Who's Who in the CBU 2010

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

Keeping Cyberspace Inline

By Regie Rigby

It cannot have escaped your attention that comics as a medium are not in the best of health at the moment. Quite apart from anything else, regular Fool readers are probably sick to death of me going on about it. But it is the case that comics are hard to find outside of their peculiar retail ghettoes, almost universally looked down on by the majority of western society (not even recognised as “art“ in California, apparently), expensive (relative to comparable entertainments) and often (lets be honest) of indifferent quality.

Comics as we know them will soon be a thing of the past. A brave new world awaits us just beyond the next bend in the information super highway. Soon, perhaps within five years, there will be no more comics printed on paper. A new breed of “Cyber Fanboy” will be logging on to the webzine of his (or her) favourite comic and downloading the latest issue. Some technophobes might then print them out and read a hard copy, but most will just read from the screen. More adventurous cyber comics creators will be using the likes of Flash, Quicktime and a whole load of stuff we haven’t even thought of yet to animate panels, the reader might even be able to influence the story with the click of a mouse.

If anyone out there reading this is nodding their head in agreement - STOP IT! If any of you are frowning and shaking your heads, I reckon you’re absolutely right. The Internet is a powerful tool, but it won’t kill traditional comics any more than TV killed Cinema.

Don’t misunderstand me here - I’m not knocking the Internet. Without it, you wouldn’t be reading this and I’d still be cornering people in pubs and ranting about the latest comics news. I’ve been online for just over six months, and I can tell you it has quite literally changed my life. I live on the net! Nor am I against Online Comics, I’m a huge huge fan of many of them. But can I take my PC with me when I take a bath, or sit in the Garden with it on a sunny day? Erm, no.

Online comics are great, and you can do stuff with them that you never could on paper. But you can do stuff on paper you can’t do online. That’s the point. Online comics are a whole different experience to their paper based cousins, and it doesn’t have to be an either or choice.

Allow me to provide you with an example. In the mid to late eighties the British newspaper industry stepped from the late nineteenth centaury to the late twentieth centaury in one bound. Almost overnight (well, via one of the ugliest industrial disputes in the British history actually, but it was very very fast as these things go) the industry switched from traditional typesetting to laying everything out on computer. Suddenly the old conventions of standard typefaces and regular rectangular columns were no longer needed.

There were all sorts of wild speculations doing the rounds at the time. It was suggested that the newspapers of the future would look radically different - perhaps laid out in spirals, or other outlandish forms. Everything and anything was (and is) possible. To the immense surprise of all concerned, nothing happened.

Really! Nothing. The only major difference between the newspapers of the year 2000 and the newspapers of the year 1980 is the introduction of colour photography and this has (so far as I understand these things) more to do with the development of colour printing techniques than computer aided design. The simple truth is that the newspaper reading public liked their newspapers the way they were. Indeed, there was a significant amount of resistance even to the introduction of colour photography.

Comics are essentially in the same boat. I have rattled on at length in previous columns about how perfectly suited the medium the traditional “pamphlet” style comic is. It remains the fact that (with current technology at least) you simply can’t replicate the whole page turning experience. Instead you have a screen, which cannot be changed in any way. If you’re using old equipment you’ll have a resolution problem.

So what are we to do with the computer screen? Personally I find both the “screen as page” and “screen as window” approaches to online comics more than a little unsatisfying. Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t the “screen as window” thing just an electronic scroll? I can’t see that returning to an information delivery system that’s been obsolete for two thousand years is progress, even if it is in an electronic format. (Although having said that, Scott McCloud’s recent online Zot strip used the “screen as window” format to differentiate between realities in an interesting way)

As for “the screen as page”, well, don’t get me started. until the technology has advanced a lot further, there really isn’t any mileage in digital presentations trying to imitate print. Never mind that the resolution isn’t there (try reading a screen for an hour. It hurts.) Screens aren’t even portable, unless you gave a laptop or top of the line PDA. You can’t even print off your comic and read a hard copy unless you have hours to spare and bucks to burn. I know, I tried.

Recently a copy of a comic that should have been published by Vertigo surfaced on the Web. So, I went over to the site, had a look, and enjoyed it tremendously. Assuming (rightly, as it turned out) that it wouldn’t be there for long, I downloaded it and then printed the thing off for posterity. It took well over an hour to produce 22 black and white pages. The resolution was poor (although I grant you this may have been more to do with the fact that it was a print of a scan of a photocopy) and I used a third of a black inkjet cartridge. At £25.00 a cartridge I’m looking at around £8.00 worth of ink! (That’s very nearly $15.00 US!) So much for digital delivery - I’ll stick to my pamphlets at £2.50 a shot, thanks very much!

Online comics have bigger hurdles than that to jump at the moment too. Creators have to eat, and so they have to make money off the comics they produce if they are to survive to make more. This is hardly news - comics have always been a commercial medium. There is scope on the Web for all sorts of small press style ventures to reach huge audiences (relatively speaking, of course) but credit card transactions aren’t viable for small purchases (they cost too much to process) and all attempts to bring a cash like system into cyber space have been unsuccessful.

That, coupled with the tradition of “free content” which has evolved on the internet makes it difficult to get people to cough up the readies for access to a website. Will people ever be happy to pay for something which exists only in patterns of electrons on a silicon wafer (or however digital data is stored these days)? Surely part of the appeal of comics is the huge collection we all seem to amass? Would we feel as attached to a stack of CD-Rom discs containing a bunch of stuff we downloaded off’ve the ‘net?

Call me a reactionary old luddite if you want (I’ve been called worse) but I don’t think so. Online comics will, I am sure grow in popularity and complexity. Some bright spark will crack the problem of making small payments online sooner or later, and when that happens the savings on production costs and ability to get your stuff out to people over the web will attract small press creators, who might actually be able to make some money that way. But unless there is a significant shift in culture we’ll still keep on buying the paper stuff as well. It’s good to have something to hold in your hand (gee, that sounds like a cheesy Country and Western song, but true even so).

Technophiles might argue that textile based display units which would be foldable like paper and would hold an image until new one was downloaded will be available in the next few years, and that these will finally make paper obsolete. (No, really - I heard an item on the radio about this a while ago.) Well, this may be true, but it misses the point. As a prediction it comes across in the same way as flying cars and paper underwear. No real reason why it can’t happen, it just doesn’t sound likely. Second of all, even if it does, such units will never satisfy the collecting impulse.

Creators don’t seem to be rushing online either. Technophile Scott McCloud may have transferred his entire career onto the internet, but most of the traffic seems to be going in the other direction. Take Steve Conley, whose Astounding Space Thrills have so far graced the web with more than three hundred daily episodes. His Astounding Space Thrills comic came out in glorious Black and White from Image a few months ago. Arch web “tooncaster” he might be, but he still wants to get into print.

I’m not saying things won’t change. They just won’t change much. They won’t change fast either, not really. There’s an old saying - “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In spite of the medium’s general ill health, comics aren’t really broken. There are things that need to change of course. A hike in the level of quality and less reliance on Superheroes certainly wouldn’t hurt. But these are problems with content, not format. There is nothing wrong with the delivery system we’re using at the moment. We like it. It works. I’ve seen the future - we’ve been holding it in our hands for the last hundred years.