Comics on Phones: Will They Replace Books?

No, comics on phones will not replace books.

There. I figured I should start this kind of post with the answer first, and then pull a Quentin Tarantino and tell about how I came to this conclusion.

It starts with a personal tale:

For my birthday last week, I upgraded my phone–At long last!–from a dumb-phone to a Motorola Razr. It’s fabulous.

As I was playing around with the apps, I discovered I could get Comixology on it, and better yet, I could download a preview issue of the fabulous “City in the Desert” by Moro Rogers, the newest comic from Archaia (nobody paid me to say this. Honest).

So I downloaded the first chapter of “City in the Desert” onto my phone.

At first, I was hesitant to because I’ve been rather adamant about keeping comics in physical form. I’m weary of webcomics more for technical reasons, and I’m personally biased to get actual books because I like their physicality: the weight, the new book smell, the page designs, the immediate reference for when you’re drawing and you want to see how the artist rendered this particular detail to use it in your work…

But I tried the comic on the smart phone.

And I liked it. That was what surprised me.

It’s a different experience: because phones are small, the comic can only be read one panel at a time, so it creates an almost slideshow effect. The panels transition well, plus it can zoom on particular details, and the speech balloons are actually readable. Thankfully, the art of “City in the Desert” is simple in style, and so it’s not cluttered on the screen at all.

It was fun to read the comic on the phone. It would certainly help pass the time when you’re stranded at a laundromat or something.

I think that’s the difference, though, between comics on phones and actual books.

The comic book can vary in numbers of pages and not have any severe consequences. Comics on phones, however, by nature, should be kept short: longer works take up more data space, take longer to download, and tend explore literature and art, where as comics on the Razr and such are usually there to help pass the time. A comic on a phone that tries to get into territory like “Maus” would have a hard time working on the phone, I think, because longer and/or more serious works require a little more emotional investment from the reader. It’s hard to emotionally invest in a comic that you can flip through effortlessly on a phone. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just that it would be difficult.

Also, there’s the issue of page design.

On a phone, you can’t see the layout of a page because it’s displayed one panel at a time. If there is a larger panel or, rarely, a full-page spread, the phone has to take it in chunks. This is a problem for a comic that likes to have fun with page layouts, or construct page layouts into a particular pattern, like “The God Machine” by Chandra Free, or “Asterios Polyp” by David Mazzucchelli. The meaning of the page design can be lost if you only read it one panel at a time in these kinds of works.

I think, however, comics on smart phones are viable. It’s an area of the comics field that should be explored a little more. Maybe, with enough tinkering, I can be proved wrong about the assumption that phone comics can’t be taken seriously as art and/or literature.

I just don’t think that comics on phones are going to replace actual books anytime soon. As long as there are comics that want to be longer, larger, thicker, and have weightier themes, there will be comic books and graphic novels.

That’s just my opinion, anyway.

Social Mediaz, yo.

Why yes indeed! I started a facebook page for my art. You can like it here:

http://www.facebook.com/kelcicrawfordart

I’ll be sharing comics-in-progress, polls, and possibly even some discussions on art tools to use, if anybody is interested in that kind of thing. But I would like the Facebook page to be an open forum for me and my fans to connect and chat about things and share art.

The more I work with it, the more excited I get, and I hope you get excited about it too! So check it out. I already have a comic page in progress up on it, if you want to look.

Here’s the link again:

http://www.facebook.com/kelcicrawfordart

The Facebook page, like I said, is where I hope to get to chat with fans. I hope Twitter can be used for the same thing, but I like Twitter because it helps me talk to other comic artists easier, and also find other professionals and just chat. Tumblr is just fun to post sketches on, but I want to try and save that for mostly fanart and illustrations. I post all my art to deviantART and this blog. This blog here is where I hope to talk about my comics, other people’s comics, and share some in-depth posts about other miscellaneous dribble. After all, blogs can hold more words than social media posts. :D

That’s my plan, anyway, and it seems pretty legit to me.

But I hope you keep liking my stuff! Please feel free to share your stuff with me, and Don’t Forget to Be Awesome!

A Comic Concept In Progress

So I’ve been thinking of making a webcomic for a while.

I’m not sure what the story will be about yet. That’s why I’m brainstorming some schemes now and making a few sketches. Today I filled a sketchbook page with nothing but potential cast members of the new story (that’s the image above).

I’ve worked with the girl in the fedora and the girl with the braid on one side of her head before. They’re main characters in a mini-comic of mine, “The Messengers”, which I just finished the script for. The script was two years in the making, mostly because when I first started it the villain was of no interest to me, so I put it away for a while until I could approach it with new eyes. Now that I have it finished, I’m debating if I want to scrap the whole thing in favor of this new idea germinating in my head.

This idea, like I said, is still developing. Right now, there is a lot of thought concerning Muses, the Nine Art Forms as considered by the French, dreams, Egyptian and Greek mythology, and interconnected yet separate worlds a la Kingdom Hearts.

In other words, I have no idea what I’m doing yet.

So you know what I’m going to do?

Work on something else for a while.

I still need to finish the pencils for my submission to the IF-X anthology, and I’m making them extra nice because I intend to use them for a portfolio to send to some comic companies. So I think I’ll switch gears and work on them.

Usually, when I do that, ideas for other projects will whack me upside the head anyway. It’s funny when that happens: when you focus on one thing, your imagination goes off into the wilderness on its own and then finds an idea for you to use. It happens to me all the time.

If you have any suggestions or ideas of your own concerning the idea, please leave them in comments. I would love to hear from you.

I’m Hosting a Contest!

I entered an event on deviantART called the 1-hour contest, where you only have an hour to draw a particular character specified by the host. And this last week, I WON! That’s exciting!

What’s also exciting is because I won the contest, I get to host the next round!

So here’s the dealio.

If you are interested in participating in this contest, here are the rules:

  1. You have 1 hour to draw a character of my choosing.
  2. Submit your entry to the 1-hr-contest group on deviantART here:  http://1-hr-contest.deviantart.com/
  3. You must submit this by AUGUST 13. That’s this upcoming Monday!
  4. Any material, etc that you want.

And without any further ado, here is the character to be drawn:

This is Thomas Doran, soldier-in-training at the military school for the Touloy Armed Forces. He considers himself a ladies man, and is in fact quite chivalrous and polite. He is well-known in the school for being an expert boxer and strategist. His two best friends are Daniel (not pictured) and Jamie (pictured as the blonde in the center image). In fact, Thomas and Daniel are keeping Jamie’s identity a secret, since she is a woman disguising herself as a man to be in the school. Thomas tends to take things too seriously unless he’s around Jamie and Daniel, in which case he likes to pull pranks on the both of them when he can get away with it.
If you win and you are a member of deviantART, then you get to host the next round of the 1 hour contest!
For sake of simplicity, only deviantART members should enter. I can’t accept outside entries. Sorry!
Good luck to all of you, and Don’t Forget to Be Awesome!

Messages in a Bottle, or Wanting More Work

Dear Readers,

I have been working my butt off the past month. As I take a break these past few days, I realize I want to get back to work again.

It’s not just my workaholic nature that does this. It’s something I have been pondering about thanks to Neil Gaiman. In a video I saw, where he gave a commencement speech to a university, he said something that still clicks with me, especially now:

A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back…

“…The problems of success. They’re real, and with luck you’ll experience them. The point where you stop saying yes to everything, because now the bottles you threw in the ocean are all coming back, and have to learn to say no.” 

(If you want to see the full video, click here.)

I still feel like I’m at a point in my life (having just emerged from the institution known as University) where I’m already throwing some bottles, but I’m supposed to be throwing more of them into the ocean. It’s just that I need to make the content to put in those bottles to throw out to sea.

(Not literally making comics and putting them in bottles. Some guy on Kickstarter already came up with that. I’m talking in a metaphorical sense, you goob.)

So in an effort to do just that, to make content to put into bottles and throw them out into the sea known as the world, I’m embarking on some new, and not-so-new, projects.

First, the not-so-new: I’ll be working with my friend Chloe on “Stray Dogs,” her fancomic for Puella Magi Madoka Magica, doing pencils and tones. (If you have not heard of the fantastic series called Puella Magi Madoka Magica, it’s amazing and redefines what the genre of “Magical Girl” should mean. You should watch all twelve episodes of it. Now.) I’ll also be collaborating with my friend Casey on a new project called “Manufactured,” about the human race losing their collective memory and becoming cyborgs. “Manufactured” is still in its infancy, so we’re still working out some design kinks and talking over plot points and such.

Another not-so-new project I am doing is a short comic I call “The Messengers.” I worked on this script two years ago and then put it aside because my original slant towards it was rather anti-religion, mostly anti-Christian. Now that I have cleared my head and have less bias towards them, I’m rewriting the script so it has more of an old-gods-and-humanity-working-together theme to it. The rough draft is nearly done, which is the first step. I intend to keep working on it and get it finished and printed for Colossal Con next year (which is at the beginning of June).

The new projects I hope to start will have some more solid and immediate deadlines.

The first is a submission to an anthology run by the Hamtramck Idea Men called IF-X. I intend on sending something for their Halloween issue and possibly for their final one the following month. I’m working with the editor now to get an idea of what to work on and what to leave out for this current issue.

The second project is a portfolio to send to Ape Entertainment. I want to see if they would be interested in hiring me for freelance work. I would like to send a portfolio to Yen Press, as well, but Yen Press’s submission guidelines calls for more work to go into the portfolio. With Ape, I have something ready to show them now. So I’ll be sending them my work soon (by soon I mean before the end of the month, so I just have to get up off my lazy ass to do it).

The third is actually a series of projects: monthly mini-comics made exclusively for Quimby’s Bookstore in Chicago and possibly for Gumroad, if I can get Gumroad to sell books. (If you haven’t heard of Gumroad, it’s fairly new, but I have used it and it’s literally two seconds between paying for the material and owning it. It’s amazing!) I haven’t figured out a topic for any of them yet, so this project is the one most likely to change or be scrapped. We’ll see.

The fourth is what Chandra Free (the lovely lady who wrote The God Machine) called a “Pitch Packet.”

A Pitch Packet, as defined by her in this interview and paraphrased by me, is a packet of comic pages, character designs, and character biographies for a story you want to pitch to a publisher. This packet also includes a story synopsis and your resume. Every company I want to pitch to has some variation in their requirements for their pitch packets, but they all have very many of the same commonalities. So I want to work on one pitch packet that I can tweak for each company as necessary to fit their pitching guidelines.

My personal deadline for this is to finish the work by at least June of next year, so I can make copies as needed and prepare them. Then I intend to go to New York Comic Con in October and submit stuff to publishers there. Of course, geeking out over seeing my favorite comic artists there would be awesome. I just hope I don’t make myself a jackass, to the editors or the artists.

So yeah. Those are my projects. I have a lot of them.

I like to keep busy. It keeps me entertained, and I learn new things with every project. Plus, it keeps me glued to my desk when I’m not at work. This is awesome because it staves me off from doing something disastrous, like getting so bored I spend my whole paycheck at Books-A-Million (it has happened before).

I hope that things are going well for you, dear readers. Do you have any projects to embark on? I would love to hear about them, and I hope you do well working on them.

Don’t Forget to Be Awesome!

Sincerely,
Kelci

P.S. I’m also thinking of selling prints, cards, and other gifts and merch through Zazzle.com. Your thoughts?