Electricomics - Revelations From Thought Bubble

"Not so much pushing the envelope of comicbook storytelling as folding it up to make a nice hat."

If you've been following the Electricomics project at all, you've probably realized by now what a strange beast it is: hard research, solid comics theory, coding and programming, all addressing the public in the sultry and whimsical tones of every comics reader's favourite British warlock and mall santa, Alan Moore. I didn't know much of anything, really, about Electricomics until last weekend's Thought Bubble comic art festival in Leeds, where I was able to attend a panel hosted by five members of the Electricrew (not my word): Mitch Jenkins, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Leah Moore, John Reppion, and Pete Hogan. The infamous Mr. Moore himself wasn't there, as will surprise exactly none of his fans; a good portion of that infamy is the man's reputation as a recluse. What he did send along as a token of his involvement was 500 pre-signed "zines", stapled 14-page A5 booklets containing some gorgeous art by Colleen Doran, an exclusive interview with Moore, and a new comic about digital comics written and illustrated by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey.

Not a bad companion for my morning cuppa

The panel set out to answer some unresolved questions for those in attendance about what exactly it was that Electricomics is attempting to do. I suspect I was one of the least informed people in the hall, having only read (so far as I can recall) this article which seemed to revel in the ambiguity of the information available in the days immediately following the project's press release...

"almost all of the information is coming from a press release, which tells us Electricomics is “an app that is both a comic book and an easy-to-use open source toolkit,” before focusing on the app, then abruptly telling us “Electricomics will be a 32-page showcase with four very different original titles.” By the end of the press release, you can probably piece together that we’re talking about a self-published anthology that will be released on the app, also called Electricomics. Even then, we’re told that Leah Moore, Alan’s daughter, “will edit the project.” Presumably, this means the comic called Electricomics, not the app — which the previous paragraph was talking about."(Sequart)

So, yeah. That's what we had to work with.

The biggest bit of new information to come out of the panel at Thought Bubble, or at least what stuck with me the most, is that this is not a commercial venture. It's an academic one. All the money for Electricomics is coming from the Digital Research and Development Fund for the Arts (something I would have known if I'd read their website), and as the project's press release explains, "As a publicly funded research and development project, Electricomics will be free to explore the possibilities of the comic medium, without the constraints of the industry". Because I'm a nerd for this kind of thing, I was stoked about the scholarly possibilities for this platform when I still thought we were being told this is gonna be Alan Moore's Comixology knock-off. So I almost wept with joy when I realized that a) Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, an incredibly sharp theorist (and cartoonist) specializing in the mechanics of digital comics is part of their development team, and b) that because the project is grant-funded they will be producing detailed documentation of the entire process, success, problems, solutions, the whole shebang. It's going to make great reading someday.

Those of you picturing Alan Moore hunched over a computer workstation writing code with his beard nearly hiding the keyboard, stop it. Don't be ridiculous; that's what he has code demons for (No, seriously, a shed full of 'em. It's in the zine.). Mr. Moore may not be a wizard of the tech variety, but it seems his self-proclaimed alienation from modern forms of media has allowed to conceive this project relatively unpolluted by the endeavours that precede it. He doesn't know Comixology, Madefire, or Manga Studio. He knows comics. That's something that was made crystal clear through the course of this panel, the idea that, if you could distill from the form the Essence of Comics, then that would be the driving technology behind this project. That's what a couple top theorists, legendary writers (did I mention Garth Ennis?), and hotshot programmers are doing with a bundle of government money: not an exercise in visual FX, motion graphic, music, flashinglight and pretty colours, but attempting to take the narrative structural and spatial freedom of a digital workspace and make it understandable and accessible to you through...an app.

Which is going to come to you in two parts, apparently: Electricomics and Electricosmos. The former is a creative suite, a toolset with which you can make, well, comics. We're not entirely sure yet what all the tools are going to look like, what kind of canvas you'll have to work with, but the idea is (as I understand it) if you can conceive of the idea, and it can be done as a comic, then you can make that comic here. Which leaves rather a lot of possibilities. Some people are getting hung up on the "page" issue; namely, if this isn't just a scan-your-physical-comic-and-make-it-digital-here deal, but a born digital creation platform with infinite canvas, then why is Moore announcing a 32-page comic released along with the app? The only answer I've got is...it's not that simple. There's an excellent essay posted on the Electricomics site which I highly recommend reading, co-written by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey and Alison Gazzard, concerned with the concept of digital "pages":

A useful definition of the page comes from Charles Hatfield (2009), who observes that:
‘The “page” (or planche, as French scholars have it, a term detonating the total design unit rather than the physical page on which it is printed) functions both as sequence and as object, to be seen and read in both linear and nonlinear, holistic fashion.’ 

[...]In the early stages of the Electricomics project, we’re in the process of transitioning from traditional page to digital planche. In this transition we’ve observed a tension between the comics creators, who take a holistic view of the page, and the technology partners, who are keen to deconstruct the page into separate assets and mechanics that will need to be implemented in the toolset.

When it comes to comics theory, listen to the French.  And Charles Hatfield; he's a sharp dude. The gist of what's being said here is, let go of whatever you thought a page was, at least in a physical sense. There are going to people coming to this from webcomics backgrounds and from ink-and-paper background (like yours truly), and from what the team's saying the tools should feel natural to all of us. Knowing Daniel and the research I've seen from him in the last month, they're covering their bases over there, and we've got nothing to worry about.

Join the Electricrew; pick up some badges over at Orphans of the Storm

Now the second part of all this is Electricosmos, which is a little bit less defined even than Electricomics. It's the publication and social network platform into which the toolset feeds. You make comics in the app, and you share them out...here. In this space, which doesn't have any rules as yet, or an interface, or an idea of exactly how right to your intellectual property are going work. They're working on it, though; if there's one dude you can bet your soul on being picky about IP laws and comics, it's Moore. There's a lot of work being done, they said, around contracts, given the online collaborative nature of the space they're building. Someone asked a question about content vetting, and got a reply that said "we're working on it, we'll get back to you in seven years." Not in those exact words, but that's the sentiment: the team is treading on such unfamiliar terrain at this point that they simply can't answer questions regarding how their network of multiple millions of creator-owned online comics is going to work when they haven't put the first tool into beta yet. The release of Electricosmos to the general market is a long way down the road. And it may never happen. It's a research project, not a commercial enterprise; failure is an entirely viable option. As Moore states in the interview found in the zine:

We may end up creating something that isn't technically a comic at all but that's not a bad thing.

Dare I say...Nemo?

Visit the project at www.electricomics.net

Comics Studies - Stuck Happily in Transition

It's too damn easy to get caught up in routines of thought.

We as scholars have a job, don't we? We're meant to break new ground, come up with new ways of approaching problems, and come up with new problems where nobody had considered them before. If this is so, the biggest threat to our success is falling into routine and ceasing to revolutionize our thinking. "Ossifying" as I just heard it phrased at London's "Transitions" comics research symposium.

Comics refuse to settle. In every iteration of the form through history they've sought to outdo themselves, climbing over each other in a race to reach untouched conceptual and technical soil. This shouldn't be surprising; it's a statement that holds true for most if not all forms of art that developed through the 20th century, be they visual or written forms. Initially driven by the pure capitalist motivation to sell, innovation in comics took a turn for the radical when the Comics Code threatened the industry with stagnation and hasn't slowed down since. So why, then, am I hearing concern voiced in the halls of Birkbeck University of London, that the bones of our field are stiffening?

Great straight-up polemic from Ann D'Orazio on what comics scholars do and don't study. 1/2 #transitions5
— Jason Dittmer (@RealJDittmer) October 25, 2014

I can't say I necessarily agree with D'Orazio. After all, in the past 7 hours I've also been recipient to a wealth of theory and analysis that has jumpstarted my interest in new directions of study and renewed my faith in the field that I'm attempting to enter. Her polemic felt oddly incongruous, claiming disciplinary stagnation in the midst of a symposium entitled "new directions in comics studies". I do understand D'Orazio's concern. Studies of comics from a purely literary direction fall appallingly short in dealing with a text that is more than purely textual. Studies that corral comics within the traditions of Art History and expect it to play by the rules will almost inevitably end up struggling with matters of multiplex authorship and unconventional paths of influence, unless they stay strictly upon the beaten path of the accepted canon of Spiegelman and Satrapi, maybe dipping cautious toes into something like Herriman's Krazy Kat.

These disciplines have tools to offer Comics Studies, to be sure. Literary theory is, by nature, multidisciplinary. It deals with and is applied to the literary, but it often begins elsewhere: gender theory, sociology, philosophy, aesthetics, and so on. Comics can be literary, D'Orazio states, but they are not literature. Neither are they art, though they are undoubtedly an art form. Art History, a field that has developed to study the creation and impact of images in a canonized tradition, is not entirely equipped to deal with the network of image, text, book, labour, reproduction process, distribution, consumption, and criticism that makes up the scope of Comics Studies (I'm sure I missed some areas; please add them in the comments). I think what D'Orazio is saying is that we can apply literary theory and aesthetic theory to comics, but we must be careful not to stop there and get comfortable. I agree. But if she's worried that we've already stopped and settled into a holding pattern of platitudes on the form I'm afraid she's sorely mistaken.

We have the advantage not only of being a young and recently institutionalized field but also of being a field with a constantly and dynamically growing body of subject matter before us. We also have the advantage of being a field rife with creators, with figures like McCloud and Horrocks both working creatively as industry cartoonists and critically as key theorists in the field. Comics-specific theory is emerging to tackle the ways the changing industry is changing the form. We're standing with our feet planted firmly on either side of a historical transition as the Age of Mechanical Reproduction gives way to the Age of Digital Reproduction. The possibilities are endless, and if #Transitions5 has proven anything it's that if you fill a room with comics scholars they will all come to comics from a different direction. We're not exactly Shakespeare scholars here. There's no way we'll ever run out of material to study, unless your conception of the field begins and ends with McCay or Caniff, in which case I say to you WAKE UP! We live in an unfolding tapestry of webcomics, motion comics, hypercomics, comics that occupy whole galleries, hand-printed comics, comics dissertations, 3D comics, poetry comics, journalism comics, info comics, comics with stoner-hipster bears quoting Bukowski...

...if we're getting bored, we're doing it wrong.

Comics Review: Ink Brick - A Journal of Comics Poetix

Take a minute with me here to look at one of the most unique projects to debut at TCAF this year (the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, for those of you not in the know). I don't use the word "unique" a whole lot, but in this case I will indulge my vocabulary and let it stand. I came across the Ink Brick project on Twitter a few months back, after having a call for papers for comics-poetry critical writing forwarded to me by a prof and realizing I had no idea what this was about. A little digging turned up Ink Brick and its small crew of editorial and artistic geniuses: Paul K. Tunis (really great guy to chat with), Alexander Rothman (equally cordial fellow), Gary Sullivan, and Bianca Stone.

Alexander Rothman (left) and Paul Tunis (right), looking about
as stoked on life as they were when I met them at TCAF

My Google search for "comics poetry" turned up a world that I'd been entirely ignorant of. Which was a lot of my TCAF experience this year, really. When it comes to the end of the comics spectrum that isn't superheroes, alternative and (dare I say) "art" comics, I am largely in the dark, which is ironic considering that's the direction my own work is headed. TCAF was an eye-opening experience directly resulting in the extensive reading list memo on my phone, and my search for comics poetry was no different. I began uncovering names I'd never heard before: David Morice, Warren Craghead, Joe Brainard, people in comics I'd never heard of who are doing amazingly innovative work. That in a nutshell is what sets poetry comics apart for me. They're going somewhere. I still enjoy a good superhero yarn, but a good superhero yarn is getting increasingly hard to find. The genre is stale. It's played-out, with little to no room for artists to grow. If I were to pull a mission statement from Ink Brick's website, I would choose this: "seek to foster work that explores those liminal spaces between the drawn image and the written word." It's concise and ambitious, and it recognizes a fertile ground between forms waiting to be sown with new ideas. I'm willing to drop the word "unique" on behalf of Ink Brick - A Journal of Comics Poetix because I don't know that there was another project at TCAF as actively pursuing innovation in the comics form.

The first issue of Ink Brick is a beautiful book. It's well-printed on sturdy paper, but it's not huge and it's not glamourous. That appeals to me. It's an object that doesn't get in the way of its content, which is important, because its content is wonderful. I found myself flipping back over pages, re-reading poems multiple times to try and unravel the threads binding word and image. I've read too few comics that build that desire for exploration in me. I'd like to see some critical work built into Ink Brick; the title, after all, is Journal. While I was in Toronto I took an afternoon to sit down in a pub and read Descant's recent comics issue, #164 - Cartooning Degree Zero, cover to cover. Sean Rogers was the guest editor for that issue, and he and I were presenting on the same panel at the CSSC conference. I had the opportunity to tell I thought he had hit the mark, struck a perfect balance of contemporary Canadian comics work and critical writing on the form. I would love to see Ink Brick find that same balance. If there's one thing I'm finding about the people involved in the small but passionate poetry comics community it's that they're respectful and well-informed. They understand the structures they're playing with, the existing traditions they can either build on or circumvent, and the work of other comics poets who have come before them. It's a strength that ought to be included in a journal of comics poetix.

It's a beautiful book

I've done some reading in this area, enough to set me straight about where poetry comics stand right now, and as is my wont I have compiled links for you. I suggest you start with what I'm calling Bianca Stone's comics poetix manifesto, followed by a post by Stone on thethepoetry.com containing an excerpt by Tamryn Bennett, the only poetry-comics-focused academic I've come across so far and (from what I've read) a pretty solid theorist. Read this interview with the crew responsible for Ink Brick, and this interview with Canadian cartoonist Seth as he discusses the connections he's always drawn between comics and poetry. Finally, take a look at Comics Alliance's overview of the shared history of poetry and cartooning. After that, you're on your own. Exploration is what this all seems to be about, so I'll leave you to it.

I look forward to seeing the work done in poetry comics these next few years, and I look forward to seeing it become something important to the field of Comics Studies. It's going to take a peculiar sort of comics scholar to tackle comics poetix (a term which, for the record, I think we should keep), someone who understands the intricacies and the basic tenets of language and image, someone who can get through a conference presentation without mentioning Scott McCloud. I've seen too much basic scholarship this last weekend, papers written from a perspective of literary review that do little more than recount the themes and structure of a narrative. We need to start building a focus on analysis, not regurgitation. This is not to say that there is no good scholarly work being done right now, but it is to say that we need to match pace with the innovations happening in comics creation if we are to maintain the relevance of our field.

Sacred & Sequential at the Kelowna Art Gallery!

As a few of you are aware, I'm a part of a scholarly group called Sacred & Sequential, intent on exploring the intersection of religion and the comics art form. A. David Lewis brought me onto this project back in the winter with the group of gathering a scholarly community around the medium and its confluence with religious scholarship. At this point I'm pirating words from my LinkedIn profile (there are only so many ways to describe our mission), but our aim is to provide informed analysis and nuanced commentary on the topic of religion as it appears in or in relation to these graphic narratives. As both a cartoonist and academic I've got a unique toolset in this field of study; I can use the comics form as a pedagogical tool to present ideas visually. I see great value in creating a common ground in form between the subject and the critical discourse. Not to harp on a perhaps overused piece of comics theory, but Scott McCloud has used educational comics to great effect in the past. There's a lot of teaching potential in creating a visual accompaniment to textual material, and that's exactly what A. Dave and I are up to right now. He's dsitilled a portion of his dissertation into eight pages of tightly scripted goodness, and I get to put my pens to it and turn into panels and stuff. And now, for...

...some great news! I submitted this project a month back to the Kelowna Art Gallery's Superheroes and Supervillains show, and it's been accepted! So not only will the comic go up on Emory University's culture and religion blog Sacred Matters by summer's end, but come January 2015 you can go see the original page on display in Kelowna, BC among numerous other works of both superheroic and villainous disposition. It's going to be one heck of a show. Bring your capes.

If you'd like to see more of what Sacred & Sequential has done thus far, I suggest you check out Beth Davies-Stofka's article on comics and the Bible, which was recently picked up by the Huffington Post. We've got a variety of different projects in the works; you can follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/sacredandsequential, and I shall do my utmost to keep you appraised here as those works come to fruition.

Sacred & Sequential on Twitter:
A. David Lewis
David McConeghy
Jeff Brackett
Elizabeth Coody
Michael J. Altman (Sacred Matters)
Jason Tondro
Christine Kraemer
James F. McGrath
Kori Pacyniak
Dan Clanton
Jeff Jackson
Andrew Tripp

...and others, but it's hard to keep track of all of us.

Cheers!

My First Encounter with the Popular Culture Association - PCA/ACA 2014, Chicago

April was a whirlwind. It's the only suitable way to describe it. The winds began on the 8th, in fact, my last post and the international Day of DH. That was the first day of setup for my BFA grad exhibition. The following week was a week of 18 hour work days as I emptied, cleaned, painted, and constructed my exhibition space. Most nights I slept at school, crashed on a couch in the studio or a corner of the floor or wherever I could find that security would let me get some shut-eye. T'was a long week.

Cranking out @gorillazband and @julytalk all night in the lab while processing the #anaglyph #3D prints I'll be hanging tomorrow.
— Asher J. Klassen (@AsherJKlassen) April 14, 2014

Tuesday, April 15th: the day I was destined to fly to Chicago for the Popular Culture Association conference. Monday night at around 10pm my good friend TP walked into the studio and made me realize just how much I wasn't going to be finished hanging my show by the time the last bus left campus. So I packed up and headed home, showered, packed, and caught the 11:30 bus back to campus. By 7am the show was up and ready to go, and I had a flight to catch. I took the bus from campus to the airport, hopped on a plane, and 10 hours later touched down in The Windy City.

Sitting in Pearson International wondering big things. Like what I'm going to eat when I get to #Chicago. #pcaaca14
— Asher J. Klassen (@AsherJKlassen) April 15, 2014

This is good, yeah? I'm in Chicago, at my hotel, settled in by 11pm-ish...and supposed to present at 9:45 the next morning. At which point it hit me just how ill-prepared I was for this whole endeavour. I sat down on the hotel sofa and started editing, and suddenly it was six. In the morning. How did that happen? Well, I thought, I'll just take an hour-long nap. And this is part that I haven't talked much about until now.

Because I woke up at two in the afternoon.

I might kill the next hotel alarm clock that lets me down.
— Asher J. Klassen (@AsherJKlassen) April 17, 2014

Needless to say, I was devastated. As far as I was concerned I'd just blown it at my first big academic conference, my academic debut if you will. I dragged myself out of the hotel and down the street to the conference centre to beg forgiveness from our area chair. Dr. Wandtke was incredibly gracious about the whole thing, understanding of the negative effects that a string of all-nighters and a cross-continental flight will have on punctuality. He had, he told me, a Friday afternoon panel with only two presenters on it that he could fit me into. Long story short, I moved some flights around and made that happen; a little pricey, sure, but damned if I was going to leave Chicago without giving that presentation.

This was all followed up immediately by a moment that made me realize just how important community is in the world of comics scholarship. I walked out of the conference room with what felt distinctly like a new lease on life, and nearly bumped into John Lent, EIC of the International Journal of Comic Art. Twitter fiend that I am, I knew that IJOCA was up for an Eisner; the nominations had been announced the day before, and I'd seen Dr. Lent's name on the list during my layover at Pearson. Without missing a beat I introduced myself and congratulated him on the nomination, which was enough to get him to stop and talk. We were promptly joined by Chris Couch (University of Massachusetts), and I suddenly found myself in conversation with two men who were referring to Scott McCloud and Denis Kitchen by first names as old friends and colleagues. Mind. Blown. I cleared the awe from my head in time to answer a series of questions from Lent about my topic, which prompted Couch to ask if I had a background in Judaic Studies. "No, art history", I said, all the while thinking, "I'm an undergrad surrounded by giants. I don't have a background in anything; I'm stilling working on finishing the thing that will get me into what will be my background...". And then John Lent asked me to send him my paper, and I don't remember the rest of what happened.

Well, alright. That's not entirely true. With a light heart and a head full of dreams (as one ought to have when encountering success in The Windy City), I made my way to Lou Malnati's, the city's top-rated deep-dish pizza joint. It was there I discovered that Chicago deep-dish is a beast to be reckoned with; that you cannot be a foodie in that town and avoid sausage; and that the locally brewed Pale Ales there are to die for. Seriously. Amazing local beer scene. Even the hotel lobby had a dozen or so local brews on tap, each deliciously different from the next. My culinary experience there was wonderful, but frankly I blame the people. Food is always better with fellowship, and I had that a-plenty. I met up with my Twitter acquaintance Heather Urbanski, also a presenter at PCA/ACA, and found a whole new group of people to hang out with. We went out for sushi one evening, and I realized that I am, in fact, a terrible British Columbian. My province is up to its eyeballs in sushimania, and I can barely tell sashimi from a California roll (okay, that's a lie; I can very easily tell sashimi from a California roll, but I have to make my point somehow). To sum up my experience with Chicago's food scene:

• Discovered Chicago's famous deep-dish pie (the sausage, man...)
• Reveled in the local beer scene
• Had an awkward sushi experience (made better by excellent conversation)
• Ate a cheeseburger at a literal hole-in-the-wall (Billy Goat Tavern; seriously, it's in a wall under a bridge)
• Consumed a lot of...no, we'll say "too much", Dunkin' Donuts

I feel that this sums up my time at #pcaaca14 flawlessly. pic.twitter.com/sir9om6B4U
— Asher J. Klassen (@AsherJKlassen) April 18, 2014

Did I mention comics?

Yeah, there were also comics. I made a point of walking down to Graham Cracker Comics, which is an excellent shop if you're ever in Chicago, and picking up...well, a bunch of stuff. I was able to track down Astonishing X-Men #2, the second-to-last Joss Whedon issue I need before I own the complete run. I snagged the new Serenity title (because it's shiny, why else?), the much lauded Sex Criminals by Hickman, and Lumberjanes, a title I've been longing to get my hands on since Noelle Stevenson first mentioned it on Twitter. It's all proved to be excellent reading. And Gotham Central...that series, never ceases to amaze me, never will. Read it, you crime comics people reading this post, if you haven't already. It will rock your world.

Anyway, that's about it. I did successfully present my paper, in a panel on Comics and Education. You don't get a lot of questions in question period when you're the only guy talking about Jewish narrative tradition in a room full of people interested in pedagogy, but them's the breaks when you've slept through your alarm and had to reschedule. I flew back Saturday instead of Friday, having shuffled my flights to make the panel a possibility. I landed at 7:30pm, and went straight back to school to attend the opening of my BFA grad show. I was a bit out of it; I wandered around the gallery for some time, going "I've been in three different international airports today, where am I now?". This, ladies and gentlemen, is my life.

Day of DH 2014 - Notes from the Gutter

Well it's April 8th here on this fine planet of ours, and that means that it's the Day of Digital Humanities (or "DH" for short). I'm going to keep this short: you can follow my research progress on the other blog I'm running today, "Notes from the Gutter", as I use the Comic Book Markup Language, written by Indiana University's John Walsh, to encode a page of Nelvana Comics. I hope you'll take a minute to check out the work I'm doing, it's pretty cool stuff.

Cheers!
Asher

Cover for Adrian Dingle's Nelvana of the Northern Lights