Buffy : Season 8

One of the curious side effects of digital media as related to comics is the advent of ‘motion comics’, a form that came to public prominence in 2008 with adaptions for Watchmen and Batman: Mad Love. Both were produced by Warner Brothers to promote films, self-explanatory in the case of the former, and The Dark Knight in the case of the latter.

Despite my interest in transmedia storytelling, I have largely sidestepped this new way to read, but with the release of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight Motion Comic, I decided to take my first good look. In viewing the sixteen “issues” collected on the standard DVD – the set includes a Blu Ray disc as well – I kept asking myself, Who is this for?

Motion comics, essentially, entails adapting print comics to digital video through selective use of animation and, typically, the addition of sound. If that description makes you think of crude animation, you aren’t alone. In a review of the Astonishing X-Men motion comic at Comics Alliance, Chris Sims explicitly compares the medium to 1960s era Marvel cartoons, underscoring the point with a clip from an animated version of The Hulk (”Astonishing X-Men: Motion Comics, Why Bother?”, 9 August 2010).

As insightful as this comparison is regarding the look and feel of motion comics animation, it also obscures the ways in which the form is meant to be something other than cartoons. What most distinguishes motion comics from straight animation is a fidelity to visual narrative structured and framed by pages and panels. This commitment at least partly explains why figures and backgrounds in motion comics remain largely static. The viewer is propelled through the narrative via changes in perspective, or ‘page turns’, and by movement between and within panels, rather than by fully animating the story.

In the Buffy Season Eight Motion Comic panels slide, drop, and fade into and out of frame. The ‘camera’ also moves and zooms to shift reader attention from panel-to-panel. Movement of and between panels, in fact, constitutes the most significant form of motion within the comic. Characters, by contrast, look like paper dolls with limited articulation of limbs and heads and limited movement of facial features. Elements such as wind and water are also animated, but it is between the panels that Season Eight is most noticeably put into motion.

Both Sims and Geoffrey Long at guttter geek, reference Scott McCloud’s discussion of “closure” from Understanding Comics (HarperPerennial, 1993) as a way to explain the effect of this forced movement on viewers (”Motion Comics: A State of the Art”, October 2008). Whereas print comics not only allow, but, following McCloud, depend, on readers to complete the action as they shift between panels, motion comics seek to do this for the reader. In a traditional comic, a movement such as Buffy lifting her scythe would be mentally completed by the reader as they look at one panel where the weapon is pointed level or down and then another where it has been raised. In a motion comic, those movements are incorporated into the visual narrative through simple articulation of character limbs, or by changing the orientation of a panel. What might take two panels in print, can now take place in one.

Long is also concerned with closure as it relates to the passage of time. In print comics, an artist can use panel shapes and page layouts to imply longer or shorter durations of time, and writers can use dialogue and the implied presence or absence of sound to hold or release reader attention, but, ultimately, a reader reads at their own pace, forging a relationship with the creators to define the time-frame for a narrative. In a motion comic, that time-frame is standardized, and is no longer subject to negotiation between reader and creator.

In this way, then, motion comics engages readers in ways more akin to movies or television than comics, raising, again, the question of who and what the form is for. And in that regard, while motion comics may be comparable to other moving image media, in its relationship to print, the form it most closely follows is the audio book.

Like audio books, motion comics are not so much adaptations as translations of print works to a different medium. Both promise recitations of the original work. In contrast, live action and fully animated versions of books, whether comics or straight prose, necessarily require substantive changes, reflecting differences between how content typically works on the page as opposed to on screens. However, the translation of prose to audio results in a qualitatively different product than does the translation of static images and printed words to digital video.

Audio books belong to long-standing traditions of turning written words into spoken, and to telling or reading stories aloud. They are electronic, portable versions of storytime, for kids and adults alike. Most importantly, they allow people to ‘read’ without having to engage hands and eyes. They have an obvious appeal for people who don’t have time to read in print as much as they would like, and to people who have time for listening, but not for holding and scanning a traditional book, or e-book.

Motion comics, by contrast, require the same kind of engagement as actual comics, possibly including one’s hands if a title is being read with a mobile device. If an audio book makes it possible for me to be read to whenever I want, a motion comic lets me read digitally while someone else does the swiping, zooming, and re-orienting.

Of course, many people like being read to. The appeal of having someone else, effectively, flipping through the pages of a book for you is more elusive.

Buffy Season Eight is on my pull list, and as a regular reader I did find the motion comic to be a convenient way to reread the beginning of the series (the motion comic only covers 19 episodes in the 40 issue print run). Having said that, I would not have paid the $34.99 list price for the DVD/Blu Ray package just to review comics I had previously read. I can, and do, re-read my standard comics in order to re-orient myself within a narrative, and it is no trouble to do so. I imagine that this is true for most people who follow monthly series.

What’s the Creative Potential of Static Images?

A product like the Season Eight motion comic seems aimed primarily at Buffy collectors and completists, and possibly at fans who have otherwise stayed away from the comics. Collectors and people looking for additional ways to own or engage with particular characters beyond, or outside of, print, seem to make up much of the intended market for motion comics, at least judging by the number of transmedia properties that have been rendered in that form, from X-Men to Watchmen.

There are cases, such as Brian Michael Bendis’s and Alex Maleev’s short-lived Spider-Woman for Marvel, where a motion comic is released not so much as an opportunity for collectors to acquire another piece of a multi-media character, but more as a way to widen the pool of readers. The premise being that additional sales can be gained from offering an alternative to people who are reluctant to invest in the traditional reading of a series, or who are interested, but resistant to adding to their comics storage problems.

As indicated in The Wall Street Journal, corporate rights holders such as Marvel, Warner Brothers, and, in the case of Buffy, Fox, primarily see motion comics as a means to squeeze additional profit from well-established titles, characters, and creators, particularly when working from already existing comics (Sarah McBride, “Web Draws on Comics: Shirts Boost Batman”, 18 July 2008). The producers of these works see consumers more than they see readers, and given the attractiveness of making something new out of something old, one of the central questions to be addressed for the future of motion comics is in production values.

No matter how carefully a motion comic is adapted from print, the creators will always be working from art that is meant to be static, and, in many cases, at a different size and resolution than it will end up being on a television or on an iPhone. There are a number of panels from Buffy Season Eight where figures that were originally drawn as if viewed from distance, are shown in close-up on the DVD. The level of detail in facial features, for example, is very different in each of these cases. There are also shots in the motion comic where the movement of a character’s hair or limb looks like a piece of paper has been cut with scissors and then moved back-and-forth, or something that I could easily do myself by tracing from a comic and making my own paper dolls.

Similarly, there are always going to be characters, and lines of dialogue, that work well on the page, where the reader imagines how they move and they sound, and also decides how much time needs to be spent on such imagining, but appear poorly conceived when subject to animation, especially of a rudimentary kind. In Buffy Season Eight there are a number of fantasy creatures, and more than a few vampires, who seem silly when given eyes that move or a limited of range of motion in their extremities. An argument can be made that these ‘flaws’ are actually part of the charm, or part of the art, of the form, but one area that seems crucial to me is in the casting of the voice actors.

Audio books are, almost by nature, best read by a small cast, and typically by one person, otherwise the experience starts to become more audio play than audio book. However, while having a single person reading a book may work for straight prose, it’s difficult to imagine that working very well in comics, where much of the narrative is in pictures rather than in words, and what is being read is almost exclusively dialogue from and between different characters.

One of the main problems with the Buffy Season Eight DVD is that all of the actors hired to voice the core cast of characters sound too young. This is not a comment on their professionalism, but on their appropriateness for these roles.

Scanning reader reviews at iTunes and on Amazon, the quality of the voice work is a repeated subject of comment regarding motion comics. While this maybe particularly the case with a title like Buffy, where the roles originated in live action, even where readers are not likely to have a specific actor’s voice in mind for a character, they will often have a clear idea of how someone should sound based on what they know from the books and from, in some cases, years of engagement with a storyworld.

Getting the voices right on a motion comic seems essential, and the less that is invested in achieving that end, the less likely it is that readers will be satisfied by what they hear, let alone with what they see. Whether hiring the best available voice talent fits within the economic models that underlie the development of motion comics or not will become more apparent when and if the form develops a reliable consumer base.

Most of what’s currently available in motion comics is adapted from print. There are a few examples of both original motion comics, such as Broken Saints (2001), and transmedia projects that incorporate motion comics from the beginning, Godkiller (2009), for example, and it is in these kinds of works that the artistic possibilities of the form are most likely to be realized. Maybe one sign of that is in Godkiller‘s writer, Matt Pizzolo’s insistence that his work is an “illustrated film” and not a “motion comic” (Scott Thill, “Post-apocalyptic Godkiller Comic Emerges as ‘Illustrated Film’”, Wired, 6 October 2009). Markers of difference like this are one way to cultivate reader interest and also a means to shape how works are received.

Whether “motion comic” or “illustrated film”, the future of this medium lies in how much creative potential there is in the use of essentially static images in a moving image format and marrying those images with sound. Part of that potential is with readers. If readers don’t find satisfaction in the experience, if they would rather read in print and watch in live action or animation, then motion comics will become the digital equivalent of the film strip, an interesting artifact of a particular period of media production, and not much more. On the other hand, if a readership does develop, even a cultish one, then what we are seeing now will be the crude beginnings of a new art form.