Deeply Dave Review

I mentioned Michael Grover's Deeply Dave webcomic a while back as one that I had recommended as a formal Eisner Award nominee when I was a judge. I said, "It was an interesting story and utilized a lot of elements that you don't see as often as I'd like in webcomics... music, animation, infinite scroll... all the things that webcomics can take advantage of that print comics cannot." Grover's other webcomics since then have followed in a similar vein, doing things that can only be done in webcomics. His most recent one is called Jake Spooky and concluded in December. So I have to admit that I was rather surprised to learn that Deeply Dave is now coming out in printed form.

As I said, Grover has taken full advantage of the webcomics medium to do things that can't be done in print. You could certainly tell the same story, but you'd have to make some inherent concessions. There'd be no music, for example. Well, fine, it's mostly atmospheric in nature anyway. And you'd have to lose the animations. Well, okay, any of the animations that are really critical could be broken out into a individual panels if you NEED to get a point across, but most of them are simple cycle animations anyway. And what about the infinite scroll? Well, the story is just vertical so you could break it into tall page chunks without too much re-work, I suppose. And that's basically what's been done. They've taken the story and plugged it into a book format, and then made adjustments for the elements that simply cannot transfer directly across mediums.

I suspect, though, that that seriously underplays the amount of work that's gone into making that transfer, though.

Most of the webcomic panels are animated GIFs that use several animation frames each. Even if you just took those and scaled them for a book format, which of the four or six or eight or however many frames do you choose for the print version? Any one of the frames might look perfectly fine when it only shows up on your screen for a fraction of a second, but it might look bad or even unreadable when it sits static on the printed page. How many of the animations convey something that you'd need to figure out an entirely different manner of conveying? This one panel, for example...

... had to be switched out to six panels in print and still only shows the changes in one direction. The story, as I remembered it, was basically the same but when I started trying to make direct comparison, there are significant sequences that were entirely re-done because they simply would not transfer well.

When I first came across Walt Kelly's Pogo, it was via one of the 1960s' trade paperbacks. I recall noting that it worked better graphically than other newsprint comics I'd seen that had been made available in that format. There weren't loads of uncomfortable dead space or squished panels or any of the other things that underpaid graphic artists did to force the strips into a page format that were absolutely not designed for. I found out later that Kelly did the work himself, frequently extending panel artwork, cropping and re-lettering, and generally re-designing each and every page to made sure it presented well in the trade paperback format. It no doubt added a boatload of work to his agenda, and likely took much longer than his publishers would've liked, but he wanted readers to experience Pogo in the best light possible, regardless of which format they came across.

I feel like Grover has done that with Deeply Dave. He's re-told the story in a form that works better for print. It still has a vertical feel to it (the book is printed "sideways" with the spine at the top to give a much-taller-than-it-is-wide layout) and he's incorporated entirely new elements not present in the webcomic (like different end papers at the front and back, a rambling copyright page, and so on) that help feed the narrative. Unlike a lot of webcomics, he has not just slapped the artwork into a basic page layout and called it a day; this book really has as much effort put into as the original webcomic did.

I'll be honest; I am still partial to the webcomic version. I like the music and the animations and the infinite scroll. Now that could be because that's how I first encountered the story. Or it could be because I literally wrote the book on webcomics and I'm biased to that format. But regardless of the format, the story is fun and entertaining. I said a couple years ago that I wish more people made comics like Grover does, and I still would love to see that. He does comics that I would genuinely have thought could not be done well in print, but he has certainly proven me wrong on that front!

Deeply Dave is being published by Henry Holt and Co. It will be available in hardcover on June 10 for $14.99 US. The publisher provided an advance copy of this book for my review.

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