Commentary

Requiem For A Promising Medium - Comics In Motion

Media history is strewn with good ideas that never had the right soil and conditions in which to germinate properly. Film, radio, TV and certainly the Internet birthed a lot of innovation in their earliest stages that never had the opportunity to take root because the audience or money was not ready for it.

I am a little bewildered that motion comics didn't get a fair chance as we migrated to mobile. Warner/DC was an early developer of the admittedly strange hybrid format that literally animated comic book art and added soundtrack and voice acting. The Watchman and Batman Black and White series were among the strongest series that the group produced a number of years ago. In more recent times, The Walking Dead comics got a very good motion comics treatment that is still available at AMCTV.com.

To me, this is a format made for mobile. In much the same way that the brilliant and successful Comixology “Guided View” of digital comics works, the best motion comics isolate key qualities of superb artwork and let us dwell within them. The Watchman series, for instance, is notable for artist David Gibbon’s precise line work and oversaturated cartoony colors telling a dark tale. On an LCD, with frames filling the screen, the impact is mesmerizing. The Batman Black and White series used some of the industry’s best artists such as Darwyn Cooke and Alex Ross. Even as the motion comic format cuts and pastes, animates and rearranges their original artwork, I think it preserves and highlights their best qualities.

Those who dislike motion comics see it plausibly as a bastardization of two other forms -- comics and animation. It violates the pristine intent and form of the former while making what feels like a cheap and easy version of the latter. Both claims are probably true, but may be irrelevant…unless the aim is to defend the sanctity of other forms. I am not a religious sort when it comes to art. I appreciate when a format works and has the potential to communicate in different ways. See for yourself. Follow this link to play the Walking Dead motion comic in your phone browser. The framing, line art and compressed timing seem made for mobile on many levels.   

My point is that there is an aesthetic at work in this Dead format that really works on a smartphone and tablet in ways they don’t on a desktop. Their brevity and intensity seem made for the medium. Their reliance on tight framing and immersion in detail seem perfect for the kind of rendering and attention that a handheld device requires. In many ways the medium feels more at home on smaller screens than does live action video. If marketers and media companies are looking for a striking way to leverage mobile video that truly pops off the handheld screen, they could do worse than consult what some of these progenitors of motion comics tried years ago. 

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