Reading comics on cell phones changes the way the medium works
In 2000, cartoonist Scott McCloud followed up his bestseller Understanding Comics with Reinventing Comics, another bold, challenging piece of graphic non-fiction. The first half of Reinventing serves as a mini-history of the art form, threaded with McCloud’s strong opinions about what constitutes genuinely creative work, as opposed to hackery. The second half ventures further out onto a limb, making predictions about the ways then-emerging technologies could transform the medium.
Whenever anyone describes “the world of the future,” they’re setting themselves up to be mocked. Most of these kinds of speculations fall into two categories: What we wish were true, and what seems likely based on what we know now. The former can actually inspire innovation, as technicians who grew up with some far-out concepts—like television, or a touch-screen tablet—work to make it a reality. But those predictions generally fail to take into account changes that few could’ve seen coming. That’s how we end up with a Back To The Future Part II version of 2015 where one of the big technical advances is “dust-repellant paper,” not e-readers; or a 2010 version of 2010 where computer drives still run cassettes.
Reinventing Comics mostly stays in a “Wouldn’t it be neat if…?” space, and isn’t as embarrassing as it could’ve been. McCloud’s prediction of “micropayments” as the future revenue stream for comics hasn’t panned out yet, but he was right about how artists would make use of digital tools, and he was right that the experience of reading comics would change between 2000 and now—even if it hasn’t exactly happened in the way he expected. McCloud wrote about the computer screen as an “infinite canvas,” hoping cartoonists would take advantage of the absence of defined borders to experiment with the form (as he had done). Instead, the basic form of comics hasn’t changed radically. The work is still being distributed in pamphlets and books, beholden to the century-old panel and page structure.
It’s just that now those panels and pages are on iPads and Kindles. And phones.
When the iPad was introduced, it struck me as the ideal electronic device for comics. It has the general heft and size of a book, it can store thousands of pages, and the backlit screen imparts a luminescence to the artwork. I never cared much for reading comic books on a computer. Comic strips, yes; and webcomics, too. But it never felt right to try to read an old Fantastic Four on my laptop. Once I had an iPad, I bought a bunch of CD-ROMs containing decades of comics, and transferred their files to a PDF reader—well before apps like Comixology made it much easier to buy, store, and read comics on a tablet. Over the past few years, the major publishers have been releasing digital-only comics expressly designed for iPads/Kindles/etc. But they’ve always struck me as too safe and too sparse, given how good ordinary pages look on those devices.
It’s how well comics work on a phone that has caught me completely by surprise. I migrated toward doing most of my reading on my phone a while back, because it’s more convenient to carry and consult than an iPad. Then one day I decided to try out some of my comics apps on the phone, curious to see just how in the hell a comic book could be readable on such a tiny screen.
Here’s how in the hell it can: through a featured called Guided View, which fills the screen with one to three panels at a time, effectively converting a comic book page into a series of comic strips. In theory, this sounds awful—a careless butchery of the artist’s intent. And sometimes that’s exactly so. An elaborate Neil Adams page-construction is all but incomprehensible in guided view, for example. But more often than I would’ve expected, using Guided View prompts me to pay attention to individual drawings in ways that I’d almost forgotten how to do, after decades of reading comics in the same way.