You sit down to watch television. You turn on one of your local stations, and see some promos that they're going to be starting one of your favorite movies in just a few minutes. As you settle in, a black screen comes up with white lettering that says something to the effect of: "This film has been modified from its original version. It has been re-formatted to fit your television screen and has been edited for content and commercial interruptions." Then the movie begins.

The reason they put that message up is simple: television was not the delivery mechanism that the movie was designed to. The movie was designed to be shown in a movie theater. Different aspect ratio, different business model, different environment, different technological equipment... Yes, you can technically display the same movie on a TV, but it wasn't made to be shown that way. Similarly, TV shows are not designed to be shown in a movie theater. Or on a cell phone. Or on your computer.

People, on the whole, seem to understand this at some intuitive level. They can accept commercial breaks during a movie they watch on television. They can accept the pan/scan editing to adjust for the different aspect ratio. They can accept incredibly bad dubbing that have, since 1986, made Ferris Bueller envious of Cameron's "piece of tin." People know this is inherently going to be a different experience than what the movie-makers originally intended.

So why do people NOT get this when it comes to comics?

Comic creators, by and large, know how their work is going to be presented. There was an old "rule" in writing comic scripts that you couldn't end a sentence with a period because there was no guarantee it would actually get printed. It wasn't a naive way to generate excitement in the story; it was a manner to work around a technical limitation of the printing technology they had available. Likewise, the comics back in the day were colored using lots of solid, bright colors because they didn't have the capability then to publish anything more nuanced.

This latter issue began raising its head several years ago when printing and paper technology had advanced considerably. There were more than a fair share of complaints fired that reprints of old books looked garish because these bright colors were intensified with better ink and whiter paper. It didn't look quite right because it was being presented in a format it wasn't originally intended to be presented in.

The same holds true for online comics. Yes, I can sit here at my computer and scan every page of a comic and post it online. I can even reconfigure the page scans so that they're all embedded in one file. But it's not going to be an entirely good reading experience, regardless of whether that's a PDF or I run it through a Flash player of some kind or whatever, because the original was not intended to be read like that. Of course a gorgeous page layout from Neal Adams is going to suffer when it's read on a computer -- he created it to be read in a pamphlet comic!

Adams is actually a good person to bring up here. Setting aside his incredible illustration skills, he's very conscious of how his work is being presented and adjusts his designs accordingly. Before his famed work on Batman, he was in DC's coloring department. He spent quite a deal of time and energy learning about what was and wasn't possible with the printing technology available at that time. His studies led him to realize that marvel had a different deal with the printers than DC did that allowed them to use more colors in their books, making them look more sophisticated visually. Adams was able to take the ideas to his superiors and eventually get a better coloring deal for DC -- because he knew how things were being produced. Years later, when DC started to reprint his Batman stories in a nice, hardcover format, he opted to go back and recolor them all himself (for free, I believe) because he knew that the printing technology had changed sufficiently that the old coloring would not translate well to these new printings. And if you look at those books, you can see that, sure enough, the couple of stories Adams didn't recolor look decidedly muddier than everything else. Not that Adams changed the actual colors themselves, but he utilized the new coloring technology to achieve the same effects he created using a decidedly different -- and not immediately transferable -- technology decades earlier.

So when you look at marvel's new Digital Comics Unlimited books, or if you illegally download scans of the same books from a torrent, you're reading a story in a manner in which it wasn't intended to be read. Likewise, if you go to Wowio or wherever, you're going to be reading comics that were designed to be printed, and your satisfaction is going to be less than what's possible.

So, is it possible to write comics for an online venue? Absolutely, but very few people are doing it.

One of the obvious things that should be addressed is that computer monitors are formatted horizontally, instead of vertically. But it really requires more than just turning your art board 90 degrees! There's an issue web designers need to focus on as well: namely, that not everyone has the same size monitor. That means your online comic should work and be easily read regardless of whether somebody's using a 15 or 20 inch screen. You need to realize that some thinner lines could get lost and smaller text might be illegible. Take a quick flip through the stories on Zuda and you can see a range of people who, while they've all adopted the horizontal format, still have varying degrees of success with the online format irrespective of the quality of the narrative itself.

So here's the thing. Many, many more comics were written and designed to be presented in a format other than online than were made for the web. That's mostly just a function of how long the web has been around compared to pamphlet comics. But as long as creators continue developing comics with a "traditional" presentation in mind, their success is going to be limited in the online world. The problem isn't that the delivery mechanisms online are flawed; it's that people are using them to deliver the wrong material. Comics of any sort need to be created to take advantage of the unique properties of how they're being created to be truly effective.

What this all means (coupled with yesterday's notes) is that as long as it's easier to read paper than it is a monitor, most creators will develop their materials to the easier-on-the-eye format. And as long as most creators are creating works geared for print publication, web publication will remain a niche for a comparatively small band of enthusiasts. Meaning that your LCS is safe from the online "threat" for the time being.

Of course, that's not to say how long it will be before that changes, but I don't plan on doing any sooth-saying today!

Most of the decent-sized traditional comic publishers have now officially thrown their hats into the online comics ring. And for every new entrant into the market, we see the same arguments trotted out again about whether this format will work, or that business model will be profitable, and whether this will hinder pamphlet sales, and on and on... Typically, you'll have proponents of web dissemination on one side citing low barriers to entry and creative freedom and laissez-faire economics; then you'll have another group citing that people don't like reading comics online because the format's all wrong and clicking a button or using a scroll wheel is more annoying than just turning a page and you can't carry around online comics in your back pocket.

But while both sides have some valid points, they're both completely missing some extremely fundamental issues.

Let's start with a technology lesson. Monitors of all sorts work in the same basic way: a beam of light is transmitted onto a plane of glass. Televisions and old CRTs use a single beam that shoots an imperceptably brief pulse to each spot on the screen over and over again, changing its color as needed. LCD monitors have what are essentially a series of miniature light bulbs that cover an entire screen's surface and are lit up as needed with the correct color. (For technical experts out there, yes, I fully realize I'm way over-simplifying this.) In either case, each portion of your screen is lit up by a pinpoint of light.

In effect, your computer screen (or cell phone screen or PDA screen or whatever) works like a pointlist painting. Or, to borrow an analogy perhaps more familiar, an old comic book. Lots of little points of color that, when you step back just a bit, look like an array of colors that form an image. (Irony: using a digital image of a Lichtenstein painting swiped from a comic book to illustrate the process of how a digital image is made.) What that means, though, is that when you look at your computer screen, your screen is showing you a series of dots over a specific space. A number of dots per inch. This is actually called "dot pitch" when referring to computer screens, but it's the same idea as the "dots per inch" (DPI) that printers refer to. (Again, for the tech savvy, I'm simplifying here.) Commercially available computer screens these days typically hover at around 100 pixels per inch; older monitors were on the low end in the 70s and 80s, newer ones upwards of 120.

Why does this matter to our discussion? Well, it matters because the average human eyeball can discern resolutions up to around 360 dots per inch. (Typically measured at a normal reading distance. Obviously, if you press your nose up against something, you're going to see finer details.) Ink jet printers print at around 300 dpi, and commericial personal laser printers tend to max out around 600. That means that you can't see about a third of the detail that's possible from a laser printer, and you'd have to look pretty closely at an ink jet image to start seeing the individual specs of ink. But that also means you can see about three times more clearly than what's presented to you on a computer screen.

Now we get to the point that most people miss in the online/print comics debate. If you're looking at a printed comic, it's probably run between 300-600 dpi. Your eyes are going to absorb as much detail as they can. If you're looking at a web comic, it's being presented at 100 dpi and your brain has to fill in the 200 or so extra pixels for every inch of the screen to complete the image. You're literally having to connect the dots to make a series of small squares into a recognizable shape, like a hand or a word. This is an extension of the notion of "closure" Scott McCloud talked about in Understanding Comics. You have to fill in the spaces left by the source. In the case of a printed comics, it's just the actions that happen "in the gutters." In the case of web comics, it's that plus the thousands upon thousands individual pixels needed to complete each image.

Think about it like this. If you look at a connect-the-dots image, you generally can't tell what the image is supposed to be. Your brain has to work to mentally connect those dots into an outline that's recognizable to you. The more dots you're given to start with, the easier it is to tell what the image is of. The fewer dots, the more abstract it looks, and the harder your brain has to work to make it into something understandable.

Scientific studies (by Jakob Nielsen, no less!) have been done that prove people read text off a screen 25% slower than off a sheet of paper. That extra time is what is taken up by your brain piecing together all those pixels into letters. Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) was identified as legitimate ongoing problem for people who spend more than two hours of their day looking at computer screens. Put simply, looking at a screen is harder on your eyes than looking at a sheet of paper.

So what?

So that means short-form comic strips are going be inherently easier to read online than longer-form comic books. (I'm not even going to start to address how the "traditional" comic strip format is also better suited to monitors than the "traditional" comic book format. That's another blog entry.) Readers, because of the eye strain, want to get in, read your piece, and get out. If they spend too much time reading in one place, their eyes are going to start to tire and dry out, making them physically uncomfortable, detracting from whatever possible enjoyment they might otherwise get out of the comic they're reading online.

You can forget portability, compatibility, usability, economics, and pretty much any other argument for either side until computer screen manufacturers start producing affordable, high-resolution monitors and a significant number of people start adopting them. The technology is there -- that's what HDTVs are after all -- but you still need to bring them down in price enough for people to start using them with their desktops and cellphones. Alternatively, you could theoretically convince people to start running their computer systems through their televisions, accessing the system with wireless input devices, but I personally think that's a steeper hill to climb.

Tomorrow, I'll see if I can address some of the other technological aspects of online versus print comics that no one else seems to have touched on yet.

The Zuda experiment continues apace, but they're upping the game a notch by actively ranking the various comics and presenting them in their ranking order. (Whereas previously, if you hadn't noticed, they were just being listed alphabetically by title.)

High Moon has maintained a reasonably comfortable lead by most stats so far, and it's currently sitting in the #1 spot. It's got the most votes, listed in more people's favorites, the most views, and the highest average rating. (Let me point out that a vote is a different criteria than being listed as a favorite. Casual viewers are not privy to vote counts.) Writer David Gallaher noted a little while back on his High Moon Production Blog why all three are significant...

First off, there is the vote... This is your number one decision making tool...

While you can only Vote for one comic at a time, you can Rate them all. This will be a crucial tool in close races where more nuance is needed in order to accurately express your opinions...

Jumping around that Comic Information section you'll see that we're tracking the VIEWS as well. We figure some people just like to read without any greater level of participation. That's ok by us and as far as the competition goes, having a widely read comic is a great indicator of success.

Supposedly, these notes all came from Zuda, and the entire piece is written as if it's directed towards readers, but I can't seem to find this same information anywhere on Zuda's own site.

David posted another note more recently, also from the Zuda staff...

We're still about two weeks away from closing the polls and so far only 50% of the users have cast their ballot!

A curious ranking I would like to point out is that of The Dead Seas. It's currently ranked at #7, but it is listed in more favorites and a higher average rating than both Alpha Monkey and This American Strife which are in the #5 and #6 slots respectively. What it lacks, though, are views. Both Alpha Monkey and This American Strife have each been opened/viewed by roughly 50% more users than The Dead Seas. (Going back to Zuda's note above about viewings being significant.) What I'm not sure of, though, is whether Zuda is counting the number of views or the number of unique views. One person could come in and look at the same comic a few dozen times to bump up a specific comics' numbers, unless the Zuda folks were on the ball enough to track the views against users' IP addresses, thus making "ballot stuffing" such as that more difficult.

More curious, however, is the #2 and #3 ranked comics: Dead in the Now and Battlefield Babysitter. However, Babysitter has a higher average rating, more views, and is a favorite of more people. One has to presume that it has been voted on more often, but it seems strangely nebulous exactly how Zuda is arriving at some of their ranking calculations. One would presume that a comic which is viewed more, has a higher degree of critical acclaim, and is tagged as a favorite more often would ALSO be voted on more often, so for Zuda to show that's evidently not the case can certainly raise some questions about the transparency/honesty of the judging. (I'm not saying that Zuda is rigging the voting, mind you, just that they seem to be leaving the door open for some of the competitors to argue the final results.)

As it stands, we're about two weeks away from seeing how things end for these comics. If things continue as they have so far, I think it shouldn't be hard to predict with reasonable accuracy all of the comics' rankings. There are definitely some clear favorites here. But to all of the participants, congratulations across the board -- you're all doing a heck of a lot better job than I could!

A little over a year ago, I noted that I was probably going to be skipping future comic conventions unless I would be able to attend with or meet a friend there; I just wasn't getting a lot out of them in my solo ventures. But I think I will actually be attending next week's Mid-Ohio-Con for one day. Mainly for two reasons: Maggie Thompson and Rich Buckler.

Rich Buckler was essentially my third favorite artist for several years. Once I started reading Fantastic Four, I was most enamored with artists who worked on the book. So it should come as little surprise that I loved the work of John Byrne (who's FF turned me on to the book in the first place), George Perez (who came shortly before Byrne and is just abso-frickin-lutely brilliant) and Rich Buckler. Rich was third largely because -- and by no means do I mean to disrespect him in ANY capacity -- I hadn't yet discovered Jack Kirby or John Buscema. My esteem for those two earlier artists has grown considerably, especially in seeing much of their other work, while Rich's work beyond the FF remained elusive to me for many years. And, though I've since learned that the idea was actually from Roy Thomas, I still like how distinctive Rich's version of the Human Torch was.

Maggie is known these days as the editor of CBG but she was in there as one of the major players in the founding days of comic fandom. My biggest interest in hitting the MOC this year is being able to chat with her for a little while about those early days of comic fandom. (I'm still rolling that book idea around in my head. I swear, one of these days, I'll actually start the damn thing!)

But, let me throw this out there as well: for anyone who wants/feels inclined and happens to see me wandering around the show, please step up and say hi. Conventions are as much about connecting with other comic fans as anything else, so the more connecting I can do, I'm betting the better a convention experience I think I'll have. I'll be at the show probably just about all day Sunday, most likely in my FFPlaza.com t-shirt.

John Deering's cartoon Strange Brew from today...
One thing I like about Deering's work in general is that his cartoons often are a good symbiosis of text and visuals. Neither is particularly funny without the other; indeed, many are wholly incomprehensible without both. In this particular case, there is no actual dialogue, but the "Pleez Heulp" and "Give" are wholly necessary for the joke to work. Without those, you simply have two mice looking at another caught in a mousetrap. We need that text to tell us that the unfortunate mouse is not dead but merely "down on his luck."

What I find curious about this cartoon, though, is the layout. Roughly a quarter of the space is devoted to the black shadow of the mousetrap, and another significant portion in the upper left is left as dead space. All of the really necessary linework needed for the gag -- the text, the expressions of the onlooking mice, and a portion of the trapped mouse -- is in a small square-ish area centered around the "Give" cup. A large majority of the space used in this cartoon is wasted or, at best, not used very economically.

Now, admittedly, this would have to be a difficult cartoon to pull off. A mouse trapped in a mousetrap is not a particularly funny sight in and of itself. One would need the to also show that the mouse is in fact trapped -- bearing in mind that an anthropomorphic mouse should in theory be able to release himself from such a device. fairly easily. Which means that the mousetrap needs to be conveyed in such a way as to become something akin to a wheelchair -- a device that the mouse lives with voluntarily because of some other concern. I expect not finding a good way to convey that visually is what led to Deering's choice to show the trap from the back.

That being said, though, why devote so much space to it? We could truncate 1/5 of the image off the right and have no loss of information. This, I suspect, was from the dreaded deadline monster. Deering's strip appears daily, and the amount of time he has to work on any single gag is extremely limited. I've read of other cartoonists, notably Gary Larson, that while working on how to execute a particular joke, you eventually cross the point of no return. You run out of time to think of and draw another cartoon before your deadline, so you have to run with what you've got and just try to do better the next day. I think that's what happened here. Deering had the notion of a mousetrapped mouse asking for handouts -- which is an amusing idea in its absurdity -- but had difficulty executing it in a manner that best conveyed that idea. I can easily imagine Deering doing sketch after sketch after sketch all day trying to figure out the best way to draw this. Trying different perspectives and points of view. Trying to highlight different visual elements. Is it funnier to focus on the child's expression, or the mother's trying to shuffle her along? For that matter, what should the child's expression be? Amusement? Horror? Concern? Inquisitiveness? What should the trapped mouse's sign say? How "trapped" should he be? There are a million questions to be asked here in a short amount of time.

None of which addresses anything else he may have had going on in his life when he drew that. Maybe he just had a tooth pulled at the dentist. Maybe he had just fallen down the stairs and broke his ankle. Maybe his wife just left him. Maybe his mother just died.

I don't think this is Deering's best work. I suspect he's not wholly satisfied with it either. But that he does his strip day in and day out is impressive, and that it's usually (for me, at least) original and funny even more so. But it's useful, I think, to examine the good with the bad; and figuring out why something doesn't work as well as it could is just as productive as why something does work.

J.A. Fludd recounts some current problems with marvel and DC, and how his comic habits have changed recently.

I've spent most of this weekend in front of a paper cutter. My department has something of a dog and pony show to present this coming week, and my boss wanted to be able to present something to the attendees that was kind of clever/memorable and cheap. I suggested that we make trading cards for each person in the department, as we would also be able to include useful information on the backs of the cards along with novelty of getting a series of trading cards. She loved the idea, but it fell to me to actually make 150 sets of cards by hand. (No budget to take them anywhere, it turned out.) Hence, I spent much of the weekend hunched over a paper cutter.

I've actually developed something of a reputation at work as the pop culture guy. My interdepartmental project update emails have featured the likes of Max Headroom and the Muppet News anchor. My last formal PowerPoint presentation was decorated with images from Office Space, Robocop, Star Trek, Batman, and two James Bond movies. My cubicle is covered in comic strips. My white board has a drawing of the Joker on it. I've a comic-book-of-the-week display on my desk. And needless to say, many of my conversations get peppered with TV and movie references.

It seems to work well for me professionally. It tends to put people at ease by referencing cultural touchstones, and casts me in the light of a real human being, and not just that-guy-who-works-on-web-sites.

The danger, of course, is over-emphasizing the geek factor. To come across as Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, or John Cuszak's character from High Fidelity. There's a line between referencing popular culture to put people at ease, and geeking out and alienating everyone. I think a lot of the fanboy stereotype comes from those folks who cross that line without realizing it.

As I see it, the best approach is to, first, stick with fairly common and readily identifiable reference points. Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, Superman, Popeye... Most folks these days have not seen The Bicycle Thief or My Dinner With Andre. Try to keep in mind that most people (well, most Americans at any rate) are going to be more familiar with intellectual properties that had some major marketing efforts behind them. Iron Man references, for example, won't work very well outside of comic book circles now, but wait until the movie comes out and you'll be able to name-drop Pepper Potts more readily.

(My Max Headroom reference noted early is something of an aberration to that rule. But I played up his role as a Coca-Cola spokesman, and wrote the email in his distinctive staccato, scratched-record speech. So even if someone didn't get the specific reference, the content itself would still have been amusing. In theory.)

The other thing you need to remember is DON'T QUOTE ANYONE! With a few rare exceptions, most folks will not remember any specific dialogue from a TV/movie/whatever. And the lines they will remember are repeated so often (and frequently repeated inaccurately) as to be cliche. Trust me, as cool a set of lines as these were, no one will understand:

• "Snakes - why did it have to be snakes?"
• "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."
• "They killed Kenny! You bastards!"
• "No soup for you!"
• "You know, there's a million fine looking women in the world, dude. But they don't all bring you lasagna at work."

You get the idea. Doesn't matter how popular you think the original reference material was, quoting it to a non-geek marks you as someone who's spent WAY too much time absorbed in fiction and not nearly enough time in reality. Not to mention that it suggests that you're not smart or original enough to think of your own response, and are forced to borrow from others.

Now, if you establish that your audience is geek-oriented in some way, you're naturally free to geek out along those lines. My boss' husband is a big fan of the Star Wars mythos, so I can usually quote the movies around her without worrying about her not understanding the reference or thinking that I've seen them too many times. I can usually make more obscure references in general with her because she's something of a geek herself. Another co-worker turned out to be a fan of Babylon 5 so I can reference that show pretty safely.

Bear in mind, though, that I still have to keep my comic book references limited! Anything that's hit the movie screen (essentially, intellectual properties with a marketing budget) is fair game, but even those folks who can catch a Battlestar Galactica or Stargate reference are going to likely miss nods to the New Gods, the Eternals, The Question or The Creeper.

My point with all this is to let you know that it's okay to show you geek side at work, or in other traditionally non-geeky circles. Bringing up the idea of trading cards is cool; being able to reference all the producers of trading cards and which properties they have the rights to, not so much. Just be sure to not let your geekery get away from you. You don't want to geek out so much that you launch yourself well over that line between "that guy who can make pop culture references" and "unsociable geek who you can't relate to."