Broken Frontier

After Sebastien Dumesnil returned with his wife to the Unites States from his native Paris home, he started Top Two Three Films with partner Robert Nichols. The two had met in years previous while attending the highly regarded film production program at Los Angeles City College. Inspired by the film Comic Book Confidential, which focused on underground and small press cartoonists and Scott McCloud’s controversial book Reinventing Comics, the duo set out to find a story of their own. They are wrapping up editing work on a new documentary of their own, Adventures into Digital Comics.

BROKEN FRONTIER: What exactly is Adventures into Digital Comics?

SEBASTIEN DUMESNIL: It’s the story of what happens in the early 90s, in the print industry with whatever you call it, a boom and a crash, and how some people thought that internet would be a way for them to be published. It was just so difficult to get published in the print world. It’s not just a film on webcomics. It’s [about] the switch from print to web, and why some people think it’s going to work and why some people think it’s not going to work.

BF: Are you talking about the black and white Boom?

SD: No, the early Image [era]. The speculation boom. Comic Book Confidential was released in ‘89, I think. So it [barely began] to talk about the Black and White Boom, and then it stopped right there. I really wanted to tell the story of what happened next. We have more drama.

BF: What’s the drama?

SD: The drama is that, first of all, I really wanted to see if people agreed about what happened in the 90s. If they consider it as a boom and a crash or an aberration. And then, I would [illustrate] what created this boom. Was it really speculation?

BF: Chromium covers?

SD: Yeah, we talk about variant covers, speculators, Image. And then I wanted to know why some people felt that internet was the best to [make comics]. It’s very difficult to make money. Why do you prefer to go to the internet instead of trying to go to small print? I just wanted to know what people who were making good money in print were thinking about the webcomics revolution and even if it was a revolution.

BF: The clips that I’ve seen, there are some really interesting ideas. I’m wondering how that would play for an audience that doesn’t necessarily know as much about comics. How would you present this to a larger audience?

SD: The idea was to talk more to art lovers and an older audience; mainly to people who have no clue of what’s going on.

ROBERT NICHOLS: I think most comic book fans are probably of above average intelligence. The nature of filmmaking, no matter how small the film, you can never micro-cast it, the way that you can a webcomic.

BF: Micro-cast?

RN: On the web you can make a comic strip that only interests five people. If you want to make a movie that you can put on a DVD and actually try to sell, then you have to try to appeal to a somewhat larger audience. Sebastien has taken great pains to make this a film that speaks honestly and authentically to the fan, but at the same time reaches out to anybody, young audience or old audience, anybody who is interested in the struggles of dynamic young artists who are trying who are trying to make their way in the world. Find their voices. Find a career doing what they love.

BF: Robert, how did you get involved with the project?

RN: Seb and I met in [our first semester] at L.A. City College. We took Cinema 2 there, which is the most basic film-making class. We were partnered together in a couple of editing projects. We decided to form a film production company, not necessarily knowing what that would entail and that’s what Top Two Three films is.

BF: Where did the name come from?

RN: In this first film class that we took, L.A. City College is a marvelous place. Anyone can go there. One of the things that I still love about L.A.C.C. and love more than any other artistic educational experience I’ve had is that sitting in a room with 60 other film-makers who’ve made their Super-8 films, and getting to see all the different ways they approach the medium.

There was one particularly ambitious film-maker in this class, who made... his film was sort of a glorious failure, and it was more or less recognized as such by most of the students. But he went up to a couple of the other film-makers... you sort of know who’s kind of hot. He didn’t go up to me or Sebastien. He went up to these other guys and he said “I reckon you and I are one of the top, two, three film-makers in this class.” And it was so clear to them that he was not, that they laughed about it a long time.

BF: (laughter) Did you realize when you set out to make [Adventures into Digital Comics] that the subject matter would be so controversial?

SD:Nope.

BF: What’s the conflict? Why are people fighting?

SD: Basically, you have two sides. It’s Art vs. Money. The main conflict that exists right now in webcomics is the way you can or could or do make money in the internet.

Different people are supporting different systems of payment. Scott McCloud is a strong believer in micropayments and you have the Modern Tales system, which is a subscription system. [After you pay a monthly fee] you have access to the new stuff and the archives.

RN: They call it a channel.

SD: You have people who believe you can make money by selling t-shirts... merchandising.

RN: Merchandising and advertising and probably going into print.

Most of the people who do that [create] work that is translatable to print. The people who are more interested in the subscription and micropayment system are those who are doing work which is native to the web and cannot translate to any other medium.

BF: That seems to be a question. When do webcomics stop being comics? When you add motion and sound to a comics panel does it become a cartoon or a video game?

SD: I think the idea is that if it remains something where you go from one panel to the other, then it’s still going to be a comic book, a space-based medium, whereas animation is a time-based medium. So if you can just watch the story by pushing a button and watching it play itself then I don’t think it’s a comic book anymore. But if there’s an interactivity between [the audience] and the story and you actually have to press buttons so that you can watch the thing in a certain space then it is going to be a comic book.

RN: I would agree that right now, given the way that most of us watch television, and given the way that most of us read books, read comic books, you can make this distinction: If the audience controls the speed at which they take in the information, if you can read a sentence, put it down, of you can read a frame, put the book down, pick it up two hours later, read the last page, then thumb to the front, at your own pace, then it’s still a comic book.

BF: How would that be different from a video game?

RN: That’s where the lines begin to get drawn and that’s why I prefaced this by saying “the way we watch TV now.” Increasingly, with the controls we have over DVD, and I may not get too much into video games, but let’s talk about TiVo and DVDs. Suddenly you can just watch one sequence over and over again. If you have the right player, you can play it backwards. The difference is still for the artist, the artist of a cartoon or a film and the artist of a piece of music are all doing the same thing.

They’re creating something that in order to appreciate it in any way close to what they tried to create it; it needs to be listened to during the amount of time they assigned it. I can play a CD at 8 times the speed. I’m not really listening to the song that the composer intended. If I start sampling, I am now the artist, and I’m no longer an audience member.

End Part 1