reading it, I'm not ashamed to say!) Borges wrote fiction under all kinds of disguises - encyclopedia entries, accounts of dreams, even book reviews (so watch out!!)

So if they're not real people, what's going on? Bad stuff's happened by the end of the story - whatever I might think of Karrie and co, they've lost a friend, and could have maybe done something to stop that happening - and that's a hell of a lot to deal with, and there are hints that they realise this. Is the book a cathartic re-working of traumatic events into something else? Like that mega-button-pushing epicentre of modern art controversy, Tracey Emin's bed (which I do not hold in high regard, for what little that matters), is this a bold reinterpretation of the artist's shortcomings and human failings, a refusal to dress life up with a civilised or aesthetic veneer?

And of course, the portrayals in the book are not completely real people, they're marks and cut-out photos on paper, with word bubbles in their mouths. The presence of an editor, shaping what is presented, is evident. Are we being invited to consider the real nature of art, to look at the multitude of hinges and mirrors that get in the way of someone else trying to communicate their experience, even when it's as warts-n-all as this? Is the apparent naivete and self-absorption calculated to get a response, and, if so, to what extent can they (or the "she" behind the fictional "they", if that's the case) really see beyond it? As a forty-odd year old, can I recall how I felt about life in my late twenties? Did I understand the balance between responsibility and creativity in the way I do now? What will I see when I'm sixty?

For an unlikeable, flimsy piece of work, it sure raises a lot of interesting questions! And they don't come easy, I feel like I'm having to do a lot of work to pull them out. Am I just a lazy reader, who prefers to be spoon-fed my profundity?

This is the point where we rejoin the main road. (If every book review followed a car journey metaphor, things would flow more smoothly altogether, in a roundabout sort of way.) By goading the reader into taking their own baggage with them, is Karrie Fransman reaching out to her audience, so that each reader experiences the work differently? Is surrender of the aesthetic polish a necessity to achieving this? Is this, in fact, a valid kind of community art?

I really don't know. From the way I've couched the questions above, it undoubtedly is. To the extent that it focuses so heavily on the role of the artist, and subscribes to the myth of the Lone Artist as Special Person, then no, I don't think it is. For my money, art about art is often narrow and exclusive - I know many interesting people for whom artistic aspirations/status are really not an issue, and, while I enjoy the company of other artists, I wouldn't want to limit the reach of my own work just to that circle. Given this book's ephemeral nature, I don't think it can be pinned down as exclusively reaching out or looking inwards. Can it only achieve this ambiguity by being so insubstantial? Is less more? - another big unanswerable question.

So I was going to leave it at that when another thought occurred to me. It's none of the above, it's a colouring book. On closer inspection, a lot of the pages are already coloured in, and the paper's quite shiny - my crayons had trouble taking to it. So, maybe not - I had to rethink. Slumped across my desk in an etch-a-sketch induced stupour, the real answer came to me. It's actually a puzzle book.

A quick search on TripAdvisor combined with google maps brings up the exact location of "Ben" and "Nicky"'s house in the Peak District, cross-reference those with the positions of the local millstone grit features known as "The one-eyed Welshman" and "The Hags", and we get a triangle some 30km along each edge. Overlaying the mirror image of the (quite literally) painted lady in the photo story on the map, lining up her eyes and nose with the boundary fence of the pub with the same name, highlights a particular spot in a nearby field. Fortunately, it's quite close to the home of my long-standing friend Maddy Updike. I gave her a call with the information above this morning, and her two sons went up there with their shovels and unearthed a marvellous golden terrier, on the side of which was inscribed the real meaning of the book. But I had my fingers crossed when I read it, so it made no sense. Do I get my five pounds now?

Confound it, if I'm going to get any sense out of this book, I'll have to put some work into it, so I might as well have some fun getting there!

Under the Radar

Totalitarian regimes often employ strong centralised censorship of media channels as a means of exercising control. It's interesting to note how often these operations develop blind spots to particular media, allowing some discourse against government ideas to filter through. The blind spots often develop around areas of humour or fantasy - seemingly pointing to a certain literal-mindedness or lack of imagination in the average dictator and his or her apparatus of control.

The most commonly cited example of this is the Soviet era's willingness to publish science fiction, such as Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog" and the Strugatsky brothers' "Monday begins on Saturday", which offered thinly-veiled criticisms of the state. Not all subversive work escaped the censors - Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" was largely circulated via underground channels, for example, but still many subjects could be broached because they were done so in disguise.

The example of this topic that we'll examine today is the syndicated cartoon strip "Feeling Lucky, Adventure Jim?", which appeared in the Ogopathian tabloid newspaper "Petelin", (literally "The Cockerel", but linked via various phrases to the concept of freedom) in the years immediately after the digital revolution known internally as The Encryption. As a state-registered publication, Petelin was watched closely by the Ministry of Information, and editorial and news content followed the party line. The curiously-titled "Adventure Jim" typically featured on the back page, and purported to inform citizens of the appropriate response to the new surveillance technologies that were being rolled out across the country. An early example does this in a rather straightforward fashion, although the somewhat clownish appearance of the eponymous hero strikes an odd note from the start.

 Jim assures us that he is lucky, to have the support of the Ministry in thinking an acting like a citizen of the new regime.

Within a matter of weeks, the tone of the strip has changed somewhat, offering a range of rather disconcerting imagery, such as the representation of the state as a bowl of talking disinfectant:

Sufficient elements of the earlier strips, and of official party wording, are retained, but the juxtaposition of the phrase "emptiness is serenity" with Jim's look of outrage or horror tells us a lot about the cartoonist's sympathies, and his/her expectations as to what the largely automated censorship process will and won't pick up on. (The identity of "Buffalo" has never been firmly established, and, as has been noted elsewhere, the symbol of the Buffalo was co-opted by both the ruling committee and elements of the early resistance, based on the ambiguity of the nonsense sentence popularised by the jazz band The Overcoats in the years immediately prior to The Encryption.)

Having secured a few column inches out of the censor's watch, Buffalo appears to have placed a test strip that openly lampoons the earlier message:

Having got away with that, subsequent strips appear to offer veiled references to emerging technologies being developed by the Ministry of Information, and their deployment.

The nonsensical reference in the strapline message has been speculatively linked to the town of Cnoot, out of which a cell of resistance operated for some years. Further strips demonstrate awareness of the micro-sensors that were deployed in the third decade after encryption, and of the cottage industry of "tin foil hats" thought to guard against some of the Ministry's more intrusive systems.

It should be pointed out that the samples shown here illustrate the few examples of direct knowledge of Ministry activity, and that inbetween times, the strp would run for weeks in a rather more whimsical mode, developing the diverse cast of characters including the increasingly argumentative feet, and the singing bath tub. Whatever the nature of the elusive Buffalo, the strip ran for little more than two years before it was unceremoniously dropped, and most references to it within official documentation wiped. 

In contrast to the slow-moving bureaucracy of the Soviet era, the censorship apparatus of post-Encryption Ogopathia was highly adaptive and innovative, and one can only assume that Jim's adventurous author soon found that his/her luck had run out.

Words and Pictures

Comics are all about how the words and pictures bounce off each other. The words and pictures can both convey the same message, or carry out complementary functions. They can create friction, by saying something similar, but not quite the same. This was all laid out in Scott McCloud's watershed book "Understanding Comics". But I want to look here at how these instantaneous associations work when we add time into the equation too.

The pictures can change the words, and how we perceive them. Let's take a short phrase:

"It's important to relax at the end of the day."

Here are four random (creative commons) images from Google that could illustrate the above phrase:

And here they are all together, in strip form. It's hard not to form a narrative around them, isn't it? Comics are all about time, after all.

Now let's add a few words, including the phrase that we started off with:

...and change the way that you, the reader, responds to the images in the process. (Nothing clever here, this is a staple of horror stories, mixing up the familiar and the unsettling.)

So that final set of words, next to the final panel, have changed their meaning because of the picture that they go with.

But, taken as a whole, the words and pictures have also done something else - set up associations between visual concepts and concepts. He's not resting on the grass, he's dead! (panel 3). But I find what has happened to panels 2 and 4 more interesting. Daisies and cups of tea are probably now linked in your mind, at least temporarily, with the concept of poison. I'm guessing that this wasn't the case beforehand!?

Let's say that I were to repeat the image of the same cup of tea, with the phrase "I don't like my brother much either." Taken out of context, the link between words and pictures might evoke tea and sympathy, but if it comes after the sequence above, it might be enough to suggest another poisoning is in the offing. Even if I included a different image showing a close up of hands holding a cup of tea, it should be enough to trigger the association. If I show several different hands, with different cups of tea, and finished the sequence off with the words "My story touched a chord for many people.", then I can suggest a whole string of copycat poisonings, maybe? And by simply suggesting it rather than coming out with it direct, I leave the reader with a question rather than an answer, which, as I've written before, is often much richer and rewarding.

There are lots of possibilities here. Colours can be used to build up associations, as much as objects like tea and daisies. Specific compositions such as extreme close-ups or long shots, could be built up to be associated with particular concepts. In film, music can do the same, as well as it's more traditional purpose of setting the mood.

This play of associations and recurring motifs isn't limited to comics - films do it, novels and plays do it too - but I think in comics, the two streams of word and picture are quite distinct. This allows us to set up the association once, and then, when we want to re-use it, let only one stream do the work, while the other can get on with something else.

Decrypting the Internet and the Magic Zebra

In the unseemly haste to rush through a mixed bag of blunt draconian measures protect our noble civilisation, there's talk once more of making sure that government surveillance agents can intercept and listen to all our internet traffic. While it's rather unsporting to point out the complete lack of technical understanding that makes these measures impractical and self-defeating (even if we acknowledge that they're a blatant land-grab by the surveillance state), commentators are universally ignoring the one secret ingredient that will make these plans a success.

A common retort against forcing all internet traffic out into the open, where it can be intercepted for our benefit and safety, is that the "back doors" we must build into our communication systems to allow snooping listening have no way of knowing if the person using them is a Goodie or a Baddy. Heaven forbid that any corruption could ever arise within our own ranks, or that the thin line between traitor and whistleblower could in any way be up for debate, but the thought of a horde of ill-kempt swarthy, foreign thugs appropriating our security system to their own swarthy, foreign ends certainly gives pause for thought.

Remember high speed bank robbery chases? A thing of the past...

But I say to these nay-sayers, think of the Bank Robbery. Yes, do you remember them? Armed men breaking into banks, and escaping in fast cars, with dangerous high speed chases and gun fights. A thing of the past, of course, thanks to the Magic Zebras installed by law in all modern cars that will prevent the engine from starting if the driver is Up To No Good. They work using Science of course, cooked up by our egg-headed boffins in their labs, so there's no need for awkward questions about how they work. Just trust us. And likewise, there's the Cornish Piskies fitted to modern firearms that only allow them to be used in the National Interest.

Well, now we've jogged your memory about that, you may be wondering what all the fuss about these security back doors is. Using lots of complicated sums on blackboards, of course the same technology can be applied to the internet, so that just in the same way that armed robbery and high-speed escapes no longer happen, Our Boys will be able to listen in to everything you say and do, with absolutely no possibility of wrongdoing.

Trust our know-how, and our judgement. You know you can.

Control room of a Fundamentalist Muslim Zeppelin hovering over Birmingham, England

INTERNET DISCLAIMER: Yes, this is satire. Please don't take it literally (apart from the bit about the unicorn).

Machine-made High Art

The big question for today: "Can Machines make Art?"

Why that question? There's an interesting interview/profile piece in the New Yorker about a young couple who've made a lot of money creating "viral" / "clickbait" web sites, and apply a lot of number-crunching to hone the headlines in order to drive traffic to their sites, and to keep it there (the revenue streams come from online ads, so the number-crunching's driven by the bottom line for the business). (It's slightly confused - the headlines refer to the guy, the company's named after him, but she's also involved, and 2/3 of the way down, it says she's as "smart" as he is. I came away seeing the business as a joint venture between the two of them, I may be wrong about that.)

The article's interesting as a story of how the internet helped someone make a sack of cash (and yeah, I'm turning out nonchalant phrases here to conceal the twinges of jealousy!), but also as an insight into the Silicon Valley style mindset that got him and his partner where they are today.

One of the owners, a Mr. Spartz, makes a rather bold declaration that came my way via the twittersphere, that vast borg-like internet-age intelligence, via fellow absorbee Damien Walter, who's since written quite a searing attack on Spartz, much of which I have to agree with. Anyway, Spartz says:

"Art is that which science has not yet explained"

Putting it into context a little, he's referring to a Katy Perry pop song, and how techniques similar to the ones that he uses to hone his headlines could be used to improve and match the lyrics, vocals, melody etc., and use the wisdom of the crowds to build a better pop song.

So, picking apart his assertion, I'd take away the following observations:
1. He's in danger of confusing art with entertainment
2. He's in danger of confusing statistics with science
3. There's an underlying presumption that "science" will inexorably explain everything

all of which rub me up the wrong way, push my buttons, etc. Having one's buttons pushed is usually an invitation to either indulge one's own prejudices and project one's shortcomings onto someone else, or, to take the road less travelled, ask your own prejudices what they're getting uppity about. The danger of the second approach, of course, is that you might learn something new! I'm feeling reckless - if I am unlucky enough to learn anything new, I can always forget it tomorrow - so here goes.

High and Low Art

I carry around in my baggage a distinction between low and high art, and think - sure, techniques like Spartz uses could be applied to low art/entertainment, but not to the high-minded stuff that I like. This gives me a warm fuzzy feeling of superiority, and an unshakeable belief that I'm safe from The Machine that's going to come lumbering our way.

But what, actually, is the difference? After all, I like a lot of Low Art (a.k.a. art without pretensions at grandeur) too. My two young daughters have got me hooked on Disney's "Frozen", to the point where I'll speak well of it in adult conversation, for example!

The clearest distinction that I can make, which isn't quite the same thing as High vs. Low, is art that comforts versus art that challenges. Terry Gilliam sums it up quite nicely - when telling a story, we can either apply closure, and wrap up all the ends to a story neatly (in terms of plot, emotional trajectories of the characters, the audience, etc.) or we can choose to leave the audience hanging, unsure of what has just transpired (he quotes Kubrick's 2001 as a prime example of the latter). Questions are more interesting than answers, as Pablo Picasso allegedly said, so leaving the audience with a question, requiring them to think, and form their own opinions, is surely a mark of respect.

Re-consulting my baggage at this point, it tells me to shut up and stop worrying - that Spartz's techniques would be able to work on closure-driven feel-good material, but would fall apart on the challenging stuff. Ah baggage, you're leaking information there, always brusque and unpleasant when you're feeling threatened!

Sure, statistical methods can be successfully applied to feel-good stories. That's not new, they already are, a great deal, I expect. George Lucas probably took a big step in this direction with Star Wars, by applying Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey so rigorously, to create a story and characters that the reader would recognise already. His approach has been honed over the years to the point where the skeleton of the formula often protrudes uncomfortably close to the surface, as another action hero overcomes self-doubt to win the heart of the woman he loves and defeat the CGI baddies. These cook-by-numbers tales track the zeitgeist remarkably well - to wit the increasing feistiness of Disney princesses and kick-ass-ness of their YA female counterparts, and the increase in sensitivity and reflectiveness (moodiness if you want to keep it macho) in the male counterparts. I applaud "Frozen" for turning Prince Charming into a Love Rat and replacing the formulaically climactic wedding scene with the recognition that other kinds of love have their power too, but it's an evolution, not a revolution.

We already describe this kind of storytelling as "formulaic", but technically, there's a difference between that and what Spartz is doing. Applying a known formula that's known in advance, requires a belief that this is what the audience will like/will sell tickets/whatever. Spartz' algorithm is blind - he uses hunches to come up with a range of starting headlines (and admits to having some skill here), then lets the users' decide, involuntarily, which variant "wins". As with any pseudo-Darwinian approach, the key is understanding how "fitness" is defined. Spartz is playing a lowest-common-denominator game, with casual browsing content, so the definition's relatively easy: number of eyeballs wins. With a high-profile movie? The studio will be looking at sales, obviously, but is there some scope for audience satisfaction or even aesthetics in there too? Hollywood's tried and tsted process of focus groups already does this to some extent,

I don't see that applying Spartz-style techniques to "improving" songs, novels or movies would be as major a breakthrough as the New Yorker article suggests.

So, what about High Art? The more interesting question, to me, is whether High Art is as immune to statistical improvement as I would like to think it is? (I'm assuming there is broad support for this premise amongst fellow proponents of High Art, the question of what I personally think isn't that important on it's own!) Is most High Art good, simply because it lacks closure or a single fixed meaning? I can think of a number of arthouse films that would have benefitted from tighter dialogue, better storytelling and/or clearer editing, without sacrificing their originality or individuality.

As a self-styled High Artist, I'm not altogether comfortable with these questions. I'd be quite happy with my art being a mystical communion with the universe, inviolable by statistics, thank you very much. I'd better keep reminding myself that discomfort is a good thing!