Uncanny Parallels

by KEVIN SILVER :: JUL 27, 2007 :: COMMENTS (0)

Last week I had the pleasure to catch Scott McCloud speaking on his 50 state Making Comics tour. His book Understanding Comics is classic. The cross-over between comics and the filed of experience design (inclusive of interaction design–especially IxD–and information architecture) is uncanny. It seems that this relationship continues in his new book Making Comics; which I have yet to buy. Scott’s passion is definitely comics and he is an astute observer and scholar of comics form. Though I have never been much of a comic book reader, I do love comic strips in the paper. So I felt a bit out of place at the talk, I did find some–again–uncanny crossover between Scott’s world of comics and mine.

Scott started off by describing comic’s form. This included defining a few foundational qualities: moment, frame, image, word, flow. He demonstrated through example of how the pace can be slowed down to focus on the little moments within a story or how the focus (frame) can be pulled back to show the whole setting. He implied that word and pictures are equally important, they both work to tell the story. In further delving into comic’s form he showed us examples from European and Japanese comic books and contrasted them to US comics books. There are some very distinct differences, but US comics books are being influenced by the Europeans and especially the Japanese. European comic books tend to have detailed environments, the background becomes an important part of the story. They strive to create worlds, a more holistic and detailed experience. Where as the Japanese is much more immersive, in that you focus on the characters, the mundane aspects of the story and even the silent moments. Also,the Japanese use archetypes to distinguish the characters in the stories.

Scott called comics the raw form of expression and in the US there are four camps that a comic artist might fall into: Beauty (visual mastery of the craft; form over content), Form (tinkerer, but loyal to the form–the medium; willing take it a part and put it back together), Content (story comes first) and Truth (honest and created for recreation or fun). McCloud says he falls into the form camp. He is a scientist of comics and is concerned with its essential character. If I applied this to UxD, then I think I would also fall into the Form camp as well.

He finished off with talking about making comics for the web. Scott mentioned comics temporal map and how they show time as the story unfolds. Another interesting thing is how he described comics evolution and his concept of durable mutation; form survives without compromising its identity. He spent some time talking about the non-spatial aspect of putting comics on the paper. Comics as we know it today is defined by the constraints of the shape it’s presented on: paper. Early comics have been placed on columns by the Romans, on tapestries and on walls as seen in ancient Egypt. Mostly comics were depicted in a single unbroken line, which is very different from the form we see today.

On the web comics can form various shapes. You need to view the screen not as a constraint but as a window that can move, creating an unlimited canvas. Astutely, Scott compared this with Jeff Han's work and Microsoft’s Surface. The most intriguing example he showed us is this: http://www.e-merl.com/pocom.htm (also thought this would make an awesome site map and be sure to check out the rest in the hyper-comic section). This is nothing new, Jef Raskin described an interface like this in the Humane Interface (ZoomWorld), but one has to wonder if this is truly the way of the future, especially with the continual acceptance and push towards multi-touch interface. It’s amazing when you remove the form from it’s constraints or even predetermined shape–invariably you create something new and different: a durable mutation, possibly.

Finally, Scott wrapped up with talking about stories. He told us that desire make a story run. Stories have to do with the characters always trying to get something or go somewhere. They are a journey of desire. A story begins at the birth of a desire and concludes with either fulfillment or not. I was floored by this, and it was too uncanny at the parallels that can be extracted, namely: story telling is akin to design an experience or even more tangible an interaction.

When I finish up my usual stacks of books lying around, I’m going to have to run out and grab Making Experiences...uh, meant to write Making Comics!

tags: EXPERIENCE DESIGN, INTERACTION DESIGN, MAKING COMICS, SCOTT MCCLOUD, UNDERSTANDING COMICS, UXD

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