In Media Res ran my short piece on the history of the motion comic today. I'm curious to see what fans and readers have to say about this formal phenomenon. Do you purchase them? Do you know about them? Do you like them? Essentially, my initial impressions have been that the American comic book industry sees a bright future ahead for motion comics while readers downright loathe them. I'll let you weigh in by following the link here.
For more on Women Comic Book Readers Day, my grassroots campaign to make the industry notice the female consumer demographic, proceed after the jump.
Cully Hamner carried this week's In Media Res topic of film and comic books into its second day (after Greg Smith's perfect opener on introducing comics to new readers). His column looks at how his comic book collaboration with writer Warren Ellis became re-interpreted once it transitioned into the hands of director Robert Schwentke and became a film adaptation.
I don't want to spoil his article, so I'll just direct you to the link above and leave you with two quotes before dropping into a digression on a comic book syllabus I prepared:
"Faithfulness to form, literary or otherwise, is illusory: what matters is the equivalence in meaning of the forms."-Film theorist André Bazin
"No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise."-Rorschach in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1986-1987).
More after the jump!
This week, I will be contributing a curated video entitled "The Outrageous Origins of the Motion Comic!" to In Media Res. It is an incredibly short piece (350 words), based around the largely untold history of the motion comic, which is often (and ahistorically) considered to be a "new media" form. The piece includes some gems of research I uncovered while writing a dissertation chapter on the form, including some key thoughts from one of the Comics Studies founding fathers, Scott McCloud.
In celebration of the weekly theme and my forthcoming contribution to it, I am reprinting an early video essay entitled "Comics to Film (and Halfway Back Again)" that served as the springboard to my dissertation topic: the formal interchange between comics and film. While I have since moved away from looking solely at film adaptations - the sole focus of this video essay - this video provides a sketch of what sparked my research. While some of the theoretical arguments involving these forms has become antiquated by the growth that Comics Studies has experienced over the past couple years, I'm still incredibly proud of it.
Originally published in 2007 by Flow. Unfortunately, I cannot embed the video here due to copyright claims.
Part One
Part Two
