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Discussion: The relevancy of the cartoon is a two way street
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alexmiel |
The relevancy of the cartoon is a two way street
Feb 28 2009, 12:46 AM EST
Cartoons and newsprint are symbiotic in their history as they will be in their downfall unless efforts are made to modernize the craft. This responsibility falls to both artists and editors.When placed on the web, static comics seem out of place. I think if they were to be reinvented with the web in mind, comics could become something more dynamic than they are without contorting into full-on animated cartoons, which I consider a very different medium. For example, I see very little use of the animated gif file. With a gif, a cartoonist can modestly animate their work without resorting to full-fledge animation (which strips away the reading aspect of a comic. Wholly half of the medium). With an animated gif file, one panel could make way to another, for example, or dialogue could flow more naturally in speech balloons by alternating what they contain, or minor animations could liven up otherwise still frames. All of these are easy to implement, do not require proprietary or bulky plug-ins (ie Flash) to operate, and could help keep comics relevant in the future. The other consideration here are editors. One problem over the last decade or so has been that most alternative news weekly carry the same five or so artists, no matter where you are in the country. This Modern World, Tom the Dancing Bug, Troubletown, Red Meat, etc, we've all seen them before. Of course, there is nothing wrong with any of these comics. They are quite good, in fact. But with the significantly lower overhead of running an online publication, I hold out hope some of the more well funded e-magazines of the future see the value in opening their doors to more cartoonists than the handful we have all seen before and maybe this will, in turn, allow artists to move beyond the nerd culture and skin deep observations that plague so many so-called "web comics." That said, the roster at publications like Salon.com are not a promising start. Do you find this valuable? |
stormbear |
1. RE: The relevancy of the cartoon is a two way street
Feb 28 2009, 3:42 AM EST
As for animated gifs, as a cartoonist - ick. Gif files are limited to 256 colors and kills the ability to do beautiful illustration tricks and renderings. I produce everything as a PNG file and retain even gradients, fades, blends and shadows.The other issue about animation is the work involved. Keep in mind I have a cinema background and also do flash animation in my day job. With my cartoon, I can crank one out in 2 hours with another hour to syndicate it. If it is flash animation, I might get ONE cranked out in 40 hours because to do it right, you need to add sound and the occasional f/x on top of the chore of animating the strip to 30-45 secs. There are several problems that relate to storytelling that make it bad for editorial cartoonists like myself. For example, when Bobby Jindal gave his dud of a speech on Tuesday, I had a new strip researched, written and drawn in under 60 minutes. Another hour later the strip was syndicated all over to places like Daily Kos. Jindal was the meme of the day on Wednesday. If I went an animated route, I would be in the middle of voiceovers. I think there is a place for animated storytelling on the web - check out http://goanimate.com Do you find this valuable? |
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mommycrat |
2. RE: The relevancy of the cartoon is a two way street
Feb 28 2009, 9:57 AM EST
@stormbear Your issues with gif are only a problem if you're using color, and maybe not even then if you do it right. I love the aesthetics of black and white cartoons as I think many people do. The nice thing about a post Chronicle would be that any cartoons, animated or not could go up. Why have a different "Place" for animations except to satisfy some cartoon purity test? Newspaper comics are static are because they have to be printed, the whole point of this wiki is that we're strarting from scratch on the web.
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stormbear |
3. RE: The relevancy of the cartoon is a two way street
Mar 1 2009, 1:18 AM EST
I am not advocating a "purity test," I am simply pointing out that that a single artist cannot crank out an animation a day. If you are running a daily paper, you have to understand the production process of a publication.
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mommycrat |
4. RE: The relevancy of the cartoon is a two way street
Mar 1 2009, 11:52 AM EST
But you're not really talking about the limitations of the production process, you're talking about the limitations of one cartoonist - yourself - without taking into consideration that other artists will work differently. Presumably at a paper there would be multiple cartoonists, some of whom could crank out an animation in a day - gif, flash, whatever- if they wanted to.
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alexmiel |
5. RE: The relevancy of the cartoon is a two way street
Mar 1 2009, 2:12 PM EST
@StormBearAlthough I was not referring to your work specifically, I will respond to some of your points. You may find little use in gifs due to their color limitations, but I often work in grayscale or broad patches of color, both of which use only a fraction of the 256 color limit. I also agree there is no need for giant productions with voice overs and lavish animations, something I stated in my original post. The artists at the website you pointed to for example (goanimate.com), are taking simple concepts and creating lavish, and in my opinion unnecessarily complex, animations with the material. The animations I suggest are modest and would take only a few extra minutes. In addition, traditional gifs have some advantages over Flash animations. Firstly, as mentioned, the production process is much less time consuming. Secondly, Flash is proprietary, which not only dis-includes many potential artists who don't have hundreds of dollars at their disposal, but also further entrenches Adobe's Flash as a necessary aspect of the Internet, something I am not convinced is wise in the long run. Thirdly, last I checked, Flash does not work on any mobile device. I'm not sure if gifs animate correctly on smart phones, but a static image will at least be displayed, so using Flash leaves a potentially huge audience of our fictitious Chronicle unable to access the material. Finally, animated gifs are tiny. While Flash animations require big downloads and loading times, gifs render instantly. Another plus in terms of the hand-held computers that will surely dominate the market in the (near) future. Really though, I think this shop talk betrays the larger point I was trying to make. Comics have been static since their conception. In the information age we, as cartoonists (and editors), must learn to evolve the medium to better find our place in this brave new world and stay relevant into the future. Do you find this valuable? |
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stormbear |
6. RE: The relevancy of the cartoon is a two way street
Mar 1 2009, 3:14 PM EST
I have included a sample of a grayscale gradient in gif and in 24bit png. The gif file is 2066 bytes and the png file is 742 bytes... the higher quality image is almost 3 times smaller than the gif.For an example of flash-based editorial cartoons, see Mark Fiore's Pulitzer prize winning work at... http://www.markfiore.com/ You can read an interview with Fiore (a SF local) on the production process... http://www.cyberjournalist.net/features/behindthescenes/fiore.html Flash, or more importantly the SWF file format is a mostly open format that has yielded a number of open source applications. See the below link for details... http://osflash.org/open_source_flash_projects I agree it is up to the artist to produce whatever they want in whatever format they want, but what I am suggesting is a set of guidelines that will allow the paper's creative director to allow fast turnaround on the production process. But before that happens, we need to decide what mediums this project will produce. Will we produce a printed daily? Are we going to be web-only? Are we going for a mobile only solution? All of these formats have their place, but we can't nail anything down until we decide what this project's primary mission will be. For example, we cannot port flash to a printed paper or to mobile devices (flash is too much of a security concern for mobile). For the time being, Flash is an integral part of the internet and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Flash's ability to run video within the wrapper sealed the deal for the long term. Do you find this valuable? |
