In an open frontier beyond comics and 'toons, animators are drafting a low-bandwidth declaration of independence.
"All my life my job has been to be a storyteller," says Marvel Comics founder Stan Lee, creator ofSpider-Man and most recently The Backstreet Project, a Web series launching this summer. "I've done movies and television, but primarily I've worked in comics - you've got pictures and word balloons. Suddenly I can use sound and music and can have action. How could I possibly not jump to the bait?"
Lee is one of thousands staking claim to an endless universe of pixels and helping to shape a new genre. At one end of the spectrum are works best described as serialized Web animations - they incorporate sound and motion and take their structure from TV cartoons. At the other end are Web comics - creations heavily influenced by newspaper funnies and graphic novels. Don Asmussen, a cartoonist for Time and George, describes his online series Like, News as "a comic strip that is moving." Both types of animation are part of a growing category of character-based, often humorous serials made expressly for the Web.
The catalyst: big bucks and new technology, or, more specifically, Flash - Macromedia's cheap and easy-to-learn authoring tool. About 230 million people use Flash's companion plug-in for viewing (and 1 million more download it each day). For the first time, an animation format is up to the challenge of delivering video-quality content fast over a 28.8 pipeline, and a mass consumer market is ready to watch.
Where eyeballs go, investment dollars invariably follow. Mondo Media (www.mondomedia.com), a San Francisco producer of digital games and content for more than a decade, raised $20 million in February to develop its Web shows. More telling than the flow of capital, perhaps, is the emergence of business models, from TV-style syndication (à la Mondo) to sponsorship (the choice of Fishbar creator Honkworm, www.honkworm.com). Wall Street, too, has anointed the market: Lee's Netco (www.stanleemedia.com) went public last August, topping Marvel's market cap within six months.
But the boom isn't all about money. It's a chance for artists to reinvent their art. Veterans ofThe Simpsons, Seinfeld, andThe X-Files are developing Net content for the new Icebox.com. This month, director Tim Burton is set to launch Stain Boy, a series of five-minute tales based on his graphic novelOyster Boy. The series will screen at www.shockwave.com, one of a dozen animation venues.
For some artists, the attraction is the chance to control their own destinies, says Brad deGraf of the San Francisco studio Dotcomix (née Protozoa), which created the first online animated series, Floops, in 1996. "Even the best, like Matt Groening, give up creative and financial control of properties that go through traditional distribution," he points out. Burton, for one, retains full artistic control over the properties he licenses online. And he doesn't have to convince a Hollywood studio to sink $1 million into a pilot. "It's more personal because you don't have to go through a hundred meetings," the director says. "Some ideas are ideas you just want to do."
For artists without a big name, the Web advantage is even greater. "It took one year to get Comedy Central to read my pilot script," says Chris Lindland. In that time, he launched Web comic Beebeard with two partners and a shoestring budget. AtomFilms picked up the series this spring. Lindland is still in the talking stage with Comedy Central.
Not all artists are making the multimedia leap, however - some argue that Web comics aren't comics at all. "If the characters are moving and speaking, pretty soon the word balloons and panels are a nuisance," says Scott McCloud, an artist and author ofUnderstanding Comics. (See "Infinite Canvas," page 264.) "It's a slippery slope to full-motion animation."
It is a slippery slope - one that thousands are thrilled to ride. "We're not trying to do comic books on the Net," says Lee. "We're trying to do the most perfect form of entertainment the Internet can support." Today's perfect form won't last. Fatter pipes will open new possibilities. So consider this eclectic collection to be one episode in the ongoing story.
ED BEALS
Wenchell Bogum: Know When to Fold 'Em
6 minutes
www.edbeals.com
CorelDraw, Flash, Illustrator, pencil and paper
This Nickelodeonesque space-adventure series follows the mishaps of janitor Wenchell Bogum. A grainy black-and-white intro - complete with the dusty, scratched look and melodramatic voice-over of old newsreels - lends the series a classic TV-'toon feel. A designer and cartoon illustrator living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Beals has a knack for using sound to fill out story lines. And his deft Flash-imatics can be seen in the series' smooth motion and minimal scene changes.
JEN DUGAN AND KENJJI MARSHALL
Eden Saga
Work-in-progress
www.eden.sigma6.com
Flash, pencil and paper, Photoshop
Eden deftly illustrates the art of putting action into a static image. Adapted from a graphic novel, the series has taken on a digital life of its own. The metaphorical tale about a "corporate, technologically fixated future" stands at the cusp of two mediums. Eden mixes still frames and old-school text boxes with sliding panels, partial animation, and a soundtrack.
CHRIS LINDLAND, NICK NICHOLAS, AND JUSTIN WILLOW
Beebeard and the World Record Heroes: Ranger on a Train
5 minutes
www.beebeard.com/index2.html
Director, Flash, paper and pencil
A chronicle of unlikely crime fighters - like the lightning-struck park ranger of this episode - Beebeard plays off the superhero themes of both comics and cartoons. But the cinematic style of camera pans and dissolves reflects the series' TV roots.
DAVID FREMONT
glue: Steamcleaning
2 minutes
www.wildbrain.com/drivein/glue orwww.dfremont.com
Flash, pencil and paper, Photoshop
Fremont, a 10-year veteran illustrator of print and television, brings elements of both media to his Web comics. He describes glue, his latest episodic series, as "a random, stream-of-consciousness cartoon saga." A campy theme song and rolling credits set a Saturday-morning cartoon mood (and entertain viewers while the rest of the file loads), but the show itself - with simple 2-D sketches, choppy animation, and frequent jumps between "panels" - draws heavily on the techniques of print. "It's truly an experiment," says Fremont, who hands off his drawings to a Flash animator and records the voices himself.
PATRICK FARLEY
Anticlimax
Work-in-progress
www.e-sheep.com
HTML, Java, pen and paper, Photoshop
Project to project, Farley moves from realistic illustration to 3-D rendering to clip-art collage, but the artist never strays from print-comic techniques like dialog balloons and still panels. His clickthrough interface mimics the natural pacing of offline page turning, and Farley doesn't use sound: "Part of the magic of comics," he says, "is letting the readers fill in the details - creating the voices in their imaginations."
DON ASMUSSEN AND LIPPY
Like, News: Al Gore Episode
2-3 minutes
www.mondomedia.com
Flash, Photoshop, various sound-mixing software
A longtime newspaper and magazine cartoonist, Asmussen creates moving comics in the spirit of political strips, but with the sound and motion (not to mention the high-end production values) of TV. With a two-week production cycle, the Like, News team is able to editorialize current events - the election of a non-Y2K-compliant Al Gore, for instance - in a way the longer lead times of television and film animation would never allow.
NAOKI MITSUSE
The Sex Slave Decalogue; Joe's Story
3-5 minutes
www.goultralightsgo.com
Flash
Naoki Mitsuse, creator of the Sex Slave series, launches his new tale this spring with a spidery nightmare sequence. The Japanese illustrator works entirely in Flash, in a process he describes as "making a flip book." While he plays with Hollywood clichés - sex, love, walking off into the sunset - Mitsuse is developing an edgy style all his own.
TIM BURTON
Stain Boy
2-5 minutes
www.timburton.com orwww.shockwave.com
Charcoal, Flash, paint, pen and paper
Driven by the Hollywood director's imagination rather than a studio's bottom line, the Stain Boy series follows a character Burton first introduced in 1997 in his rather twisted collection of short graphic tales, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories. Using paints and charcoal and reaching for Flash only in the later stage of animation, Burton evokes a moody atmosphere that proves the storytelling potential of this crossover medium.
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