Comixpedia Interviews Madden
Comixpedia briefly interviews Matt Madden under the unfortunate title of “Madden About You”. My (much more interesting, I hope) interview with Madden is forthcoming (in a month perhaps).
I excerpt the first question of the comixpedia interview. The use of “graphical” put me on edge from the start in regards to the interviewer:
[Interviewer] You seem fascinated by experimentation within constraints. (And indeed, teach a course in it.) What are the constraints you see for webcomics, as opposed to other graphical media? What inspirations can we draw from them?
[Madden] I don’t really consider myself a “web cartoonist” per se, so I haven’t thought about it a lot, but a lot of what Scott McCloud talks about–and puts into practice in his work–is interesting to me in terms of adapting the form and content of comics to the Internet, html, Flash, etc. Scott’s recent work and that of a few other cartoonists out there exploits the possibility of having an endless “page” that the reader can navigate in an unusually interactive way. There are also lots of possibilities for using “hypertext” style ideas to create expanding stories that exist in multiple planes (e.g. you click on a panel and it opens a whole new strip in a new window which tells a related story). On the other hand, some of these technologies can be pretty gimmicky. I don’t find it terribly interesting or experimental to have a regular old comic strip where a dog’s tail is wagging or the sun is flashing little animated sun rays.
(That last part is an important point regarding any attempts at web versions of other media. The gimmicky feel can quite easily ruin a work. Something that needs to be kept in mind for electronic literature in general. Don’t put something in just because you can on a computer. Make things integral to the work as a whole.)
Tags: Comics, Constraint, madden
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