(The couple samples I've checked out so far of the new "motion comics" looks to me more like typical low-budget animation features than comics with added motion. Not great, but no worse than much of what's on TV.)
Personally I'm considering making comics, not with any motion, but with the text replaced by speech. Or maybe picture books like that. (I think pictures are stronger without any text on them.) It seems that it should work, although it may be difficult to do really well.
I'm considering something a little different too: an illustrated audiobook. Just a regular audiobook, except every minute, a new illustration for it appears on the screen.
Me, I immediately want to be pretty experimental with the drawings, since that's my nature. And since the story is fully told by the text/audio.
But I must admit I suspect there's only a small audience for that really.
In the same way that comics with movement are no longer comics and just bad animation, comics without word balloons are no longer comics but bad art. You can get away with a page here and there lacking text, but no more than that. There have been attempts at doing a complete comic without text but those have been failures.
ReplyDeleteYes, you're quite right.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think it was Will Eisner who said that word balloons were a "desperation device" or words to that effect.
And the technology never existed before.
It may be a failure, but I think it's worth a try.
It's worth a try. It might fail, but better to try and fail than to not try.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I love The Spirit I found his other work to be kind of pretentious. Now that comics are somewhat respectable they seem to have lost something.
I don't know about his comment on word balloons, though, I mean would anyone say that dialog in a novel was a desperation device? It serves the same purpose. On the other hand the way Jack kirby worked, he could easily tell a story without dialog and I think the way it worked was that he had the plot, drew the pictures, and Stan The Man came up with the dialogue based on those drawings.
I *think* he meant, how the hell do we get the pictures to talk?
ReplyDeleteWell, we can't, the closest we can get is to put this ugly text on top of them.
That's how I see it, anyway.
Well done balloons and lettering are part of the art form, IMHO. Lettering and sound FX convey much about the characters.
ReplyDeleteAs an experimental comic form, I would buy and "read" an e-comic with "spoken word" sound, but I guess not many stories could be told that way.
A storybook for children might work quite well, tho'. But I can't imagine a Spiderman story told like that, unless it was some minimalistic, European-ized intimistic version... that is at odds with the traditional medium anyway.
I mean, American action comics (the ones I prefer at least) are talky. The moment you get an actor to read the lines, you realize that they couldn't possible tell that much during action scenes.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the cost of doing voice overs would be on par with dubbing a TV episode, so quite expensive (I'd say $150+ a day just for the sound technician and equipment, same for each actor and you would have to pay minimum union wages which are horrendous... Dubbing a 5 minute cartoon for TV can cost you $2000+) unless the prices have dropped much since I was working on that.
That expensive, huh. Wow.
ReplyDeleteI'm considering an illustrated audio-book instead.
(Post updated)
ReplyDelete