Future Comics

NOTE: the below is me spitballing at 3 in the morning just to get some dialog going. I invite your comments and corrections. I've had this news item floating around for ages and kept...

The New York Times has been dabbling in "future comics" type stuff over the past year orzo, and they se Lille Carré up to bat and she hits a home run with The Bloody Footprint an inquiry into memory and and identity that cleverly uses the scroll and gif panels for an effect distanced enough for memory and sharp enough for contemplation.

There haven't been many new developments in the "Future comics" category of late; that is comics that use animation, gifs, or other tablet- or web-based technology as a storytelling tool, beyond Madefire's leading the category. It seems like motion comics and the costs of developing platforms have sort of put this on the backburner...plus guided view and the like are now such a standard aspect of reading comics that they don't elicit much comment.

F YEAH!!!!!! If there is one Halloween tradition in comics that must be kept is a new digital comic by Emily Caroll! Her previous uses of the digital palette to create horror has made her one of the few true autuers of "future comics"—and the print iteration, Through the Woods is one of the best graphic novels of the year. Her previous horror comics like His Face All Red, Margot’s Room, Out of Skin and The Hole the Fox Did Make are all classics of terror and digital storytelling.

Has anyone come up with a definite name for those "swipe" comics? Many use comiXology's Guided View, but there are other methods. Anyway, they are increasingly popular, and learning how to make them is...

Launched last year at San Diego Comic-Con, Madefire aims to be both a publishers and platform for developing next level motion comics/future comics/whatever you want to call them. And now, in traditional start-up...

Oh yeah but speaking on indie comics and arts festival., this weekend THE PROJECTS kicks off in Portland, but it isn't so much a bazaar of indie comics as a maker festival: THE PROJECTS is...

Boulet is awesome, nuff said. The French cartoonist is very popular in his home country, and his amazing 24 hour comic published here by AdHouse as Noirness has begun to get him a well deserved US following.

It's been a while since we looked at one of those motiony-comicky-giffy-dealies that take comics and extend them in a browsable movable way. Here's one from the Netherlands. It's actually an animated book trailer for De Vriend (Friend) by Dutch thriller author Charles den Tex. It was animated and illustrated by Aimee de Jongh and it was coded by Submarine, using a technique called "Skrollr" which unfolds as you scroll through it. (Pro tip: you can also use the down button.)

by Serhend Sirkecioglu From her Tumblr all I know about Jen Lee is she’s a freelancer from Idaho, with a boyfriend, two dogs, two cats, and farmland critters. From all this plus her comics/illustrations on...

Two recent surveys reveal seismic changes in how the consumption of books and movies—once the massest of mass media—is changing.

by Serhend Sirkecioglu

--          My common complaint with the current wave of interactive/digital comics is the lack of ingenuity, risk, and execution, which fall into three camps. The first is the artist-centric camp where the person who made the comic is a competent cartoonist but has no knowledge of programming and is unconscious of interactivity, so the function feels gimmicky and not worth my time. The second is the program-centric, where the design is strong but the story is not much of a looker or read, and can feel more like a proof of concept than a whole-hearted piece. Finally, the third camp is the ones that peter out because the time and energy put into it outweighs the pay off, leading to burnout and an unfinished story.