Reinventing Comics Review by Michael Lee

If I had any artistic talent at all, I'd probably do this review as a comic. Fortunately for your bandwidth, I don't.

Since I purchased Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics several years ago, I've found myself regularly pulling it out every couple of months to page through or read a chapter -- it takes apart the comic form in marvelous fashion, revealing what makes "sequential art" a unique art form. I'd say that it is required reading for anyone who is interested in seeing how comics tick, regardless of genre.

So when I was at Dreamhaven earier this week and saw McCloud's comic self portrait staring out in a book called Reinventing Comics, I immediately picked it up. I was curious to see what new things that had to be said.

Reinventing Comics is a very different book from its predecessor. Where Understanding Comics is a factual look one the history and form of comics, Reinventing Comics is a manifesto on where comics should go in the 21st century. How comics should reach beyond the simple (and enjoyable) superhero stories that are its most popular genre; that it can tell as many different story types as the motion picture (on both small and big screen) or the novel. That comics don't need to fear the Internet and computers, but can use it as a creative tool and a new distribution mechanism. That creators have rights as well, which should be considered when some superhero comics lines are little more than research and development for blockbuster motion pictures. That the people reading and creating comics should represent society as a whole.

Obviously, that makes Reinventing Comics a very different work than its predecessor -- it's a poltical book, with opinions and theories. McCloud believes that the Internet could change the distribution of all comics; and while the newspaper comic strip has migrated on line, I don't believe that full length stories will migrate to be mainly on line any more than I believe that electronic text will; at least not until such time that you can curl up in bed with an electronic tablet, or have something secure enough that you can bring it into the bathtub.

But on many points, he's right -- I love comics, and I love superhero comics. I certainly don't read as many non-superhero comics as I "should", basically because I'm not as aware as to which ones I'd be really interested in; primarily buying the titles I do on inertia and on the creative teams. But with movie technology such that we're finally going to see an X-Men movie (please don't suck), or possibly a Spiderman or Fantastic Four movie -- something that can find the pure essence of these series, rather than the rambling mess many of these lines have become over the years -- the comic isn't the best place to see these types of characters anymore in many cases.

However, the title of Reinventing Comics is a bit of a misnomer -- it's also all about the changes that technology is bringing to creative ventures as they can be beamed around the planet at a very low cost. You see some examples of what he's talking about on his website as far as comics go; you also have comics that aren't bound by traditional page sizes, or ones which have unique navigational schemes. You have comics with a new delivery system -- just like music, video, and text can be delivered as data. The comics belong as much in the convergence of artistic forms as anything else -- after all, if you're downloading a comic strip from Sluggy Freelance, or an unproduced Crusade script from some place like Bookface, or those pesky bootleg mp3s, copies of the Buffy episode Earshot, or The Blair Witch Project, it's all the same as far as the network is concerned. (And we have to give some points to any work that uses the word convergence, don't we?).

And all of that is important for those of us who like our science fiction, fantasy, horror, adventure, and super hero stories as well as the other genres as well, because it has impact there as well. (Perhaps even more so, because us geeks live online so much.)

Reinventing Comics isn't the mandatory reading that I think Understanding Comics should be, but I think people that are either interested in technology and how it is -- and can -- impact the delivery of art and entertainment, or interested in comics and its possible futures should definitely check this book out. And that is especially true if, like me, you are interested in how they might play together.

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Reinventing Comics

Four out of Five Beakers

Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Michael Lee stepped into the MISFITS Website and vanished .... He woke to find himself trapped on the Internet, facing pages that were not his own and driven by an unknown force to change the MISFITS Website for the better. His only guide on this journey is Professor Maxwell Misfittle, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Mike can see and hear. And so Mr. Lee finds himself leaping from site to site, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home. Michael previously wrapped up the 1999-2000 seasons of Buffy and Angel

The title of Reinventing Comics is a bit of a misnomer.