07.06.2003

Cartoonist/journalist Joe Sacco contributed a mini-comic to the NYTimes Magazine this week, reporting on the situation in the Rafah region of the Gaza Strip. It’s quite good, consisting of four uninterrupted pages of hand-lettered, full-bleed layouts, and reading it, I kept wondering how they’d try to make it work online. Unfortunately, the slide show format they chose — effectively dismantling the comic and presenting it one panel at a time — while preserving a sequential reading order, also destroys most of the rhythm of Sacco’s layouts and the consistency of his linework, and completely loses the overall design. It’s as poor a job as any you’ve seen at presenting a comic online, and probably could not have been done by anyone who’s read Scott McCloud or Will Eisner on why sequential graphics work as a storytelling medium - I don’t mean to sound like Comic Book Guy, but those books are like a kick in the head that you can’t easily forget. But egregious as this is, it’s still an illustration of how difficult it can be to repurpose print comics on the web. If you’re not willing to reinterpret them in a way that works on the web, the least you could do is try not to lose what made them work in print, and part of that means to find a way to present them as a whole, while keeping file sizes manageable (which usually means smaller graphics) and details and lettering legible (which means larger graphics): a difficult balance to achieve if you’re limited to JPEGs and GIFs. I’ve often kicked around the idea of creating some sort of Flash-based comics reader that could intuitively follow a cursor and zoom and pan around an entire layout, allowing readers some of the freedom to roam around the page and either look closer at any given portion or back up and take in the whole thing, the way one can in print. Sort of like QTVR for the 2D plane. If you could get the interface working right, you could open-source it or release it as a flash widget, and let anyone trying to put comics up on the web use it. Who knows when I’ll ever do it, though, so now at least the idea’s out there. Hopefully, in the meantime, someone will offer a way for people who missed it this Sunday to get reprints of Joe Sacco’s piece as it was printed in the magazine, as it’s worth reading in its intended form.

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