2014 may seem kind of soon for a lot of what they’re showing, but it’s encouraging to see how close our imaginations are drawing toward the kind of pie-in-the-sky displays I was filling peoples’ heads with during Q & As in the late ’90s.
(Also, yeah, there’s a bit of gratis “product placement” in the first scene, though I swear that’s not why I’m linking to it!)
A lot of the progress we’re seeing in multi-touch display technology (the real thing, not just smoke-and-mirrors promo videos) falls into the broad category of introducing physics into visual iconography; something I’ve wanted to see comics embrace for over a decade.
If we treat comics as a still life of multiple static (or looping) images, then the way we navigate through that landscape matters. Hunting for tiny scrollbar arrows or next page links to click was always a temporary waystation.
When navigating through information is a process of grabbing, flinging, flipping, or stopping continuous images, we can finally delegate the common sense parts of our brain that’ve always known how to navigate the physical world to getting from panel to panel, and devote our attention to the world inside the panels and inside the stories we care about.
This is the full 2-Day Workshop (given most recently at School of Visual Arts in Manhattan). 16 full hours of everything I can teach you through lectures and hands-on exercises.
An intense look at the art of telling stories visually.
Here’s the latest mutation of the 24 Hour meme, this time from Down Under, James and Hania Lee’s 24 Flash animations completed just this weekend. Lots of funny and creative short shorts at the link.
The listing on YouTube is pretty comprehensive, so I’ll be lazy and reproduce it here:
All of these film shorts were created within a 24 hour period. Flash animation by James Lee. Music composition by Hania Lee.
Members of Newgrounds, deviantart and the web helped bring this film together, by providing ideas while I was broadcasting the whole thing live.
I animated everything in Flash, using some textures which were edited in Photoshop. The idea was inspired by Scott McCloud’s 24 hour comic.
I seem to remember that the first 24 hour animation contest (about a decade ago?) involved a single 24-second short. It’s telling that in a post-Flash world, a single animator (and musical partner) would even consider making 24 of the things in a single day, however brief some of them were. Very cool.
Way, way back in the deep recesses of the horrifying guilt-mountain that is my Inbox, I found an old email from one Michelangelo Cicerone forwarding the news of a very cool Historic Tale Construction Kit, which is essentially a Create Your Own Bayeux Tapestry tool. Give it a try if you’re so inclined.
On the night table: Top Shelf’s excellent alternative manga collection AX; Mario and Gilbert Hernandez’s good-old-fashioned twisted comic book adventure Citizen Rex; and Moto Hagio’s lyrical Drunken Dream from Fantagraphics.
To satisfy your weekly Greek webcomic quota, check out the handsomely-drawn Mused by Kostas Kiriakakis.
And finally, here’s an insidious video that’ll burrow its way into your skull forever, courtesy of Warren Ellis. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Here’s a good stemwinder by Cory Doctorow from earlier this year (via Dirk) on the many complex ways copyright control legislation and information access are at war.
A lot of people in comics—writers, artists, publishers—are pinning their hopes on legal protections and new walled gardens like App Stores to restore some sense of stability and control to what looks increasingly like the same leaky boat scenario that’s affecting other creative fields.
It’s important, though, to consider the many ways that the “remedy” being proposed and implemented is far worse than the “disease” of widespread sharing.
I’ve always hoped that a culture of willing buyers and willing sellers, however small, can continue to emerge alongside file-sharing. But the key word was always willing; a concept increasingly at odds with the world Cory is rightly warning us about.
Mostly, though, I’m posting this because several people a day keep telling me about the site, so I figure I better link to it now or I’ll never hear the end of it!
Kudos to the guy at Microsoft who I’m pretty sure was the first to tell me about this latest collaborative mutation when I was up in Redmond last month.
Having carefully surveyed the competition, I can confidently say that this is the best comic about collateralized debt obligations you’ll read all week.
A bit under the weather, so real blogging will resume tomorrow.
In the meantime, here’s a thought experiment that crossed my mind this morning: If Walt Disney had been a much better animator, would he have gone on to be a cog in someone else’s machine?
I’m off to New York again this week for a talk at NYU.
Not open to the public, sorry. Just for freshmen within the Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies programs. (Basically, if you can come, you probably already knew about it and have all the details)
But hey, in the meantime, here are two gorgeous music videos with similar vibes: 1 | 2. (via Lori Matsumoto and Mark Siegel).
A couple of new angles on navigation this week. On the Web side, a nicely-rendered side-scroller by Cody Coltharp, and on the mobile side, a tilting viewer by Karrie Fransman & Jonathan Plackett.
[Via comments: The javascript for the side-scroller viewer was written by Jean-Nicolas Jolivet, originally as a panoramic photo viewer.]
From Mexico, a well-told silent comic by Edgar Delgado, using some extended page sizes and storytelling tricks practically designed to make me happy (and maybe you too).
Finally, a moving good bye from Satoshi Kon, a creative giant of Japanese animation whose work I was still in the process of exploring when I heard the news of his death from cancer. I look forward to finishing my journey through his stories. I regret there won’t be any more.
San Francisco, CA
March 23, 2021 San Francisco State University
Round Table Discussion, "Adapting Comics for Blind and Low Vision Readers," moderated by Nick Sousanis
March 3, 2021
