To Researchers
"The times do change, and so do the desires"
Luís de Camões
In my Master Degree dissertation (Comics and Internet – Aspects and Hybrid Experiences, in portuguese), presented in october 2009 to the brazilian academic community, I analyzed the relationships between comics and Internet, highlighting some interesting advantages the latter brings to the former if one compares web to printed media, cradle of the sequential art: extremely low publication, advertising and reproduction costs; immense potential visibility, despite the challenge of attracting and retaining an audience — which I called 'reader-internauts' — accustomed to a torrent of information that is often distracting and fragmented; greater artistic independence and, consequently, greater freedom of expression, as authors do not need to submit to publishers; increased proximity to readers; and, most importantly, the possibility of employing expressive techniques that can only be realized in comics with the aid of computer technology, such as animation, dynamic layout, soundtracks, infinite screens, hypertext, and enhanced interactivity.
Starting from the meticulous analysis of these characteristics, I divided online comics into the categories of 'Heirs' and 'Hybrids'. The former, formally closer to the paradigms of print media, are conveyed through static images. The latter, essentially experimental in nature, make use, to varying degrees, of these technological expressive techniques I mentioned, aiming for new aesthetic and narrative results, breaking the established models of printed media.
For such a break to occur, except in the case of animated .gifs, Hybrid comics must rely on a computer language such as HTML, JavaScript, or ActionScript. Of these three, the most user-friendly for non-programmer comic artists, and therefore the most widely used – at least before the complex and wordy 3.0 version – , is ActionScript, as it is closely tied to Adobe Flash, which has built-in drawing tools in an environment oriented towards multimedia production. In Flash, many effects can be easily achieved using the graphical interface, minimizing the artist's learning curve for coding, and exporting to the internet is straightforward. It was precisely due to this ease and versatility, as well as the near ubiquity of the Flash plugin on personal computers at the time, that I chose to use this program for my Hybrid digital comic practice: the story of Samuel.
Creating a Hybrid webcomic, besides being one of the prerequisites to finish my Master's Degree, was a challenge for me, as should have been clear in my dissertation. I was excited to see how I would integrate sound effects, animations, mouse events, buttons, randomization of panels, and instant translation with the drawings and story in the most harmonious and interesting way I could do. However, during the four years between the public defense of my dissertation and the present moment, considerable technical, practical, and conceptual obstacles arose for the work I was creating. These challenges came about due to changes in internet technology and the way people navigate the web.
Technically, as an option for displaying multimedia and interactive content on the Internet, Flash and its plug-in, properties of Adobe, have been put aside in favor of open technologies like JavaScript (and its library JQuery), CSS3 and HTML5 itself. One of the main reasons for that change was financial, as using Flash requires purchasing a license to work legally with it. Given the robust development of these open standards and the increasing support from browsers, the proprietary nature of Flash discourages both new developers from emerging and those who already worked with it from persevering. The exodus accelerated when Steve Jobs published, in April 2010, his article Thoughts on Flash, in which he pointed out other alarming flaws of that software,explaining why Apple did not allow Flash-based content to run on the smartphones and tablets it manufactures. Considering that mobile devices now represent a growing and significant portion of Internet access – devices like iPad did not exist at the time of the conclusion of my research – and that the fruit from Cupertino is one of the major players in its market, it became clear that Flash, as it was built, would quickly fall out of use.
Furthermore, the Flash plugin over time began to show more and more security and performance issues. Its updater became annoying to users, as it prompted a screen to appear at every computer restart, inducing them to perform the operation manually. Eventually, Adobe itself has decided in 2011 to end the Flash Player development for mobile platforms. These events were enough to affirm that Flash, as long as it relied on its own plug-in, was dead to the Internet. Along with it, the technological support for the Hybrid comic I created also died – unless a way to adapt it to open technologies emerges in the future. It would be foolish to insist on a platform that excludes a significant portion of readers just because they cannot or do not want to read my work on conventional computers.
As for the practical side, I came to the conclusion that a Hybrid webcomic like Samuel is very complicated for a single artist to undertake entirely on their own without spending many months or even years. Short Hybrids can be produced relatively quickly by one person, although the most common is for multiple professionals to come together to create them, just like with printed comics. Larger, more radical and more complex Hybrids have always been created by a dedicated team to speed up its completion.
Many times I asked myself whether I was dedicating too much time and effort to find technical solutions using ActionScript. I spent many days imagining more complex interactive effects for Samuel and figuring out how to execute them and integrate them into the script when, in reality, I should have focused on the most fundamental thing — in what any worthy comic artist should know how to do best: tell a story that engages the target audience, preferably with good drawings that fit the concept. Dealing with lines of code, testing them, and searching for bugs or ways to improve syntax can be stimulating and even fun for a programmer. But for a visual artist like me, even though I have some ease with the brute language of machines, it is a serious diversion from the main focus. It is something frustrating and even mortifying.
As for the concept of comics on the Internet, technical experimentation is by no means the kernel of this art: it is storytelling. It is the unweaving of the plot's threads, panel by panel, by the reader; it is capturing their attention, inviting them to witness characters in search, loss, satisfaction, anguish, desire, fear, and ecstasy, and in doing so, allowing them to touch the artist's soul and their own. Even the name that this art form has in my mother language Portuguese – histórias em quadrinhos, stories in small squares – highlights the supreme importance of narrative. There will never be good comics without good stories to tell, no matter how appealing their visuals or experimental techniques might be. It is good stories, not just their technological platform, that withstand the test of time and criticism, that touch something universal, and that leave a legacy for humanity from the culture in which they were born.
Perhaps, since they were the focus of my dissertation, I may have wrongly suggested that Hybrid comics, due to their intrinsic experimentalism and formal novelty, represent the true expressive power, the highest refinement possible for webcomics — unfairly reducing Heirs to simplistic web transpositions of press paradigms. For anyone who might infer from my writings some superiority of Hybrids over Heirs, I just would like to make it very clear that both categories are equally important for the continuation, survival, and renewal of the sequential art. If there are more Heirs than Hybrids on the Internet, it is simply because the latter are much more complicated and time-consuming to produce than the former, not due to laziness or lack of boldness among comic book artists.
So, I decided to continue Samuel's story in the form of an Heir webcomic. While it loses all the dynamic and innovative qualities of the Hybrid form, it still takes advantage of the main benefits of publishing comics on the Internet. It shifts from an experimental yet costly format to one that lacks boldness but is feasible. The direct, unmediated connection with the reader continues. The freedom of artistic expression remains. The ability to give the audience access to the work from any device, anywhere in the world, endures as well — without obsolete plugins or proprietary software interfering with the enjoyment of the artistic creation.
The inevitable change in the format of my webcomic does not, however, invalidate my research. Flash is just a medium that is no longer used and can and should be replaced by similar ones or even ported towards different platforms. The Hybrid proposals for comics on the Internet remain valid for any interactivity and multimedia technology, whether existing or future, as long as they are compatible with browsers available in the market. If and when a program or method arises that satisfactorily replaces Flash, I might create another Hybrid comic myself — less ambitious, if I have to work alone.
For me, unrestricted creative freedom and visibility, more than any experiment, are the true essence of the webcomics. And it is what will guide me, and what I will defend, while I publish in the World Wide Web.
Thiago Mallet
October, 2013
If you want to see the original version of Samuel, please click here (Flash plug-in required)