|
Adventures into Digital Comics (Documentary)
Adventures into Digital Comics is perhaps one of the more serious works about the comics industry to be made in Hollywood. Produced and directed by Sebastian Dumesnil and Robert Nichols at Top Two Three Productions, the work aspires to paint a picture of the comic book's emergence into the digital age - and apears to achieve remarkable success in the effort. The documentary is compiled primarily of video taped interviews with comic book creators and the list of talent interviewed is quite extensive. I recently completed an interview with Sebastian, to be presented at the web site promoting the making of the film. There's a great deal of material to see there, so go and have a look. It all gives an insightful look at today's comic book creators as they're raised onto a pedestal, front and center stage, to the eyes and ears of the world. 
Below are are some excerpts from the interview. Q: Can you tell us about your background? I'm a storyteller and an activist of sorts, by nature, drawn into the comics at the peak of its Silver Age in the 1960's, profoundly influenced by the dramatic realism of Neal Adams' artwork yet captivated by a host of creators of that era including, Kirby, Steranko, Wrightson, Smith and many others. I emerged onto the comics scene in the 1970's, at a young age, working from Neal Adams' Continuity Associates studios but found myself quickly awakening to the global conflicts and dillemas our world was in. I then began a course of exploring the power that the comics hold in our culture and have since embarked on weaving our collective historical and social experience as a civilization into the medium. I've found that there are some very intrinsic underlying currents in the comics which point to this medium playing a very primary role in the global events unfolding in our time. I strive to bring these undercurrents to the forefront in the hope to inspire the comics community, headed by its creators, to take the more active role in our world - a role which awaits the comics industry in the future and is coming nearer to being realized today. One of the steps recently taken to help bring about this change in awareness within the creators' community is the coming together of a core group of creators to form The Comic Book Creators' Guild, striving to strengthen the creators' independence in the medium in order to help bring a better tomorrow the comics and for the world they thrive in. Q: In the film, we discuss the nature of comic books. Can you tell us what, for you, a comic book is? What are the strengths and ideas you like or intend to explore? First and foremost, the comics exemplify the human spirit in its raw pure force. Whether suprehero, reality-based alternative or simple cartoons, the comics explore the most intense energy inherrent in the human experience. This is perhaps why its heroes and villians are super and its melodrama driven to the highest emotional degree. Unlike other commercialized and more lauded cultural vehicles such as literature, art, music and theatre, the comics - by virtue of having been the bastard child of the creative endeavors - have maintained an independence which allows them to explore aspects of our existence that other forms can't. The creators in the comics remain a breed apart in their renegade exposition of their innermost views of the world they live in. If we were to look at the worlds within the comics as a metaphor of our world, it's easy to absorb the piercing messages that this medium brings. The synthesis of the visual and literary forms within it connect the comics, in a very primordeal way, to the very first communications forms that mankind developed, be they the first etchings made in the dust of the earth, the stone age cave art, the development of the first alphabets, the literary works of ages gone by and even the renaissance art movement from before half a millennia. The comics are a concentrate of the most basic need to communicate and tell stories in order to drive forward the human experience - and civilization as a whole. Q: In contemporary comics, storytelling tools like thought balloons or captions are mostly absent. As an example, John Byrne told us he stopped using captions when he realized that readers did not read them. Do you think that these tools are now perceived as a stigma? I believe it's preferable for a creator to take the lead in their story telling form and not to be led by what's perceived as the readers' whims - which change from time to time anyway. What would Dark Knight be like without captions, for example? I believe that even if captions and thought balooons are perceived to be a stigma today, an innovative creator can bring them back to popularity as viable assets in their storytelling. Creators should take the lead here and remain innovative in their work. To allow themselves be driven by a populist perception of readership whims only stagnates a creator's true ability. Q: In the film, Scott McCloud says there are more golfers in this country than comic book readers. By right, we should be able to sell comics about golf, but it's not happening. Do you feel there is an issue of diversity going on? There is no doubt that the comics need to become more diverse and that they need to learn to communicate to the diverse populaces amongst the people. This will hapen when the act of reading a comic book becomes trendy, so to speak. It will become so when the comics become relevant and desirable to a wider audience. In order for this to happen, the comics must learn to address what it is that the potential readership is interested in and looking for.
The world has changed and evolved greatly since the days when the comics could ingnore the environment they thrive in and still hold their own. The manner in which the comics based films are proliferating in Hollywood indicate that the comics community needs to consider the notion that it no longer exists within the bubble it once did. Imagine how the medium could be elevated into the limelight when it begins to present a model for a new political leadership in America, for example. Or when it begins to unravel the cobwebs from the confusion which engulfs our religeosly diverse social heirarchy. These issues, and more, are at the core of the human experience for the American people today, who feel as if they've been led astray for generations by a leadership which they once believed had their best interest in mind.
Since the attacks on America by Al-Quaeda, it's becomig more evident that the socio-political leadersip in America and the world may not have the best interest of people at heart, but rather scrambles about only in attempting to bolster its own powerbase - at the expense of the people - while promising a nearby rose garden which they can never truly provide. The comic book creators have been delving into these issues of our experience for decades and stand poised to put forth a new and clear path that can deliver our civilization from the catastrophe which its present leaders inadvertantly bring upon it.
Permalink Posted: 2:32 PM EST
|
