What’s the default shape of our art forms?

Cinema is wider than it is tall. TV is wider than it is tall. Theater is wider than it is tall. Laptop and desktop monitors are wider than they are tall. In fact, with the advent of widescreen TVs, there’s little difference in the shapes. They’re all around 3×5 or 4×5 range. Wider than tall. All of them.

And print? Well, print is taller than it is wide right? The printed page is the exception to the rule, isn’t it?

Wrong.

The default shape of print is not taller than wide. It’s wider than tall just like all the rest, because the default shape of print is two pages side-by-side. And the reason is the same reason as the shape of TV and cinema and theater and surfing and all the rest: because we have two eyes next to each other, not one on top of the other.

I don’t even have a Kindle yet, so this isn’t meant as a specific critique of the device. And I’m sure its engineers had solid practical reasons to design the device the way they did. You can even turn it sideways when needed.  It just reminded me when I went to Amazon this morning and saw images of the latest, how design principles in the wild can always be adjusted on the fly, but as soon as they’re embedded in hardware, they tend to stick around. For decades in some cases.

So if I could humbly suggest a new cardinal rule of designing anything meant to be read (including webcomics): Step #1, look in a mirror.

[Edit to add: Within ten minutes of posting, everybody has agreed that I’m utterly wrong about this! Oh well. Check the comments thread to see some smart, funny rebuttals.]

Only one day until the whole family flies to Toronto with me for TCAF! You can find me wandering around a lot, but also at:

Saturday, 10:15am-11:15am: Concept Comics: Abstract Comics Ideas. Bill Kartalopoulos will investigate the challenges and opportunities of communicating abstract ideas in the comics form with artists Tom Kaczynski, Scott McCloud, Dash Shaw and Jason Shiga. Learning Centre 1.

Saturday, 2:00pm-3:30pm: Scott McCloud: FAQ. The author of Understanding Comics, Making Comics, and ZOT! will be talking and taking questions from the audience! Have you ever had a question for Scott McCloud? Well here’s your chance to ask Scott! TD Gallery.

Sunday, 1:00pm-2:30pm: Newspapers, Comic Books, and The Internet. Featuring R. Stevens, Scott McCloud, Stuart Immonen, Brendan Buford, and John Martz. Moderated by Steven Murray. Learning Centre 1

[Photo: Edgar Wright’s snapshot of Mr. O’Malley on the set of the Toronto-based Scott Pilgrim film w/Michael Cera, filming right now.]

Catching the plane home from NYC tomorrow, but Heidi MacDonald has a great write-up at The Beat on a lot of the stuff that went on in the last few days, much of which I was able to catch despite only finding out about it at the last minute. So, um… basically, I’m letting The Beat do my work for me today.

Above, a picture of Shaun Tan and me at Books of Wonder on Sunday from the write-up.

I’m still in New York, taking thousands of reference photos for the graphic novel. The two-day seminar (Friday and Saturday) was packed and energized; a great class with a lot of talent and spirit. Now it’s just me and my camera for a couple of days. I promise they’re not all of high horizon line rainy sidewalks like the above, but damn, I do love me some high horizon line rainy sidewalks…

Originally planned as a solitary expedition, this part of my trip still had me crossing paths with some old friends including Tracy White and baby Suniva, Heidi MacDonald and beau Ben, and the Legendary Brian Dewan who was showing his work with a bunch of terrific cartoonists Thursday night as part of the Cartoon Carousel series (which is very cool, though I’m not sure how to explain it, and I’m not sure if they have a website). Also saw a slew of great artists, old and new, at S.V.A.’s great Fresh Meat show Saturday and met briefly with the astounding Shaun Tan at the tail end of his signing at Books of Wonder.

Dropped out of sight a bit, web-wise these last few days, but it was for a good reason. I’ve been thinking non-stop about the graphic novel and the role of this city in the story. It’ll be a long time before I can show you guys anything from the book, but I hope it’ll be worth the wait. I still have a few trips to go (including fun ones like next week’s TCAF), but there’s big part of me now that just wants to draw and draw and draw and draw and draw and draw.

This was pretty much our experience with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as well (during our drive through B.C. on the way down from Alaska in 2007). A fine, polite fellow was our Mountie.

Off to New York for the seminar and reference photos for the GN.

Hm. Must blog something…

Ooh—Kate Beaton collection! There. That was easy.

Nawlz has been around for a while, but in case you haven’t seen it yet, it’s pretty much the quintessential experimental webcomic. Weird, dissonant, and relentlessly inventive.

I sometimes joke that my early experiments in webcomics put me in comics’ “lunatic fringe” but it’s nice to know that there are artists like Sutu out there that make my scribblings look tame by comparison. He tells me he may release a graphic novel follow-up including the first chapters on DVD, so I guess all the walls between print and web are tumbling down if a strange beast like Nawlz can cross the line.

Meanwhile, Mr. Rowland points us to MS Paint Adventures and an entirely different sort of experiment with cartoons and interactivity. Simple on its face, but not so much when it sucks you in.

Experiments in any medium are like a blind man tapping about with a cane, finding the shape of his surroundings. His peers, comfortably sitting still on the couch, can dismiss the dead-ends and stubbed toes that result, but every once in a while a vast new room of possibilities opens up.

I’m sitting still myself while working on the graphic novel, but I’m grateful for the sound of tapping all around me.

Dylan Meconis began her webcomic about vampires in the French Revolution back in high school, but you’d never know it from the smart, funny writing and accomplished artwork.

Now we can finally own it as a book so all is right in print as it is in pixels.

Also out this month (with a considerably bigger spine) is Tatsumi’s monumental A Drifting Life which I’ve been reading with great interest. Early in the book, the young cartoonist meets his hero, Osamu Tezuka, still in med school, but already a Manga sensation. I’d pulled over in my car to a shady spot to read a bit, and it made me think about how I’d been influenced by Tezuka, and had the pleasure of meeting some of my own heroes like Eisner when I was just starting out.

Starting to drive again, I realized that I was about to pass the cemetery where Jack Kirby was buried. I pulled in, parked, and picked up a small stone.

Dylan Meconis was in late elementary school when Jack Kirby died, and barely out of kindergarten when we lost Tezuka, but their genetic traces run through almost anyone making comics in America today, whether they realize it or not. It’s a long, long lineage, and it’ll be longer still with any luck.

Courtesy of the New York Times this week, Maira Kalman’s And the Pursuit of Happiness is an enjoyable meditation on laws and those who preside over them.

And since Kalman’s comic is presented in one big scroll, it gives me a hook to also link to Dash Shaw’s gargantuan scrolling Bodyworld webcomic (completed earlier this year) which I’ve been meaning to blog about for awhile.

In principle, I always liked the idea of putting comics all together on one page; the idea being that readers could just hit a button or touch their scroll wheel and just use that one method to move all the way from beginning to end. I used the format myself a lot in my early webcomics.

It saddens me, though, to note that the big drawback of scrolling in the early days still hasn’t gone away after all these years. Most browsers still update images every few pixels while scrolling so that the entire page flickers and jitters all the way down until it stops. Dude, it’s 2009! Why does scrolling still hurt my eyes?

Ah, well. Still holding out for multi-touch laptops that scroll like iPhones. We’ll see…

Still catching my breath after China, but three more trips loom in the next five weeks. First Manhattan for the two-day seminar. Then Toronto, where the whole family will be joining me for TCAF, a show we’ve wanted to do for a while and which we’re all very much looking forward to. Then I’ll be swinging by Barcelona for the 27th Annual Comics Festival there.

Despite a busy spring, my travel schedule will cool down for the rest of the year as I focus increasingly on my new graphic novel for First Second, The Sculptor. In fact, the Manhattan seminar will be doubling as reference-taking for that story which takes place in New York City.

We announced The Sculptor before the blog relaunched, and I haven’t written much about the project here because it’s still in the very early stages, but hardly a minute goes by at home or abroad when I’m not thinking about it. As exciting as China was, I couldn’t wait to get back to the studio and resume work on this story. I may be away for 12 out of the next 37 days, but I’ll be devoting the remaining 25 days—and the 1,000 days that follow it—to finally using everything I’ve learned in 25 years to tell a story I love, as clearly and effectively as I possibly can.