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The Limits of our Language are the Limits
of our Technology
Balancing the evolution of literature with that of the Web
IntroductionA biological metaphor
Hybrid
Mutant
Atavism
Evolution
The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering; Frederic W. Goudy (1918)
Why webcomics
Multimodal medium
For over a hundred year comics have been using image, text, color, principles from film, architecture, design and photography.
“The
Las
t Tro
lley”
(Mar
ch 2
4, 1
946)
, s
crip
t by
Will
Eis
ner,
art b
y B
ob P
alm
er
Sco
tt M
cClo
ud,
Und
erst
andi
ng C
omic
s
Ala
n M
oore
, Tod
d K
lein
Sup
rem
e #5
6
Comic book theoretician
Comic book author
Web and digital media futurist
Scott McCloud “Scott McCloud didn't write Understanding Comics to help web designers, but the book has proved inspirational to designers of multimedia CDs, web sites, and games.
Dave Sims
Faces the same challenges
As with literature, comics is a medium defined by print, its language is shaped by print and by the analog world.
Webcomics don’t appear out of the digital world, they must be laboured into it, but they might be:
“a durable mutation that will continue to survive and thrive into the new century
Scott McCloud
The canon of digital literature must
constantly face up to the canonical
technologyThe Web has a language of its own and it is ever changing
The need to maintain a digital record
“The digital work is vulnerable. The preservation of its existence in cyberspace requires continuous precautions, so that its programming and electronic format do notend up obsolete and illegible with the renovation of support systems, and so that it does not vanish from its servers for lack of maintenance or payment of fees.
Domenico Chiappe
The language of the Web changes
“Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story is literally unreadable, languishing in antiquated software and hardware formats inaccessible to the contemporary reader
Adam Hammond
The meta-language of the Web changes
A webpage might look like a page...
“For readers who do not themselves program in computational media, the temptation of reading the screen as a page is especially seductive.
N. Katherine Hayles
...but it’s not
We would navigate a site
Now we scroll through a feed
“I think the online comics’ greatest promise is the chance to break out of the page. But if we don’t merely want to trade our old flat rectangular prison for a new one, then we need to treat the screen as a windows and for now that means asking the readers to scroll.
Scott McCloud
The Infinite Canvas
The trouble with The Infinite Canvas
Perils of unexamined theory
More than scroll
● New kind of sequencing
● New ways to explore the spatial relationship between panels
Some problems
● There are limits in the original formulation
● Gary Groth addressed them in McCloud Cuckoo-Land: Un-Reinventing Comics
Sco
tt M
cClo
ud, R
einv
entin
g C
omic
s
Sco
tt M
cClo
ud, R
einv
entin
g C
omic
s
Novelty and freakishness
Sco
tt M
cClo
ud, R
einv
entin
g C
omic
s
Sco
tt M
cClo
ud, R
einv
entin
g C
omic
s
Fixation on clarity
● The fear of ambiguity limits the potential
Sco
tt M
cClo
ud,
I can
’t st
op th
inki
ng !!
#1
False lead?”This sounds like nothing less than a desperate attempt to wed a form and a technology that aren't particularly suited to each other
Gary Groth
Real world to the rescue
● Daniel Merlin Goodbrey applied McCloud’s ideas to “architecturally mediated hypercomics”
● More in-depth discussion about them in Images In Space - The Challenges Of Architectural Spatiality In Comics
“Spatial relationship between panels influence the reader's interpretation of the passage of time.
Daniel Merlin Goodbrey
“Blind corners hide surprises for the reader.
Daniel Merlin Goodbrey
“Shifts the narrative from being a thread to follow through the comic to be being emergent from the space of the exhibit itself
Jaymes Nichols
Retrofitting The Infinite Canvas on the Web
Flap design
“Had reformatted the comic, zoomed in and zoomed out of the original print version, and created a reading experience that felt like it went on for pages and pages
Frank Santoro
Ambivalence to digital authorship?
Scott McCloud
Dash Shaw
Zack Soto
Emily Carroll
Potential new
evolutions of The Infinite
Canvas
Who controls who?
Make a choice without knowing
Remake the act of re-reading
Conclusion
