We're on the move. It's the 21st Century. Keep up
or be left behind. If you missed or forgot what I started talking
about last time, click here and then
come back and join us.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that the uses of the printed page
as a medium for sequential art has been exhausted. (And this is not
to say I believe this; the penetration of anything other than linear,
pen & ink-created expression is barely a blip on even the comic-reading
community's radar.) Popular opinion is that you then must then go
online. After all, there's animation, music and sound clips. This
raises the worrisome question that if comics, by definition, are sequentially
juxtaposed images, at what point do you add so much that the end product
cannot rightly be defined as a comic anymore? What do you call sequentially
juxtaposed animated images? Is not half the power of comics that you
can linger over a single image, representing a single instant or moment
in time, as leisurely as you like, yet in the differences between
two panels there is still the internal closure that signifies the
passage of time? But in what other direction can we go, if go we must?
There is probably a large portion of you who at some point owned a
View-Master,
a device that's faded in and out of public consciousness for over
50 years. Usually red and looking like a clumsy set of binoculars,
you would feed in a circular reel of 14 pieces of film which, when
viewed in the light, actually combined into seven stereoscopic images,
each with some caption displayed in a tiny window at the top of the
viewer. Back in the day, it was a rare tourist trap's gift shop that
didn't stock their own custom-made set of reels so the Griswolds could
recreate their trip to Dogshit, Nebraska, in glorious 3-D and living
color back home in Bones Of The American Aboriginals, Illinois.
Every flash-in-the-pan kids show in the '70's also seemed to have
their own reel:
The Bugaloos, The New Zoo Revue, The Hair Bear Bunch. The craze
lasted until around the late '80's, when promises of virtual reality's
impending arrival on all our doorsteps reduced it to outmoded kitsch
before we'd even got its successor or fully explored its potential.
But then, that's commercialism for you.
So we've arrived in 2001, and I still can't, as Dennis Miller once
put it, "sit in a Barcalounger with a beer in one hand and a
remote control in the other and fuck Claudia Schiffer for $29.95."
The one pathetic attempt to bring VR to the masses before it was ready,
Nintendo's Virtual Boy, even looked like a View-Master (though the
images were like the original Game Boy seen through a red filter while
drunk). Which begs the question, why
not the View-Master?
They still make 'em. Hell, they even make one-off, non-modular versions
for N*SYNC and Britney
Spears (and if two technologies were ever meant for each other,
it would be the View-Master and Britney). I've seen versions licensed
to The Discovery Channel that double as binoculars and telescopes,
with reels showing into a shark's jaws and lions humping. But the
potential that they never realized was that the View-Master could
also serve as a delivery system for three-dimensional comics, despite
the licensing of both DC and Marvel properties for the viewer. Unfortunately
these were more often than not art drawn for two dimensions, extrapolated
into "three" dimensions by displacing elements printed on
acetate, shifted just so and photographed. But nonetheless, is not
comics a series of images intended to communicate a narrative or an
idea over a period of time?
Some might argue that the seven image system of the View-Master reels,
even when packaged as a group of three, allows for a limited space
in which to tell a story, and the means of production have now become
so scarce as to be cost-prohibitive. Which is the curse of being the
abandoned, unrealized technology: ways in which to make the technology
fresh and remarket able are not
explored .
One tragedy of the View-Master's existence is that of all the attempts
they made to revamp it, they could never get past the seven image
limitation. The answer, to me, seems obvious: design a delivery system
for the images that extends past the View-Master's hull into a storage
system with images arranged along a linked, flexible belt, like a
bicycle chain, that could be advanced by the View-Master's mechanism
and would curl into the right angle to go 'round into position to
be seen, then snake back up into the cartridge. Perhaps the better
analogy would be a machine gun ammo belt. Hell, I'm no engineer, and
this could well be a more expensive solution than just to produce
more paper reels. I'm just the idea man, baby; I leave it to the
pragmatists to grind our hopes to dust.
One of the innovations View-Master did try to make it more "multimedia"
was the addition of audio tracks. I have seen the same principle applied
to comics. On the surface this may seem no better than the children's
books that have the text being read on tape to help the beginning
reader, a concept that may seem insulting to comic readers who are
already sick of having to defend the maturity of their choice in mediums.
But there are at least three examples in comics I can cite which demonstrate
the efficacy of adding the auditory element, and they each function
on different levels.
The first was Kyle Baker's collaboration with rap group KRS-One in
his Break
The Chains! contribution to the Marvel Music line. In this
'Psychosonic Comic,' as Baker calls it, the traditional read-along
is updated with his fusion of Chuck Jones and Chuck D, illustrating
the content of the accompanying audio cassette: rapper Big Joe Krash's
lyrics for Afrocentric pride along with a framing storyline starring
only black characters, and the signal to turn the page, rather than
a traditional "bing," is a shouted "WORD!" I am
still trying to contact Baker to find out whether there was, as promised
on the back cover, a second issue; something, probably the $6.99 cover
price, seems to indicate to me that there was not.
The next example was recently brought to wider awareness by Warren
Ellis in one of his last editions of "Come In Alone" at
comicbookresources.com,
Alan Moore's performance art album The
Birth Caul. Obviously, there is no way of recreating the experience
of witnessing Moore's shamanistic performance, and neither the album
alone, nor the comic adaptation, is an attempt to. Each alone is an
aspect of the original performance: the album includes Moore's languid
spoken word and the sonic effects engineered by David J and Tim Perkins
as heard in the performance, while the comic at times darts between
depicting the performance to representing the themes of which Moore
speaks. It is an even more stirring experience to read and see what
Moore is saying with the soundtrack (available separately) than the
one and only performance thereof might have been; not having been
there, I cannot say for sure.
The last example, and the one which will carry us into next week,
is Mike Allred's triple-threat project which viewed from a comic angle
would begin with his miniseries Red Rocket 7, a fictionalized
history of rock n' roll as seen through the eyes of an alien clone.
This series, on its own, is remarkable, and could be the best thing
Allred has yet produced. But what makes it truly unique is that it
is only one face of a triptych. Events and characters in Red Rocket
7 are featured in Allred's indie film Astroesque
without it being a film adaptation. Allred's band The Gear's CD, Son
of Red Rocket 7, contains the same tracks that are listed
in the comic as being on the eponymous 7's own album. Which raises
the question, does the comic service
the album, does the movie service the comic, is the album the
soundtrack to the movie? Or vice versa? Or none at all? They can stand
on their own merits, but they also are symbiotic to each other to
a
complete vision. Would your reading of the comic change if you
did so while listening to the album? Would the movie seem less dadaist
if you knew its relationship to the comic? Which do you absorb first?
Is there a right answer?
The difference between these three is that they span a spectrum from
the supplementary to the complementary, from one or the other function
as an added feature to being just as necessary to understanding the
author's full intent as any other component. Again, this begs the
question, at what point does a change in dynamics signify that what
you are reading is no longer a comic? Is music still music whether
you see it on a page, listen to it from a CD, or witness it performed
in person?
While you think on that, think about the other ideas I've raised.
In particular, I want you to tell me or show me your best idea for
optimizing a comic delivered to the reader in the View-Master format.
If you haven't seen a View-Master in years, or ever, for that matter,
follow one of the links above and read up, then head yourself over
to the Savant Forum
on Delphi and let us know. Three top winners will be chosen, and will
receive their very own View-Master stereoscopic viewer. Yeah, OK,
so it's no personalized Channel Zero, but I still get a big
kick out of mine, and this contest is as a result of my topic, not
the other way around. Like comics, get too snobby about the whole
affair and you ruin your potential to be entertained (conversely,
I hope your threshold for entertainment is higher than "pretty
colors"). Winners must get their entries posted on the forum
by Monday, January 29.
Tell you what: To sweeten the deal, for the grand prize winner, I
will personally give a customized paint-job to their View-Master (except,
of course, for the parts where light has to pass through), and include
a starter set of View-Master reels. Can't promise that it'll become
a collector's item or anything, but then again, you never know.
We're almost there. The flattened pulp is beginning to buckle. After
this, no one will ever be able to accuse us of being unable to punch
our way out of a wet paper bag. Welcome to Jericho; time for Joshua
to play his trumpet.
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