Broken Frontier

Part 1

Inspired by the film Comic Book Confidential, which focused on underground and small press cartoonists and Scott McCloud’s controversial book Reinventing Comics, Sebastien Dumesnil and Robert Nichols 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.

Part 2

BROKEN FRONTIER: What was it like being lampooned by  Penny Arcade?

ROBERT NICHOLS: We had two different responses. I personally thought their parody was funny and fairly insightful, but the following discussion was surprising to say the least, because the contributors to the Penny Arcade website, which is as much a forum as it is a webcomics site, [began] to treat our preview as though it were a completed film. A 70 second preview and we were getting reviewed as though we were a 90 minute film.

I think it’s always the case any time you have a flame war the people who are going to speak the most often are the people who have a way of getting heard, and “the best way to get heard is to say something nasty.”

BF: (chuckles) That’s the internet for ya.

RN: It’s the nature of the beast.

Cat Garza had a similar reaction to me. He liked it so much that he took their parody of him and put it on his Livejournal as his avatar.

BF: I guess if someone’s talking about you, you must have done something.

RN: I don’t know. He also said that it inspired him to work more. Cat said “I haven’t been productive for a while and still I’m getting notorious on the internet. So maybe it’s time for me to turn out more strips.”

BF: Sebastien?

SEBASTIEN DUMESNIL: It reminded me of early to mid 19th century newspapers, at least in France. Kids of rich people who disliked specific individuals created newspapers to get them. They couldn’t do it directly, though, because you risked a duel in the woods. So, they started by creating a newspaper against something, rather than someone, then they created weird theories to get an audience, and as soon as they had a large audience, they started the personal attacks because their readership already believed everything that they said. A favorite example of mine is an anti-kingdom pro-republican newspaper which created the following theory to get a readership: “The French Revolution was a fight against the foreigners. The citizen was a good old Gallic and the aristocracy was made of Francs who invaded our green pastures centuries ago. It was just fair that we cut the heads of the invaders.” The creators of this newspaper only had a big incoherent dislike of the King. Of course, if you open a history book, you realize that their writing was total bulls**t, but people bought it.

BF: How important is Scott McCloud’s contribution to comics and webcomics?

SD: For comics, everybody will agree with Understanding Comics. That book had [put] on paper certain ideas which were not clear before. The reception was not the same for Reinventing Comics.

His contribution for webcomics is clearly different because he has a point of view of what he wants to support, but he’s very clear in the book and it’s something that comes from I don’t know where. In Reinventing Comics, he talks about micropayments because this is what he believes in, but he never said anywhere that people should only try micropayments on the web.

When I met Scott for the film, we talked mainly about micropayments. He was the only one that I met who was into micropayments.

RN: That was before the launch of iTunes.

SD: Actually, the first McCloud interview was shot before iTunes; the second interview was shot after the launch of iTunes and after McCloud’s first concrete attempt at micropayment with The Right Number. I agree with McCloud when he says that if people are willing to pay for a song, it means that this specific content has a value. If you can not sell a comic this way, well basically, it could mean that your content, per se, has no value and you’d rather sell some T-shirts or advertisement, or film rights.

If you take a look at the print run of the new Asterix album, it’s obvious that Uderzo doesn’t need to sell T-shirts, or advertisement, or film rights to make a living. His content has a value. The micropayment experience still has to be tested by huge names (bigger than Neil Gaiman or Frank Miller). I would like to see if a huge powerhouse like Uderzo or Bilal or Jodorowsky could sell a short story this way.

BF: Do you feel that ink-and-paper comics are on their way to extinction?

SD: Maybe in the U.S... Just kidding.

No. Let’s say I go to France and I start talking about webcomics. Nobody knows what a webcomic is because we don’t need them. We sell so many comic books that nobody feels the need to go to the web and potentially not make any money, when you can actually get released in print comics. So I don’t feel that this debate will even exist in Europe. Maybe in the U.K. In the U.S. I would have a hard time [to stop] reading comic books.

BF: Is there something more to print comics than the smell?

RN: I don’t think it’s just the smell. I think it’s several things. The pleasure of reading [print comics], it’s not just the fetish of holding an object. It’s the experience of looking back and forth, of letting your eye roam around the page, and it’s also the quality of the image. A flat image that the light shines on. It’s not a glowing image [as would be projected from a computer monitor]. I don’t think it’s just the smell.

I do think it’s taste. A number of younger readers I know do all of their [comics] reading on the web because they really care about the stories, they care about the characters. They don’t need to sit down with a book. It’s where their habits are.

BF: I just realized that a lot of webcomics are in comic strip form. It seems like that [webcomics] might be limited in the kinds of stories an artist can tell.

SD: It’s just that the strips were the easiest transition because of the format. Because it fits on the screen.

I don’t really like short strips on the web, but you have people like Shaenon Garrity, with Narbonic, and she’s doing something that you cannot do in newspapers anymore, which is to have a very long storyline.

BF: Why can’t you do those in newspapers?

RN: There are a lot of reasons. The current readership is probably not consistent enough. There are not enough people reading every day to support [long term] serialization. So the incentive to come up with something that’s going to be complex, possibly lose your readers is very low. Better to have a joke.

SD: Shaenon distributes her strip through Modern Tales, and of course when you subscribe, you have access to the archives, so she can make long storylines which you will be able to read if you subscribe.

BF: Shaenon’s also already gone into print.

SD: Yes, and she's recently done something with Marvel.

BF: The folks who do webcomics that are native to the web, they’re not going to be putting out books. What kind of things are they doing?

SD: Well you have what Tracy White is doing. She’s really into interactivity. The best example is that she tells a story, a personal story on her website, and then she invites the readership to participate in the story by going to the message board to share their experience on the topic. She was doing some stories for Oxygen and they were inviting teenagers to give their opinion of where the story should go. Tracy would draw the story from what they were thinking.

RN: One version of interactivity is saying “should I do this with the story? ABCD, here are the choices.” Another version is saying “what should I do” and then your readers offer their story ideas, then the artist has the opportunity to weave those together or to pick one.

BF: That seems like it can be printed after it’s all done.

RN: That can be printed, but the creative process is native to the web. It gives you an opportunity to tell a story that doesn’t obey [traditional] narrative conventions, where you have elements that are more open-ended.

SD:Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, using Hypertext, does a lot of this. He has a special name for them. He calls them Hypercomics. You just have a character thinking, each thought is just one word floating around him, and as the reader you have to click on one word, floating like that. And it’s going to give you a special story and then you go back to the original page and then you grab another floating word.

BF: One of the big conflicts is about money, making money, being financially stable as an artist. That conflict exists for every artist, but now we’re talking about the internet, where money is very difficult to pin down. Do you feel that there will ever be a financial model that will work for everybody on the internet?

RN: How do you start with that one?

SD: My understanding would be that if it works for you to, say merchandizing, licensing

BF: Licensing? Like a cartoon show or a movie?

SD: Or a t-shirt. If it works for you... If micropayments end up working, then...

BF: How are you thinking of distributing your film?

RN: We’re still working on that. We may go first to Europe, and that’s looking promising now. At this point, we’re looking at different possible distributors. This is a niche market film so we want to know “how do we get it out to the people who want to see it” and “how do we hopefully realize some sort of profit on it as well?”

BF: Is there room on the festival circuit for a film like this?

RN: Sure, there’s room, but whether we got that way or not is another question. Going into festivals is very expensive.

Also, with the proliferation of festivals, using [them] as a way of exposure is trickier than it was five or ten years ago. Last year, two percent of submissions to Sundance were accepted, and Sundance is one of [the few] film festivals taken seriously by distributors and buyers. If you don’t get into one of those festivals, then you’ve wasted a lot of effort and money trying to get in.

I think it’s safe to say at this point, we’re still trying to figure out what the best way to get exposure is. The website has generated a lot of interest, and I’m hoping that the interest will continue to build.

SD: One of the main issues is that in recent years it has become easier for everybody to make [a] film, but the distribution system –

RN: The number of films are actually not up. The numbers of docs are up as a result of [digital video], but the number of feature films is not up. The bigger issue is that the quality has gone up.

I taught a class at L.A. Mission College, a film history class, and one of the films that I showed was El Mariachi, which in 1992 was a huge sensation and has led to a very successful career [for writer-director Robert Rodriguez] That film today, I don’t think it would make it into the Palm Springs Festival. What was amazing about that film at that time is that it got made. Like Clerks. If you were to make Clerks or El Mariachi today, I don’t think they would gain the same attention that they did back then because just finishing a film in 1990 was hard: expensive and very difficult. Today, just finishing a film is not so hard.

What I hear from the directors of Sundance [and] the buyers at Fox is that movies are a lot better now than they were in the early days of Sundance. So, trying to fight your way through festivals maybe makes sense for the right movie, but with the number of docs up, and with the quality of docs up, it may make more sense to find a distributor who has the same take, who has an idea of how to find an audience.

BF: What was your favorite moment in the creation of the project?

SD: I guess that my best moment was when I could start watching the film and seeing a conversation between people who were not in the same room, and that’s when I knew it would work.

RN: For me the best moment of shooting was the second year we went to Comic Con [2003]. It was [Tracy] White, [Leonard] Cachola, [Cat] Garza, and [Patrick] Farley, in their interviews, cinematically and from their personalities that showed me what I believe to be the heart and soul of the film could be. It came through their commitment, their creative commitment and through their passion. Seeing those very candid, honest impassioned moments on film told me that we had a movie, and gave me tremendous confidence.