Crisis On Infinite Comics

A couple of weeks ago, Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada posted a few cryptic and interesting tweets, starting with, “The future is ∞”. Initially, we at Crisis On Infinite Midlives didn’t pay as much mind as many did because we figured Joe had just looked at our Twitter profile and suddenly realized you could use the ∞ in tweets (about an hour before Joe’s tweets, we had just gotten into a Twitter exchange with Marvel exclusive artist Mike Deodato, after all).

Speculation on the meaning of the tweets ran rampant, from the start of a new line of comics from Marvel, to a New 52-style reboot (But Marvel doesn’t reboot! And Miles Morales has always been at war with Eastasia!) to a baffled suspicion that Joey Q just found Wingdings in his font list, thus officially moving boldly into the state of the art digital technology, provided it’s 1996.

However, at this past weekend’s South By Southwest festival in Austin, TX, Marvel announced what Infinite Comics really means: three digital-only comics, written by Mark Waid and co-written and drawn by Stuart Immonen, tying into the upcoming Avengers Vs. X-Men event.

Well, just calling them “digital-only” comics is selling the thing a little bit short… or hyping them a little bit too much.

Infinite Comics will be designed, first and foremost, to be read on a iPad or some other kind of digital tablet. Tell them what you mean, Joe:

It’s essentially an animatic, but what makes it a comic is that the reader controls the timing in the same way that they control the turn of the page. That’s a key component of comics as is the artists and writers ability to guide your eye across that page and through the story. In an Infinite Comic, all those attributes are there only there is no page. There is only the screen and on that screen the possibilities are endless.

Okay, that sounds… like it doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to me. The proposed storytelling in Infinite Comics is really one of those concepts that falls squarely in the camp of “You had to be there,” so Joe helpfully provided a link to a 2009 proof of concept done by cartoonist Yves Bigeral. Go look; I’ll wait.

What this amounts to is a layered flip book rather than a complete printed page. So rather than turn a page, the reader adds elements every time they press “next”, be they captions, visual changes, or additional pictures. It allows creators to modify traditional pacing by keeping focus on a single panel for as long as they want, while adding or subtracting elements from that panel. It changes the focus from the page to the panel, and provides a ton of storytelling options within that panel.

On one hand, if you must create comics in a digital format, this is probably the best way to do it. It assumes that the reader is definitely reading the comic on a digital device, and plays to those strengths by ignoring the needs of print comics in favor of what digital reading can give you. Based on Bigeral’s short example, it’s something that can work: you’re still plain-old reading comics, without the motion comics trap of introducing unnecessary animations and sound effects, which take control of the pacing from the reader.

In addition, creating comics under the assumption that they will be read on a 2048-by-1536 resolution screen (assuming you have an iPad) will eliminate what I see as the most annoying part of reading comics on a screen: page size. I hate seeing splash pages that need to be shrunk down to fit a screen; you can never read all the words due to the shoehorning of the image, requiring you to either trust the “intelligent” reader to move you around the page, or to use a virtual magnifying glass to zoom to what you want to read. Reading a conventional comic on the screen is like reading one after a mild concussion; you can’t always make sense of what you’re seeing, and I have enough self-esteem issues without throwing in the acknowledgement that I’m befuddled by a fucking funny book.

The downsides are: if you fully embrace the digital format with this kind of storytelling, it cannot be translated to a printed page. The kind of paced layering of a single image that you can do with a computer can only be replaced by, say, a printed comic with a bunch of layered clear acetates to allow you to add on the visuals at will, leading to a comic that’s less a storytelling device and more an origami Rubik’s Cube, and costing several thousand dollars. This makes Marvel’s Infinite comics the first real shot across the bow for comics retailers, by providing comics that you will never be able to buy in a store. And that will make the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop offering to show the paying customers my Nook, very unhappy indeed.

It also means that no matter what you pay, be it nothing thanks to a download code (Which Marvel will be providing with every print issue of Avengers Vs. X-Men) or full retail price, you will never own these comics. As we discussed when I reviewed Marvel’s free Avenging Spider-Man download, Marvel is only selling you access to these comics, and that access will only exists as long as they maintain the servers that authenticate you. And as I said back then: I hope they named that server “Mom,” who also once threw out all my comic books.

And finally, did you like that proof of concept by Bigeral? Good; that means you could actually use it. When I found the link, I tried to look at it on an old netbook, my Android phone, and my Nook Color… and I couldn’t load it on any of them. And that proof of concept was published in Adobe Flash, which is one of the most ubiquitous platforms on the Internet. Publishing comics this way will be heavily platform dependent, meaning that you will not only need a device that can use Marvel’s digital comics app, but relies on simple screen real estate; if comics are drawn embracing, say, the iPad screen? Lotsa luck reading that on your cell phone without suffering permanent retinal damage, Charlie. Same difference with a seven-inch Nook screen or Amazon Fire screen.

On one hand, this is an exciting development, because that proof of concept was the most interesting way of presenting comics on the screen that I’ve ever seen. I genuinely enjoyed the experience… once I found a machine that would show it to me. On the other hand, this is another step toward a future where you, as a comics consumer, will own nothing after your investment, and will be required to pre-own particular and expensive hardware if you want to read your Spider-Man comics anywhere but in front of your computer unless you’re tired of having vision good enough to be able to drive at night.

Finally, it’s yet another thing that puts pressure and additional jeopardy on your local comic store. And if those go down, I’ll be reduced to showing my Nook to random passersby, and it’s hard to download comics while in police custody.

(via Comic Book Resources)