Every revolution needs a spark, and many consider Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics the Das Kapital of the burgeoning digital comics movement.
Comic book artists, according to McCloud, are being suffocated, forced into an increasingly narrow definition of what a comic should be. And audiences, no longer able to find a diverse selection of comics, are looking elsewhere for their thrills. Reinventing Comics envisions the Internet and new digital design tools as tools to help create a "durable mutation" of comics – comics that will stretch beyond the superhero genre that dominates today's shrinking market. If comics can become more literary, more diverse and more inclusive, McCloud believes they can win back audiences.
In this scenario, the Internet can serve as a container – artists of all kinds will be able to circumvent the profit-driven systems that dictate which CDs, books and comics reach stores. "For music, art, movies, comics and the written word, our whole planet is about to become one giant jukebox," McCloud writes in Reinventing Comics.
If McCloud's predictions pan out, digital design tools will allow artists to think beyond the limitations of the printed page. If the comic book artists can break out of those little rectangles, McCloud writes, comics can be created in entirely new ways. "To choose computers as one's primary art-making tool is to choose an almost superhuman palette of options," McCloud said, "and to devote it to merely imitating (printed comics) is a bit like hunting rabbits with a battleship."
Comics artists working online cite the 240-page Reinventing Comics, done in comic-book form, as a major influence, and McCloud has elaborated on the book at his own site, which includes commentary and his new chapters.
McCloud's pages are a good starting place for those hoping to better understand the potential for comics online, but he also recommends a few other sites.
When I Am King, by Swiss artist Demian5, posts weekly installments of the amusing, sometimes otherworldly story of an Egyptian royal who ventures out into a bizarre world.
"The way the cartoon scrolls horizontally gives you a sense of a continuous panorama, a continuous landscape," McCloud said. "So as his characters travel, you are traveling, too, across a wide-open storytelling canvas. It's very intoxicating, immersive and funny."
The wordless presentation of When I Am King, as McCloud points out, makes it universally accessible.
Patrick Farley's E-Sheep offers a startling range of stories and styles, from Japanese manga to 3-D modeling to psychedelia, along with a version of The Book of Revelations done a la Pokemon. According to McCloud, Farley's versatility, along with the controversial content of his works, would make him a difficult sell in print.
"From a market standpoint, it would be suicide for an artist to do work that continuously changes its look," he said. "But online, Farley has been able to present it as part of a single collection. And his themes – paganism, the apocalypse, politics – have no existing market niche. There would be nothing to shelve him with."
McCloud also recommends the colorful, surrealistic works of Cayetano (Cat) Garza, Jr., seen at the Magic Inkwell Comic Strip Theatre. The site includes 150 short cartoons, each one with a different look and feel.
"If you look at a chart of the online color gamut versus the print gamut, you'll see twice as many colors represented," McCloud said. "A savvy artist like Cat can take tremendous advantage of that. He's what we call a native designer – his design sensibilities come from the digital realm, rather than having been adapting to digital from print. So he speaks this language; his style is informed by the way the digital devices talk to us."
And then there is Comicon.com, with its 200 or so booths featuring aspiring and established cartoonists and animators.
"Everyone is spread out before you – it's an enormous smorgasbord," McCloud said. "There is plenty of crap and plenty of gems, but initially figuring out which is which is not always easy."
