Capturing vs. Generating Comics

A good friend of mine who works for the company that produces Second Life sends over this link about using the Comic Life software with Second Life screenshots. I've expressed my displeasure with Comic Life before, but I haven't really thought about comic creation of video game clips before.

Something about it rubs me the wrong way... And I think its the same issue that I have with why "photo comics" don't work, and why only some CGI comics feel comfortable.

The problem is that they don't come from some sort of conceptual basis. They are just capturing events in the (virtual-)world and the displaying them in segmented parts. But, contrary to regular comic sequences, they aren't produced to be sequential.

(This may be the same reason that pin-up/cover artists don't always translate to being good "storytellers": they are used to drawing single images, not sequences. Or: they have good visual vocab, not so good visual grammar.)

The capturing vs. generating sequences makes a huge difference, since in one you are actively setting out to express concepts visually, and the other you're just collecting whatever actions might be given to you. In fact, I'm guessing that the CGI comics that read the best (and there are some good ones) are the ones that were first drawn in thumbnails or layouts. The actual "visual language production" occurs at the thumbnail stage. The rest is all just refinement. These "event capturing" comics bypass the stage where visual grammar is deployed.

Of course, the grammar could be deployed "online" in the processs of that CGI comic being created, but I doubt most who do this have much capacity for visual grammar in the first place. They use it thinking that it is an alternative to having graphic fluency, only their non-fluency then shows through in CGI instead of poor drawings.

In many ways this issue is similar to an Internalist vs. Externalist debate in linguistics/philosophy as to where meaning comes from. Traditional philosophy/linguistics (and I think? a commonsense view of meaning?) has held that meaning of sentences is derived from the truth value of how that sentence relates to the "real" world. The Internalist side (including my advisor) says that those meanings only connect to concepts in a person's head, regardless of their truth value to the world.

"Capturing of events" for comics is much like the Externalist viewpoint — sequences of images are depictions of some form of events, and it doesn't matter how they get depicted. The Internalist side would be the opposite: Sequences of images are derived from the conceptual expression of a human mind, and reflect the fluency of that mind.

Comics software sucks

I apologize in advance for this rant...

One of the pre-installed applications on my new macbook is the "comic" making program "Comic Life." I'd played with the demo before, but figured I'd jump back in with this one to see what was changed. What didn't change was my opinion of it: not good. (It's basically a goofy photo album making program)

This has been my opinion of many of the other programs as well, ranging from Comic Book Creator to Strip Creator to Comic Creator to The Balloonist, as well as (less so) Manga Studio and Comic Works.

While some of these are very well designed programs, such as Comic Life, all of them are fundamentally deficient in the way that they are built. That is, I have the feeling that they were designed by people who have little understanding about the theory behind comics. It's one thing to have advice or commentary from people who make comics, its another to actually understand the structure of the medium and how to best utilize software to manipulate it. Especially if you want it to be used as a professional grade system, it is embarrassing not to take this into account.

(While I wouldn't be surprised if some companies consulted comic artists, I'd be very curious, for example, if Scott McCloud has been consulted on any software like this, as he is the most well known theorist out there).

For instance, a few things I noticed after using Comic Life for about half a minute...

Isn't it a bit curious that in the selection of templates for pages there aren't even standard grids, yet they do include layouts that I've experimentally seen to be problematic for readers? Why is it that when you drag in a panel, it simply appears on top of the others, and not bound within some sort of layout schema? Why do you have various templates for balloons and bubbles, instead of a generalized Carrier field that takes different representations, tails, etc. (and my god how annoying the sound effects are...)

... just to name a few. I could probably go on for pages.

Most of these programs fall into similar patterns, structuring the software as a design program... which is fine if you want to do a modified drawing program, but not if you want to be a visual writer. Even the seemingly well thought-out and evolving Comic Studio is doing things far different than I would think most useful or efficient.

As I might have mentioned before, I've had designs for a "comics" software program for about 5 years now, but have no coding skills (and little time) to work on it. So, if there's any talented and enterprising programmers out there (or companies that don't want your current product to suck so much) that would like to give it a go, feel free to drop me an email.

Comic Book Innovation

I've been meaning to post a link to this site for awhile, but am now finally getting around to it...

Comic Book Innovation is an interesting yet sparsely updated theory-based blog with a couple different comic projects on it. I originally found his site because of his adaption of McCloud's Big Triangle. He seems to also be working on some other projects as well.

While his work isn't necessarily theoretical in a way that explores the medium, it certainly takes a theoretical tact that I haven't seen much in other places. For instance, his Comics Mindmap attempts to break down the constituent parts of a comic, from the parts of a page or panel, up through genre and format. His visualizations of story structure also seem to have some interesting theory based intuitions in them.

One of his projects seems to strive towards creating a "Comic Studio" software program to help comic creators develop works. I'm particularly curious to see what he comes up with, since I've had designs for a visual language software program for over four years now (Alas, I can't code :( ... any enterprising and talented coders out there are welcome to contact me though!).

On the whole, the site seems worth following just to see what curiosities are next to emerge.

Comics Generation Thesis

Jason Alderman has completed his (downloadable) Masters Thesis on "Generating Comics Narrative to Summarize Wearable Computer Data." Here's the abstract:

As people record their entire lives to disk, they need ways of summarizing and making sense of all of this data. Comics (and visual language) are a largely untapped medium for summarization, as they are already subtractive and abstract by nature (the brain fills in the blanks and the details), and they provide a way to present a series of everyday events as a memorable narrative that is easily skimmed. This research builds upon the work of Microsoft, FX Palo Alto Labs, ATR Labs, and others to further ground the procedural generation in the comics theory of Scott McCloud, et al.

The paper poses some very intriuging ideas, and he does a great job summarizing and comparing a lot of the work that's been done in comic theory, including my own. Alderman's paper also has a good discussion of various comics computer programs and a very interesting discussion of adapting comic theory issues into programming code. The appendices also have a wealth of summarized theory and analysis as well. Particularly interesting was the taxonomy of panel types and gutter spacing. Go check it out!

He has some good criticism concerning my old model of visual language grammar though those should be asuaged by my newer work (which can be found at my ComicCon talk next month...hint hint).

And since its been mistaken before, I should point out that I don't consider my notion of "visual language" to be comparable to or a subset of the "visual language" proposed by Robert Horn (though his work informed my early stuff, and I subsequently developed a personal relationship with him when I was in college. He's a very nice man and enthusiastic about all things related to visual communication). Horn is more talking about a broader type of visual communication, largely diagrammatic, but mainly from the union of text and image. To me, the visual language is only the visuals (and only in specific conditions), which then unites with the verbal to create a multimodal whole (see my paper, Interactions and Interfaces for more).