Just some random thoughts to throw at you today. First off, I’ve been holding onto this idea for awhile now: in my opinion, there is a huge misconception about what constitutes for quantity when reading comic books. Simply put, page count does not equal quantity.
I say this in reference to this post from Comics Should Be Good! from a few weeks ago. My example? Sitting down to read a recent trade paperback from Ed Brubaker’s Captain America can take as long as reading two of the more wordy issues of Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men. I’m not making a value judgment, just simply an observation.
The work of some comics creators reads abnormally fast while others pack their pages with so many ideas that a single issue can take 30 minutes to read if you’re really following everything. I think a lot of the Essential collections from Marvel Comics therefore do count as a ton of comics, while I think that some of today’s five to six issue collections should be sold for much less money due to the fact that the bang for the buck just isn’t the same.
I know it doesn’t cost more to see a movie that lasts 3 hours instead of 1.5. But comics are different. You control the time of the reading experience. And of course, you can prolong that time of the experience as long as you desire. But there’s only so long you can comfortably prolong the reading experience if the material is simply not there.
Speaking of the passage of time in relation to comics, I wanted to throw out a few ideas on Warner Premiere’s Motion Comics. When the Watchmen motion comic debuted and I watched it, it got me thinking: what’s the difference between reading a comic and watching a cartoon?
At first, I thought, “obviously, there’s a huge difference — one moves and the other is static.” But that’s not completely true. A lot of animation will hold on a single frame and provide voiceover and music. That’s still animation. So is it the combination of sound and image? No, that’s still not it. You can read a comic and listen to music at the same time but that doesn‘t make it animated.
In my opinion, the primary difference between reading a comic and watching a cartoon is: when you read a comic, YOU control the passage of real time. You can linger on one panel for an entire minute and then resume a faster reading pace without interrupting the story. However, when you pause a cartoon, the story is just that — paused. The viewing experience is interrupted because a cartoon takes place over a specific amount of time. That controlled duration of time is part of the essential definition of animation.
And visa versa. Part of the essential definition of a comic is that passage of time in relation to experience is something left open by the creators. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that is that Warner Premiere’s Watchmen motion comic is a neat idea, but it’s still just a shitty cartoon with weak animation and some word balloons tossed in.
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