Moving books: a tale of two

I’ve been dipping my toes into new comic formats recently.  A friend told me about Lost Girl, saying that the premise resembled some of the tropes of one of my old favorite books, War for the Oaks.  War for the Oaks is an awesome early urban fantasy novel, and if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.  Despite its aging cheesiness and eighties pop music references, it’s a fun tale of fairy and rock and roll.

Lost Girl comes in two formats.  Mostly it’s a TV show.  Secondarily it’s a stop motion interactive comic.  It’s the comic part that I’ll be talking about.  I’ve seen some stop motion comics before but nothing memorable.  This was a much bigger budget production, with a clear script and real voice actors and sound effects and even cheesy choose your own adventure options.

Pity it sucked.

The premise is simple. Our heroine, Bo, is a succubus who fights crime.  Good and Evil are both watching her.  When feeling peckish, she kisses men in order to feed on their sexual desire.  Such feeding sucks out their souls (or whatever) and they wind up dead, dried husks.

I found the comic unbelievably creepy, for all the wrong reasons.  It’s clear to me, although it does not appear to be clear to the writers, that Bo is raping these men as well as killing them.  She chooses innocents as well as muggers (yes, it’s an interactive comic, but I went for the nicest options available and she still ate a total innocent).  The setting draws on the rape-fear tropes that plague society: pretty girl in tight clothes walking alone in a dark alley.  Talk about cliche.  She tells her victim to stop her if he doesn’t like it, she says it will hurt her more than it will hurt him, she says that once she starts she can’t stop.  Blah blah blah rape tropes 101.

I suppose it could be argued that by making the rapist a woman, this is somehow turning a story-trope on its head.  Except no, I think it does nothing more than increase the misogyny.  Here we have a strong, kick-ass woman.  And how does she get her power?  By raping men.  There is nothing good or strong or new about that.  Nothing.  She is supposed to be a gray character, but call me crazy, I consider rapists villains.  Weird, I know. But there’s no need for a Good Guy and a Bad Guy to fight over which side she’s on.  Stamp a E for Evil on her and move along, you know?

One of the oldest tropes in the book is that women gain power by using their sexual wiles to control or destroy men.  See, for instance, Aristophanes or Euripides.  It’s an insidious, nasty, icky approach to storytelling.  Blech.

But besides that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play?

Well, it sucks.  The comic’s palette is absolutely dreadful.  For reasons which are known only to marketing deities everywhere, there has been a new resurgence of sepia-toned mucky brown and gray color schemes.  The new Sherlock Holmes movie is a good example.  Practically the whole damn movie was brown, presumably to tell us that this is Ye Olde Tyme History.  Nevermind the Victorian adoration for truly hideous bright colors.  This lousy comic seems to have felt that by moving every normal color down and to the right in the Photoshop box, they’d have made the comic edgy and urban.

I find cities to be ridiculously bright.  Much brighter than suburbs, where beige and tan predominate and brighter even than the countryside, where one finds greens and scarlets.  Cities, in my humble experience, tend towards lots of shiny surfaces and gaudy clothing and banners and neon window displays and advertising and art and graffiti and bright metal newspaper boxes with free papers.  The comic takes place during the rain, but oddly, there aren’t any silly umbrellas and no one is wearing the currently hot Hunter wellies in neon yellow.

Cities, in other words, are a lot more likely to be a jumbo pack of crayons dropped on a sidewalk than a country mud puddle.  But hey, what do I know?

The drawings themselves are angular and psuedo-edgy.  Not good, not dreadful, just…. dull.

Besides the victims, Bo talks briefly to a waitress.  The authors of the comic show that the waitress is dumb but nice by making her fat, freckled, and bedecked in a pink diner uniform.  Gee, I’ve never seen that before.

You know what I would like?  Just once I would like a fat woman to be portrayed as both smart and sexually attractive, dammit.  Not fat and therefore asexual.  Not fat and therefore Despair.  Not fat and therefore dumb.  Fat and sexy and smart.  Is that so much to ask?  Apparently it is.  (And yes, I may prefer my women a bit zaftig.)

Let us not even get started on how boring the composition was.  The poor damn comic only lasted a couple minutes and I’ve already wasted over seven hundred freaking words on the thing.

No, instead I wish to present something else entirely.  Because, see, at the point I watched Lost Girl the interactive comic, I began to think that motion comics just sucked as a medium.  Books are books and movies are movies and really, just move on because the two can’t be combined without sucking the soul out of the work, succubus-Bo-like.

Then I stumbled across something else.  A book trailer (worksafe):

Il etait une fois (Apologies for link instead of embedded video. WordPress isn’t letting me embed today.)

Benjamin Lacombe’s Il etait une fois.

It isn’t intended as a motion comic, but a book trailer, and yet it was far more effective to me than the comic above.  It’s a simple story, just the rabbit entering the pages of the book, but I found it moving and fascinating and a lovely work in its own right.

The colors are much more carefully chosen.  The rich red of the rabbit’s eyes are striking and the soft greens are dreamy.  Each movement flows smoothly.  The music adds instead of detracts.  Overall there is a cohesive feeling of fairy-tale creepiness that the old, dangerous fairy tales had.  Would-be-princesses might lose a toe here or there in their quest for the glass slipper, and monsters might just leap from those shadowy trees.

I found myself shivering in creepy delight, glad it was turning October, knowing that the nights are getting longer and the woods are getting darker.

The video is half as long, the story is twice as simple, and yet it has given me some glimmer of hope of what a moving comic might be.  I hope to see more stories told this way someday.

I have seen the future, and it is MOTION!

Spider-Woman: Agent of SWORD, Episodes 1-3

Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Alex Maleev
Spider-Woman/Jessica Drew voiced by Nicolette Reed

This is my first foray into comics blogging, and rather than waste everyone’s time discussing primitive sheets of paper, I thought I’d take a look at the cutting edge of comics technology. Books are for Luddites, motion comics are the future, so what does the future look like?

Short answer: a really cheap cartoon with an impenetrable plot.

Long answer:
After her solo title was canceled in 1983, Jessica Drew vanished into character limbo while the Spider-Woman name got passed around to various heroines, none of whom found any lasting success. In the mid-2000s, Brian Michael Bendis pulled Drew from obscurity and placed her on his high profile revamp of the Avengers. Spider-Woman: Agent of SWORD is the first serious attempt at a Spider-Woman ongoing in more than 20 years, as well as Marvel’s first go at motion comics.

Considering that motion comics are sold through iTunes rather than the Direct Market, you’d think that Marvel would target the casual “I liked Downey, Jr. in that movie” fan. But Marvel is nothing if not predictable, and instead the story launches out of the last mega-crossover, Secret Invasion (also by Bendis). Jessica Drew was apparently kidnapped by Skrulls, a shape-shifting alien race, and replaced by the Skrull queen. So the Spider-Woman that readers had been following for the last couple of years in New Avengers was a fake. Now the real Spider-Woman is back and she’s understandably pissed. Lucky for her, Abigail Brand, director of S.W.O.R.D. (Sentient World Observation and Response Department), offers Spider-Woman a job hunting down Skrulls, thus allowing her to work out her issues and beat up illegal aliens at the same time. Spider-Woman’s first assignment takes her Madripoor, the crime capital of Asia. As these things always go, her mission quickly goes to shit and she’s on the run from HYDRA (like G.I. Joe’s Cobra, but no ninjas). And just when you think things can’t get more complicated, in episode 3 Spider-Woman is targeted by the Thunderbolts, a super-powered hit squad run by Norman Osborn, the Big Bad of Marvel’s current Dark Reign mega-crossover. In other words, it’s a story only a hardcore superhero fan could love.

Thankfully, Alex Maleev’s artwork is easier to appreciate. His penciling is fairly realistic and detailed, but he applies multiple layers of color to his work, causing every image to appear dark and washed-out. While the coloring can make certain details hard to see, it effectively establishes the mood and atmosphere of an espionage thriller.

The main attraction though of Spider-Woman: Agent of SWORD is neither the story nor the art, but the format. Each motion comic episode runs about 10 minutes, and consists of three types of visuals. The first type is a sequence of still images accompanied by dialogue and other sound. During conversation scenes, the images are frequently re-used. The second slightly more sophisticated visual involves moving an image in the foreground while keeping the background still. The third type of visual, which is used for the vehicle chase scenes, is just low budget computer animation (which seems like cheating to me).

Several critics have accused Spider-Woman, and motion comics in general, of simply being low budget animation, and there’s a pretty strong case for that. But comparing motion comics only to animation ignores their biggest flaw, namely that the subtle communication between artist and reader is sacrificed without replacing it with the advantages of actual animation. While it probably goes without saying, comics are a sequence of artistic panels usually accompanied by text. But there’s more to reading a comic than just proceeding from top-left to bottom-right. The layout of panels, their size, the level of detail, and the amount of text per panel are all part of the communication between artist and reader. Motion comics take most of that away. Every “panel” is now just another background that fits the standard aspect ratio. And the pacing of the story is set by the motion comic producers rather than the artist and readers. Motion comics, in short, are something less than comics AND something less than animation.

Of course, motion comics do have one element that comics can never have: sound. The music and sound effects in Spider-Woman are used quite well, adding to the atmosphere of the story but generally remaining unobtrusive. The dialogue and Spider-Woman’s inner monologue are another matter. Bendis has a peculiar approach to the English language, which seems to consist mostly of repetitions, redundant statements, and pointless asides. Presumably Bendis is going for realism, but I can happily say I’ve never talked to anyone who speaks as strangely as the characters in this comic. I feel pity for the voice actors who had to read his lines and try to make them sound like something non-assholes would say. Nicolette Reed, who voices both Spider-Woman and Madame Hydra, doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with her lines, so Spider-Woman comes across as flat (and British?) while Madame Hydra quickly becomes obnoxious. But her performance seems Oscar-worthy compared to her co-stars. Particularly shameful are the “actors” who voice the Madripoor police detectives, who seem to take the Breakfast at Tiffany’s approach to portraying Asian men.

So the execution of Marvel’s first motion comic is not so good. Maybe a better example would change my opinion of the medium, but I doubt it. Still, it gave Marvel an excuse to come up with another corny character theme song. Behold, the Spider-Woman music video!

Update: the entire first episode is available for free for a limited time on Youtube. Check it out if you’re interested.

Update 2: David Weman was kind enough to provide a link to an animated short based upon Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Telltale Heart.” It isn’t quite the same thing as motion comics, but it’s a similar combination of still images and simple animation. And needless to say, Poe is a somewhat better writer than Bendis.