In light of the announcement of Marvel’s Project Gamma initiative, Dylan Todd gets philosophical:
If you add motion and sound to a comic, at what point does it stop being a comic and start being an animated piece? Does it matter? I mean, obviously, a comic doesn’t need to be printed to be a comic, so what is a comic?
I’ll admit: I don’t get the adding of music to a comic. It stops being a “pure” comic for me when you do that, by adding another sense (going from a visual-only experience to a visual-and-auditory one) and introducing a sense of time that I don’t control to the process; it turns the whole thing into particularly static animation, for me.
Yes, I know that this isn’t a “soundtrack,” but is instead “adaptive loops” that will keep playing no matter how long you linger on one panel – Spoiler: That’s still a soundtrack – but really: No matter how adaptive those loops, they’re going to be a reminder that you’ve stayed on one panel for a particular amount of time in a way that having no music wouldn’t. And also, if Project Gamma works on a panel-by-panel basis, isn’t that removing a reading choice by restricting you to ComiXology’s Guided Panel view?
Project Gamma feels like another attempt to build comics out of the active-reading experience that it is into something else, and I’m always a little suspicious of the origins of that kind of thing; it feels like nervousness and something born of insecurity about the medium as is, to be honest. We’d make fun of the concept of “novels with interactive soundtracks,” wouldn’t we? So why not this?
March 12th, 2013 at 10:14 am
A few months ago, I listed to a Star Wars audiobook (I don’t normally do audiobooks, but I made use of it for several long car trips). Besides having a narrator dictate the story, the book was “enhanced”–for lack of a better word–with music and sound effects. The familiar Star Wars theme was provided at the beginning and end, and battle scenes had a subdued soundtrack, blaster fire, and explosions. It didn’t hurt the experience, but I could see an audiobook getting carried away with that.
Now, contrast that with Marvel’s forays into CD-ROM comics in the mid 90s. It was essentially a PDF comic, but certain panels had clickable buttons where you’d get a short film clip related to that scene. For example, if Wolverine was charging, they had a clip from the X-Men cartoon of…Wolverine charging. That, I found to be distracting, as it interlaced two forms of media in a manner that didn’t work; it jarringly jumped from static imagery to movement, then back.
So…depends on how it’s done, I guess. I wouldn’t mind appropriate music interlaced with a comic, but I hope they run it through test audiences first.
March 12th, 2013 at 12:22 pm
“I’ll admit: I don’t get the adding of music to a comic.”
It’s a good thing nobody is forcing you to do it then!
“I’m always a little suspicious of the origins of that kind of thing; it feels like nervousness and something born of insecurity about the medium as is”
Or, you know, some people just wanted to try to do new things…
“We’d make fun of the concept of “novels with interactive soundtracks,” wouldn’t we?”
I think most people would decide whether or not such a thing was their cup of tea, and if not, never pay any mind to it ever again. Other people write hand-wringing blog posts about it. To each his own.
March 12th, 2013 at 3:24 pm
There is a webcomic called Homestuck. My wife is part of a cult that follows it with utter love, devotion and misery. (It’s one of THOSE comics, all heartbreak and so on.) And it uses a lot of original music as well as Flash animation, even though a lot of the art is pretty primitive. I see this as a new thing, not quite a webcomic in the way that most webcomics are, and yet still built around art and story.
Thing is, it’s built from the ground up. The music is not added later. And fans help out with the music. So there is a way to do this and not just have bells and whistles.
But I just don’t see the Gamma Project being anything but bells and whistles and a way to charge more. (Did I mention Homestuck is free?)
March 13th, 2013 at 12:25 am
I don’t like the sounds of it.
If I want sound, I can add my own.
March 14th, 2013 at 12:45 am
So…depends on how it’s done, I guess. I wouldn’t mind appropriate music interlaced with a comic, but I hope they run it through test audiences first.