Zabel on Webcomics
From a recent Comixpedia interview with Joe Zabel:
Zabel: Hmmm… well, I think of comics in the context of late 20th century culture. What is the dominant artform of the last 50 years? Cinema, i.e. movies and television. In terms of popularity and influence, all other artforms pale to insignificance next to it. The problem with cinema is that it’s nearly impossible for an artist to produce a work of cinema by themselves; it’s too costly, and in any case you need actors and various technicians. Comics are structurally similar to cinema, i.e., words and pictures. So one way of looking at comics is that it’s an alternative that allows artists to create their own cinema without a cast and without a budget. It also provides greater freedom for the audience, who can read the comic at their own pace, and reread their favorite parts as often as they want without having to rewind a video tape. But being consigned to a physical object, paper, makes comics less like cinema, less “alive.” And traditionally, comics have tried to transcend the fact that they’re on paper. They’ve adopted exotic art styles that require special training to render, and use flat, mechanized coloring techniques. The typical commercially-successful printed comic book doesn’t look like a hand-crafted work, it looks like television on paper. So the migration of comics to the Internet, a television-like medium, is a provocative development. Potentially at least, it frees comics from physicality and brings them closer to cinema, more “alive.” So with webcomics, maybe it’s not as important for the art to resemble television, because they’re already on television. Or maybe it allows them to push that cinematic connection a little further. Now I realize the word “television” raises a red flag with a lot of people. Personally I’m a big fan of artists like Robert Crumb whose work have a strong sense of being hand-crafted. But most comics try very hard to transcend the physical, and I think the phenomenon deserves more attention.
Zabel has a lot of interesting things to say in the interview, but this answer stood out to me as particularly contentious on a number of levels. Saying that comics have tried to “transcend” being on paper is unfounded. That’s an opinion from a perspective where being more “alive” is necessarily desirable and a goal to work towards, a perspective where “alive” seems to equal as visually close to real perception as possible. This would make literature “dead” I guess, since it is all words, the least real looking of all representations. These opinions do make sense in light of Zabel’s interest in 3D computer modelling for making comics.
I also fail to see how being on a computer screen necessarily makes something more “alive” or even closer to TV. A static screen is as close to a printed paper (albeit of high color quality) as it is to TV (which never seems to stop moving in contrast with the mostly static pages of the web).
While I can agree some with the idea that a lot of mainstream (i.e. superhero) comics approach the glossiness of TV, I think, even the most “realistic” comics style is not so realistic. Taking just the physics (Edit: I originally meant “physiques”) of superheroes one quickly passes outside the realm of what TV/cinema can replicate.
My two cents.
Tags: Webcomics
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