Here are some more refs I’ve come across:

Comics Research Bibliography

Comixpedia

But, for digital comics specifically, it seems John Barber has alot of really interesting works, articles and a Masters thesis on the topic.

And yes, I did mean to ask about any writings IN ADDITION to those provided here. :)

A great speech by Will Eisner is available as a webstream: Will Eisner (2003) ‘Eisner on the Graphic Novel‘, Library of Congress [56mins]

Webcomics Examiner

The Cultural Gutter’s Archive of Comics

My collection of links to interactive comics and comics remediated

I’m also making a list of software resources for creating or extending interactive comics — anyone is free to contribute.

Christy

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Oh yeah, forgot to add an article I was commissioned to write a couple of years ago: Dena, C. (2003) ‘Who’s Driving this Engine?‘ ABC Arts Online.
It was written for high-school students, so I don’t go into much depth. But I think you’ll find some interesting works and articles on it. :)

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My last question: I’m having trouble sourcing articles, papers and reviews that deal with interactive comics specifically. There is plenty about sequential art — which is of course still supremely relevant — but little writings on the differences because of interaction, and the screen etc. Do you, or any of the readers of this thread, know of any they could suggest?

I really like the way that the artist can characterise both external and internal emotion in a character. You can literally see inside someone’s head at the private emotions going on. I think that perhaps one of the best examples is Craig Thompson ( http://dootdootgarden.com/ ) in his graphic novel ‘Blankets’ He illustrates beautifully the whole range of human emotion from hate and fear to the deepest love. Fantastic!

Perhaps another great thing is the use of caricature. The artist’s use of exaggerated facial features lends itself very well to recognising people. Admittedly this seems only to be used in parody or slapstick, but I think that it is a valid positive point in comic’s favour.

I think that the point that I’m trying to make is that I don’t think that even the most complex system for generating content for comics will ever be capable of relaying the amount of information needed to empathise with the character and story that an artist can.

True, the most interesting levels of interactive narrative are in the smaller details, take the final fantasy games for example. They play like movies with you as the main character, but there are different ways of completing the game each time you play it. This leads to some quite interactive storytelling from a user point of view, as you are the active character, and you have control over their actions, and how you react to the concequences of your actions.

however I’m not sure that similar rules apply to interactive comics. I think for the most part, a lot of people are trying to apply existing media to the comic form. I find this difficult as comics are a unique method of communication. I think that to make great interactive comics, we need to define what it is about comics as a communication language that we all like so much.

For me, it is the following;
1 – the sense of time passing through sequentially juxtaposed corresponding text and imagery. (this is a really easy one to understand)

2 – The use of complementary text and image to illustrate and explain action, reaction and emotion. (would ‘Maus’ have worked as well as prose?)

I will have a think and add to the list anything else that I think of. Please add your ideas also.

Thanks – Dan

The interactive prose issue is a very interesting question. As a kid, I loved the adventure books, the ones that used to say
“there’s a giant spider, turn to page 33 to stab it, turn to page 58 to buy it a beer…”,
however now that I return to them as an adult, the narrative seems very thinly spread.

I’d say one of the major problem with gamebooks is they pick “big” plots — here’s an alien invasion, fight it off from the beginning to the end. The most effective sections in the books I remember involve micro-level detail, where 40 sections or so are spent on a single location.

Incidentally, the best joint for information on gamebooks is here. Demian’s reviews are interesting because he doesn’t “cheat” and takes all rules given in the books literally.

I guess a way around this would be to have multiple authors working on different narrative threads, so that any particular thread isn’t neglected.

I think that whatever happens, a truly interactive comic should always be different each time it is revisited. This is something that paper based comics cannot do, but that we can do in a digital form.

But I’m not ready to write off interactivity in comics narrative; I think it may be possible to integrate interactivity with comics in ways we haven’t yet discovered. What do you think of how interactivity has been integrated with prose so far, in text-based interactive fiction? IF is certainly quite different than traditional fiction, it’s kind of a new form all its own, but it shares some of the pleasures of traditional fiction. I’d imagine interactive comics would have a comparable level of similarities and differences to traditional comics.

Your experiment in dynamic layout is interesting, although not really interactive yet — from what I can tell, there’s nothing yet for a player / reader to do except click for it to regenerate a layout. But I think dynamic layout is one of several interesting directions to experiment with, and I’d love to see where you might go with this, integrating some real interactivity with layout, somehow.

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Switching gears — on the topic of comics getting more serious, might it threaten their future survival?

So it brings me to where the interaction should lie; in the layout. In the triangle of text, image and space, I’ve already ruled out text (narrative) and image (artwork). This leaves only the space and the relationships between text and image that we can interact with.
I have been working on a system that does just this. I’ve developed a flash piece that randomises the scaling, placement and cropping of each image and it’s relating text each time it is reloaded. This way, it is not the comic that changes, but the way that the reader experiences it will change. The interaction in interactive comics should be inside the reader’s head. Each time it is re-read, a different view of the narrative should become more or less apparent, enriching the story for the reader.
You can view what I have done at http://www.thingsbydan.com/sequence/
I have used Rodolphe Topffer’s Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck as he had no preconceived notions of what a comic should be, or of film theory or layout theory.

Please let me know what you think, as I don’t think that interactive comics will ever get any better without discussion. Thankyou – Dan

A couple of years ago I had the good fortune to hear Eisner speak about comics, on a panel at the Chicago Humanities Festival, alongside Chris Ware and others. I remember him as a very unassuming pontificator, who spoke like a regular joe off the street. Er, maybe he was just old.

Narrative slideshows and comics do have some things in common. Both use panels (i.e., the full screen is a panel) that typically capture a frozen moment in time, and both necessarily leave events out between the panels. But unless panels are spatially juxtaposed with one another, you lose that time-transformed-into-space capability of comics, as well as other important effects. (Understanding Comics goes into much detail about all that, that I won’t repeat here. Note one can do time-as-space effects within a single panel, but this is uncommon.)

You could say I’m nitpicking here, but I don’t think so; a slideshow is closer to cinema than to comics, and has more cinematic effects on the viewer than sequential art effects.

One could argue that some simpler comics don’t really take much advantage of panel juxtaposition, that the overall effect might be just the same if the panels were presented one at time, one per screen/page, in a slideshow format. Perhaps this is especially true for most machinima-ish comics, discussed in the original post of this thread; after all, the panels themselves came from screen captures of a form similar in visual presentation to cinema — videogames. In such work, screen captures are often presented uncropped, in their original aspect ratio.

But that argument isn’t true, I think. Even in simple comics, such as a 4-panel strip of same-size panels laid out horizontally, the viewer gets a different overall experience than a slideshow. The fact that you can see all the panels at once allows for a different kind of reading.

(Note that La Jetee, mentioned previously on GTxA, is more than a slideshow; the timing of how long each image stays onscreen is carefully controlled; it’s cinema.)

(Actually, looking at the preview for McCloud’s The Right Number Part One, it’s presented in an almost slideshow format. But not quite. Hmm, maybe I should spend the 25 cents to look at the whole thing.)

I’m sure there’s a book or thesis out there, “Comics, Slideshows, Cinema: They Will Fight Eternally” or something.

What does Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media have to say about comics vs. slideshows vs. cinema? In the chapter list I notice a section called “Cinegratography”. Should it be Creepy-Cinegratographs?

Nick, I wasn’t perfectly clear in my point about too little vs. too much representation. I was trying to say that if one offers too little representation, you may lose some people. To put it more plainly: my interpretation of the decline in marketability of text-based interactive entertainment is that it seems many people want more than text alone, they want visuals too. Once videogames gained in visual sophistication, perhaps people were less willing to shell out money for products without visuals, even though the text-based products were in many ways more content-ful experiences, as you describe in your book.

I like your point that videogames in fact go far in the other direction, towards over-representation, perhaps too far. It would be interesting for one or more of us to write about text vs. visuals (which I’m sure has been written about extensively elsewhere, e.g. comparing literature to cinema and TV), what you gain and lose with each, and if it’s any different with interactivity thrown into the mix. And with an eye towards how comics fits in to this.

The main reason I didn’t discuss the decline in marketability of IF in greater detail is that I don’t think a lack of marketability (of IF, or of comics, or of non-musical theater, or of poetry, etc.) is a very good measure of cultural importance

No, but I would have liked some analysis of why IF went from a relatively healthy industry to the non-revenue-generating independent art it is today. That shift is a major point in the history of IF, I think. Why it happened is an interesting question, that probably has an interesting answer, especially since so much of what people want in interactive entertainment already exists, to varying degrees, in text-based IF.

This ["use your own imagination" combined with visuals] effect gets harder to achieve as characters and environments become animated or filmed; the more detail realized in the work itself, the less the audience has the freedom to fill in the details themselves. But go too much in this direction, and you may lose some people — a reasonable guess for why text-based interactive fiction, although to date better at addressing human-condition themes, became unmarketable as visual digital games gained in sophistication …

I didn’t follow what it was that might have made text-based IF unmarketable from this standpoint? It seems to me that graphical games would be the ones going too far in the representational direction, and although text-based IF certainly had trouble coming up with interesting screenshots and such, and I can see that it doesn’t do the “combination with visuals” thing particularly well. The main reason I didn’t discuss the decline in marketability of IF in greater detail is that I don’t think a lack of marketability (of IF, or of comics, or of non-musical theater, or of poetry, etc.) is a very good measure of cultural importance. But there certainly is much more to discuss regarding the juxtaposition image and text in IF, and how exactly that works — that topic is one I did pretty much overlook, to focus on IF essentials.

Michael wrote:

Though some have argued that what you’re doing in IF is creating a story in the form of a trace (I think Nick holds this position to some degree), I find the trace itself to generally be incoherent and repetitious. I don’t go back and read IF traces …

Yes, Michael, I do hold that position, but I also agree with you pretty much exactly. This is what I wrote in Twisty Little Passages (p. 14) about this issue:

The narratives generated during an interaction [with IF] are often more trivial and repetitive than even the bluntest folktale, but can be essential to the experience of the interactor. Only through consideration of narrative aspects such as plot, episode, character, setting, atmosphere, and focalization—as they can be extended or applied to interactive fiction—can the interactive generation of narratives in this form be understood and improved upon. … It is the effect of the narrative in the process of being generated that is important, after all, not the quality of the text that is output when the session is over, and not the effect of any post hoc reading of that output text.

But what comics has to tell us about interactive story is more problematic. As Andrew points out, the “dead” frames that record what has already happened have two major problems: they make the experience feel like it’s about “creating a comic” when it’s really about living a comic, and it will be difficult for the comic created by the dead frames to have any kind of pleasing coherence. It seems like a similar problem to the trace in text-based interactive fiction. The real meat of what’s happening in IF is happening right around the cursor, where you’re making decisions and seeing consequences. Though some have argued that what you’re doing in IF is creating a story in the form of a trace (I think Nick holds this position to some degree), I find the trace itself to generally be incoherent and repetitious. I don’t go back and read IF traces, savoring their literary quality, I only occasionally use the trace to remind myself of what’s already happened. So how about abandoning the trace? In the case of an interactive comic narrative, don’t worry about trying to generate a nice comic trace of what’s happened. Instead, just use short sequences of panels to depict the world’s response to player interaction. And have the player specify action by constructing a short sequence (two or three frames) that depicts what they do next. Perhaps by clicking around on the current set of 1 – 4 frames that depict the most recent actions/response in the world, the system provides action templates relevant to this current state. And once you perform your action, the frames are replaced with new ones. Like IF, what matters is what’s temporally right around the interaction point.

The root of the tension here is temporal. McCloud argues that the essence of comics is representing time with space. In his talk at Tech, his examples of interactive comics all involved navigating through already constructed possible sequences. For more deeply interactive comics, the interaction time of the player (I’m doing this now) and the spatially represented time of the comic seem to be at odds. My solution of a few short frames only showing what’s just immediately happened is one way to try and resolve the tension. But then you’re throwing away much of the representational power of the comic form. You might not need the cool whole page and multi-page image montages with multiple frame sizes, inlays and so forth, but only little 4 frame newspaper style representations.

Drew, thanks for the link to Cointel, I hadn’t seen that before. (Although I would hesitate to call that an interactive comic, in the sense of the word I was using in my post, since no virtual world is being simulated in Cointel. I’d lean towards calling that a “participatory comic”.)

Also, here’s some more links to contribute (I’ll continue to add more over time as I find them): MadInkBeard, a blog I really like that I discovered during a recent oulipolooza, has enticed me to mail-order some new work from Alternative Comics, the first being RabbitHead by Rebecca Dart. MadInkBeard gives it a pretty positive review, including a scanned-in image sample of its non-linear narrative. Further exploration of the Alternative Comics site led me to Matt Madden’s experimental A Fine Mess. Madden is a founding member of the American chapter of the French formalist comics group, Oubapo (Ouvroir de la Bande Dessinée Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Comics), the “Ninth Lively Art” to join the ranks of Ou-x-po, founded in 1992. Oubapo doesn’t seem to focus on interactivity per se, but of is course very interested in thinking about creating under constraint.

Update: Urgh! On Amazon there are no copies of CL/DM cheaper than $85, used! Noah, what’s up with that?