Back in 2010, Mark Waid appeared on the Major Spoilers Podcast to talk about webcomics, digital comics , and the state of the industry. During the interview he mentioned he was thinking of ways to make comics work in a digital environment. Now, in 2012, is ready to put his plans into action.
Over the past year, I’ve begun exploring the emerging digital comics medium and, in preparation for launching my own webcomics this summer, I’ve produced several short examples to demonstrate the tools digital allows writers and artists. Most “digital comics” offered by large publishers are little more than clunky adaptations of previously existing material first designed for standard portrait-format print comics, not for landscape-format monitors and tablets. When reading a print comic, you can see the entire page at once, and artists use that as a design tool. But print comics captured on the screen are almost always too large to “take in” without scrolling about or enlarging or isolating individual panels—the comics equivalent of the old “pan-and-scan” evil of presenting widescreen movies on square televisions by inelegant cropping and editing. Hence, my new passion.
The project in question is Luther, which looks like it could be a zombie/undead book.
Whether this succeeds or fails is yet to be seen, but I’m happy to see Waid put his plans into action; instead of just spouting about a problem, he’s looking for a solution.
3 Comments
Amen, Stephen–while I am not a fan of the zombie genre, I am excited to see a fantastic creator like Mark Waid try to change the industry
Wauw – I want to see this on some more actionoriented title. Daredevil???
That Mark Waid interview was incredible and one of the main reasons I started to listen to Major Spoilers regularly (that and the “Smallville is in Kansas” episode, which brings a little something different than NYC / Cali based podcasts) and it’s definitely heartening to hear Waid put his time and money where his mouth is.
I’m a bit zombied out, but I’ll give this a try.
While he’s bang on about the pan-and-scan, I’m a little worried his efforts will be marginalized by the iPad3’s rumored higher-res / greater pixel density display, which would allow clear (if slightly smaller) and sharp viewing of traditional comics pages in their normal format / layout. That said, it’s definitely something that needs to be pioneered and investigated if inertia or tradition is to ever be changed.