"When I Am King" Concludes!!

Discuss the future, present and past of sequential art.

Moderator: Moderators

Locked
Scott McCloud
The one and only
Posts: 293
Joined: Wed May 23, 2001 7:00 pm
Contact:

Post by Scott McCloud »

http://www.demian5.com

...and he's put a Paypal link on his main page. Let's reward this amazing work now!
Guest

Post by Guest »

Wow!

I was going to complain that he left us hanging about the guard and the two women in the flowers, but then I clicked the acknowledgements.

Scott, what was your take on the use of limited animation in When I Am King, compared to your comments in RC?
Jack Masters
Consistant Poster
Posts: 180
Joined: Mon Jun 04, 2001 7:00 pm
Contact:

Post by Jack Masters »

I've been looking around for a good place to post this, and I guess this looks good.

In my opinion, the use of limited animation within the framework of a comic opens up very interesting possibilitys artisticly, because you get to work with two different kinds of time simultaniously.

With limited animation inside one or more of the panels of a comic, you have real time inside juxtiposed time. In the other direction, if you have a daily comic strip, or a comic that gets posted as a series, you have gaps of real time between the pieces of comic, within which you have juxtiposed time. If not for these gaps of real time, projects like my Spongy would have no meaning, because the whole point of the thing centers around the fact that I write the entire story in reverse order.

I also would like to know what Scott thinks of all this.

<a href="Http://CastleZZT.net/">House of Stairs</a>
Scott McCloud
The one and only
Posts: 293
Joined: Wed May 23, 2001 7:00 pm
Contact:

Post by Scott McCloud »

This speaks to the difference between autonomous narrative animation ("see Spidey punch the villain then jump away...") and short looped animation like the stuff found in "When I Am King" and some of Cat Garza's comics.

The former tends to present two different methods of representing time, on conflicting axes.

<img src="http://www.scottmccloud.com/home/xtra/mess/rc-ax-01.gif">

While the second leaves the temporal map only temporarily, hitting its surface repeatedly.

<img src="http://www.scottmccloud.com/home/xtra/mess/rc-ax-02.gif">

I'm guessing this is why "When I Am King" seems so smooth and whole, while things like the Star Wars online comic, while expertly produced, tend to have that stop-and-go fragmented quality.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Scott McCloud on 2001-07-15 12:14 ]</font>
David Gaddis
Forum Member
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Jul 01, 2001 7:00 pm
Location: Ohio! New York! Oakland!
Contact:

Post by David Gaddis »

I thought the animation worked beautifully within the fabric of the comic, often taking the place of devices like "quiver lines". He also comes up with what I think is at least one new thing, when he makes the guard and his girlfriends flicker to show you they're screaming at the approach of the bees. The funny thing is, you get it right away.
Guest

Post by Guest »

Yes, replacing "quivering lines" and other stylized cartoon conventions with looped animation is a really good point--and as Scott said, he only did it for things that made sense looped (e.g. there's still the big long arrows for running).

<font size=1>Nice art, Scott, the first time I read your response I didn't even think about it, I'm so used to you using illustrations, and then second time through I was like, "wow, did he make those just to reply to this"?</font>

That reminds me, kinda wandering off-topic a tad, isn't the flash "zoom-in" comic going to pretty much violate the spatial tenet of sequential art? I mean, it'll be there in the imagination, but it won't really be perceiveable more than two panels at a time. (Hmm, but it could also be a transparent interface for branching--allowing zooming in on different spots.)

The Anonymous Sean
Scott McCloud
The one and only
Posts: 293
Joined: Wed May 23, 2001 7:00 pm
Contact:

Post by Scott McCloud »

Nice art, Scott, the first time I read your response I didn't even think about it, I'm so used to you using illustrations, and then second time through I was like, "wow, did he make those just to reply to this"?
Those were transparent gifs that I uploaded to my own site and pointed to as image tags in my post. Now in case anyone else wants to try the same thing, I should caution that many boards prohibit html in posts specifically to prevent such shenanigans. Greg's been nice enough to trust us with his code, so let's only use the feature sparingly, keep file sizes as small as possible and be extremely careful with our html syntax.
That reminds me, kinda wandering off-topic a tad, isn't the flash "zoom-in" comic going to pretty much violate the spatial tenet of sequential art? I mean, it'll be there in the imagination, but it won't really be perceiveable more than two panels at a time. (Hmm, but it could also be a transparent interface for branching--allowing zooming in on different spots.)
I see zooming comics as just a change of axis (from x to z) and perfectly consistent with the temporal map idea. Depth and scale (somewhat interchangeable in this context) are spatial qualities that we've endowed with temporal meaning in the same way we do it to width and height in traditional comics.
User avatar
Greg Stephens
Forum Founder
Posts: 3862
Joined: Sat Apr 14, 2001 7:00 pm
Location: Los Angeles, California, USA
Contact:

Post by Greg Stephens »

OK- some thoughts on this: A zooming comic doesn't strike me as true z-axis movement, since each image is embedded within a larger one on a 2-dimentional plane. It's not as if we're stepping through panels to view the panel behind it, we're narrowing (or widening) our focus to see differing amounts of the same image. Rather than any z-axis travel for the reader, it's a simultaneous x- & x-axis expansion (or contraction) for the comic.

Of course, all things being a matter of perception, a reader could imagine that they're walking forward (z-axis movement) toward a very large 2D plane, or holding a 2D plane at arm's length and slowly pulling it towards them (another z-axis movement), but either way the comic only exists in 2 dimentions-- Even as it simulates 4.

Hmmm... Such an arrangement could illustrate cause & effect rather handily if, rather than having one image house another, you had many. Example: Point of origin for the comic is an illustration representing your birth. Moving outward in all directions represents time backward, so the surrounding sets of images would be your parents' lives; the further away from the origin, the further in the past, events that are equidistant from the origin, but further clockwise (or anti-clockwise) from each other are likewise not so tightly related. Like ripples in a pond converging on the center to form a pebble. Add a third dimention to form a sphere and you can map more events. Events are linked by trails, and may be read from any beginning point (along the outside perimeter), but all have the same ending (your birth, at the origin).

OK, this isn't a z-axis comic or even a zooming comic (thought it could be), but the idea just hit me.
Good morning! That's a nice tnetennba.
Locked