Broken Frontier

Lately I’ve been reading comics that make me think about the kids in my life.  The kids I know read for humor.  They look for anything zany, wacky, spontaneous, and inventive.  They respond extremely well to slapstick, one-liners, irony, puns, and intricate, lunatic plots that turn on a dime and never look back.  While kids are certainly intelligent readers, unlike adults they don’t need meaning or morality in their literature.  It doesn’t have to serve the Greater Good.  If it can make them laugh, and provide fodder for their endless games of “let’s pretend,” then it will be read, probably over and over again.

When I choose comics as gifts for kids, I pause and reflect on my arrested development, since these are the comics I prefer as well.  In fact, the only content separating the adult comics from the kids’ comics in my treasure chest is nudity (artful nudity, of course, in the service of Serious Art). 

I have to be quite stern with myself, and make myself give away the brand-new copies of Dungeon (Sfar and Trondheim) and Little Lit (Spiegelman and Mouly).  I even read Jughead’s Double Digest #127 last week, and while I still can’t see why Betty and Veronica compete for Archie’s attention, I thoroughly enjoyed this most American of comics.  The proud get their comeuppance, selfish schemes are thwarted, and some noble soul marches to his own drummer, never caving to the pressure to disappear into the group.  Above all, lots of food is consumed.

Reading Jughead caused a flashback to my own childhood, and I might have remembered what it was like to read comics when I was very young.  I think I was able to absorb the entire contents of a panel seamlessly, making no distinction between word and image.  After the flashback, I experimented a bit, even holding Jughead at arm’s length to see if I could see the whole panel without moving my eyes.  I couldn’t.  My eyes moved between the image and the words in the balloons.  I had to take them in separately, and put them together in my head. 

My memories might be bogus, but the flashback made me start wondering about the reading process, and how technological changes might be affecting the way comics are made and read by children and adults.  Out of curiosity, I contacted comics expert Paul Gravett, and asked him for his opinions on the subject.

BF:  Do you think that adults are more inclined to read comics and graphic novels if they read comics as children?  It might be hard to find an adult who did not read comics as a child, so this could be a spurious question.  But I'm wondering if there's logic behind the belief that readers need to be captured young.

PG:  Good question—in other words, can a novice adult learn how to read comics?  I’m sure it helps if you've had the habit from childhood—a bit like riding a bike. But I am sure plenty of graphic novel readers come to them as "comics virgins"—which may explain why Maus was so successful- and Persepolis too—as they are very clear, without too many specialized techniques for cognoscenti.

BF:  I read your interview with Forbidden Planet International, in which you said, "I'm becoming convinced that the current growth in appreciation of the comics medium is part of the human evolutionary process. Not to get too New Age about this, but it coincides now with the advances in how people read and watch and think, their capacity to process information, visual and verbal, their minds opening. Comics will evolve and so will their readers and creators."

Now, I've had this thought as well, but I tend to think that kids already possess the techniques that these advances bring to adults.  It seems they have a much easier time processing the pictures and the words together, while adults tend to privilege the textual, due either to lower thresholds for information processing, or education, or socialization, or all of the above.  As comics, and their readers and creators evolve, will it be due to an expanded capacity to read words and pictures together, or will it rest more in comics becoming more multi-media in design?

PG:  I would think the relation here is strong with web sites.  Multi-media design might include more fluidity and multiple directions of reading and levels of story—which also has affinities with gaming of course, another key influence on how comics read and are read now.

After this brief chat with Paul, I started thinking about iPods, camera phones, PDAs, handheld game consoles, etc. Portable tools are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and they have increasing capacity for user configuration.  Suddenly the possibilities seemed endless for comics to become for adults what they are for kids: toys!  A downloadable comic book would be configurable, and could include embedded games and puzzles. 

The reader (or user) could create and add a character to a comic and affect the dynamics of the story.  Backgrounds, colors, and settings could all be user-selected.  Wireless networking would speed up collective creation of comics.  The notion of “sequential art” would expand until the concept of sequence is fractal.  Above all, reading would become highly dynamic, dependent in ways never before seen on how readers receive and act upon comics. 

Ultimately, wireless technology will be so robust as to easily connect individual users around the world at little extra expense.  Then we the people, mostly bored at our underpaying and undemanding jobs, will begin to connect across oceans, deserts, and national boundaries. 

We’ll connect in spite of our governments and diplomats, and our handheld game consoles will replace the media conglomerates that control information.  We’ll start making comics together.  We’ll play together.  We’ll crack each other up.  Maybe we’ll make world peace, when we’re not busy making comics.  We can, of course.  That’s kid stuff.