“comics”

And as many have pointed out, “definitely for real” synchs up as well. There’s room for love within O/XK-CD.

Las caricaturas de atras del Ocio, Pupa y Lavinia, de un humor neurotico y feminista (muy a la Maitena^{WP, IY}) que me fascina, son de ella y su trabajo de diseño tambien es muy chido.

No se por que me dio un gusto raro saber que es tapatía, ojala algun dia pueda conocerla (creo que anda por Canada). Bueno, el punto es que es mucho muy buena. Leanla. ^_^

It’s because they’re so bad.

Some days ago I bought my first manga^WP on a whim (Kare Kano^{WP, IH} and Furuba^{WP, IH}). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.

They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.

The diptych is a fascinating art form—the boundary object between comic and picture.

A weird happening today, a phone call, has got me paralyzed and deep in soul-searching. In my rambling thoughts I remembered Dragon Ball, my all-time favorite story as a child. You know, one of the most magical things of this most magical anime, perhaps even its central theme, is how almost every enemy, minor or major, eventually becomes part of the gang, a friend and perhaps even a wife or a husband—there’s Oolong, Yajirobe, Tenshinhan, Chaozu, Kuririn, Android 18, the Ox King, Yamcha, Piccolo, Vegeta, Majin Buu, and even Mr. Satan, but I’m sure I’m forgetting many.

What’s more, practically every character is presented mysteriously and ominously at first (or at times)—Dragon Ball’s is a world where one is always wary of The Other, where circumstances always conspire to cast It in a menacing light, and yet one where there’s always camaraderie, friendship, humor, and sometimes even love underneath it all. A world where appearances deceive, where enemies are future friends waiting to be made. What a naive, beautiful idea.

Let’s see if it works.

Update March 8, 2007: It worked!

Excuse’s user testing went so well I decided to improve it. The original strip had color but it was somehow so distracting that black and white looked better. Then I found about the burn tool in a Photoshop tutorial I chanced on. What a difference it made! There’s a lot more focus! Much better outlines. (No doubt about it, learning Photoshop would be one of the best investments of my time…)

I think the changes are for the better. And so, it’s time for phase 2 of the plan: the metacomic. Print the comic on hard paper and carry it in your pocket, tote, whatever. Next time you’re bored in the subway, bus, wherever, show it to your right-hand neighbor (in the absence of a right-hand neighbor, feel free to substitute your left-hand one). Let it be your excuse. Report on what happened. :)

It was a very simple idea—a girl and a boy, in the subway—and yet actually drawing it was a nightmare. There are any number of things I would do different for my next webcomic. I guess that means the effort was worth it: much was learned.

So, again, the idea is a girl and a boy in the subway (I used this Flickr photo to “remember” the subway). None of them can muster the courage to speak to each other, none of them can come up with a clever excuse for starting the conversation. Until the girl realizes there’s no bad excuse for meeting someone. And that is her excuse. That’s it.

Reminds me a lot of an elevator sign I scrawled years ago.

Scott McCloud begins Understanding Comics^AM wrangling to create a definition of comics, contrasting it with pictures and movies. Taken individually, a picture is merely that, a picture. Arranged sequentially however, pictures are transformed into something else. If the sequence is temporal—pictures alternating in time, fixed in space—we call that art movies. If the sequence is spatial—pictures adjacent in space, “juxtaposed”—we call it comics.

So that’s that. His is a great book and you won’t regret reading it, but for now hearken back with me to the web before blogs. There was, in such olden times, something called the «personal homepage»: primeval websites where people put their disjointed personal trivia for the world to admire. (See An Exploratory Profile of Personal Home Pages: Content, Design, Metaphors.) They were usually boring, disorienting, and self-flattering (think photo albums) but there had been nothing like that before, not on this scale—you could learn about fascinating people you’d otherwise never meet and there were some unbelievable things out there. But back to the photo album metaphor. Personal homepages were piles of scattered, assorted personal paraphernalia—they were, in a way, photo albums.

Then the blogs started to appear. It took a while to notice anything had changed. The diary metaphor obscured as much as it enlightened. With some hindsight it’s easy to pinpoint what happened—and to marvel at how simple yet radical a change it was. The blog era is when websites learned about sequence, spatial sequence. They stopped being fractal trees of buried content and became, yes, comics—post became the new panel.

By spatial, we mean that blogs, just as comics, unfold in space. There’s a post and right below it there’s another, further below, another, and so on. It makes as much sense to talk of a “blog strip” as of a “comic strip”—about the only difference is that the former goes from top-to-bottom while the latter from left-to-right (or right-to-left).

And then there’s sequence. Sequence brought context, interface and development to websites, it gave them personality, motion, and tension, made them subject to change and thus to evolution. Sequence brought time.

Every page in a blog has a natural context: it comes after the previous post and before the next. A blog’s homepage is simply a broad sweep of the most recent panels posts in the strip—an easy way to glimpse the website’s personality and recent happenings. If you’re faithful (or diligent), you can see the writing and the themes evolve through time. The mind fills in the gaps, the bleeds, and the continuity that emerges can feel as real and intense as reality itself. Spatial interface is a brilliant interface in its almost ridiculous simplicity.

(Blogs are the web’s poster boy for spatial sequence but they’re by no means the only (or the first) web form to avail itself of it. Comments, within blogs and beyond, are also spatially sequenced, are also comics. So are forum threads.)

What, then, is the equivalent of movies in the web? What web form is temporally sequenced—”pictures” alternating in time, fixed in space? The hard part, really, was coming up with the question. The answer is obvious: wikis.

Consider a popular pedia^ELZR (Wikipedia article). It’s the product of a myriad interventions (most of them rather trivial) from several Wikipedists, but you are only seeing the most recent frame when visiting the pedia’s URL. If you visit in a couple of hours, chances are someone corrected a typo, reverted vandalism, or added a sentence, and you will thus see a slightly different frame—the pedia has “moved”! Unknown to a surprising amount of users, every pedia has a history where a log is kept of even the most minute change—the movie’s celluloid film. Wikis are movies.

I’ve been staring at this strip all day, pasted it on my wall, read all the strips from its parent webcomic (xkcd) —and still it dazzles me. It has got to be among the best I’ve ever read. Quirky, sexy, naive, upbeat—makes me happy every time.

Oh boy, I really love this strip. I’m going to be pasting it everywhere… :)

Dreams comes close after it; Pong, Donald Knuth, M.C. Hammer Slide, Words that end in gry, and Moral Relativity are also keepers; and both Escher Bracelet and Sudoku are almost single-panel-ly perfect in their simplicity.

The weird thing about fetishy pics^ELZR like the one below is they’re so beyond-words good if you were actually on the look for them you wouldn’t find any. This one, for instance, I found yesterday (here) while looking for pictures of sakura^WP, cherry blossoms, on Imagery.