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Comics

The Best Digital Comics of 2012

December 31, 2012 – 11:12 pm

This year saw the comic book industry continue its inexorable move into digital publishing. Along the way we’ve seen innovation, exploration and inspiration as writers and artists pushed the creative envelope, expanding the definition of digital storytelling. While there isn’t enough space to highlight everyone’s attempts to further the medium it is worth taking a moment to recognize some folks whose efforts were especially noteworthy. Without further ado, and in no particular order, COMIC BOOK THINK TANK takes a look back at some of the most innovative digital comics for 2012.

InsufferableINSUFFERABLE: By Mark Waid, Peter Krause, Nolan Woodard and Troy Peteri

Billing themselves as an “experiment in new-media publishing” storytelling maestro Mark Waid and the gang at Thrillbent are regularly exploring how print comics can evolve in a digital environment – with fantastic results!

 

xkcd

XKCD: By Randall Munroe

A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language…and in this particular instance about the exploration of the infinite canvas.  If you haven’t already seen Click and Drag you owe it to yourself to head over there and spend some time exploring. You wont be disappointed.

AvXAVENGERS VS. X-MEN: INFINITE: by Mark Waid, Stuart Immonen and Marte Garcia

Kicking off Marvel’s Infinite Comics experiment in digital storytelling in a way only Marvel can – big! The House of Ideas didn’t shy away from pushing the digital envelope with this introduction to the mammoth Avengers vs. X-Men event.

madefireMADEFIRE

Melding comic book storytelling with animation and special effects, the Madefire team describe their comics as “Motion Books” and are trying to do nothing less than “revolutionize how stories are told.”

 

instacopINSTA•COP: by Kwanza Johnson and Andy Belanger

A hard boiled action adventure delivered one panel at a time across multiple platforms. The fine gents behind Insta•Cop are exploring the increasingly thin boundary between comics and social media.

 

Operation AjaxOPERATION AJAX: by Daniel Burwen

Based on a true life spy thriller, this multi-media comic is chock full of extras and support documents that let the reader dive deep into a truly immersive digital storytelling experience.

 

America: Elect!AMERICA: ELECT!: by The Guardian

The interactive team at The Guardian used a creative scrolling digital comic format to tell the story of Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and the US Presidential election. The results were far, far more fun than the election itself.

 

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Comics Process

The Road Goes Ever On – Process

December 17, 2012 – 11:06 am

To realize the pages in the Road Goes Ever On, we first had to make a central panoramic scene at the desired screen size x 4 – one for each season. To do this I illustrated each season or page with a particular element I wanted to convey relating to each season . For Spring there had to be flowers and trees present – something we could make grow over time. For Winter – rolling landscapes where snow could fall. For Summer- the sky and water I wanted to play with to show the brilliant summer sky reflected on the water. For Fall, there had to be trees where the leaves could change color and bluster away. (click for larger versions of the images)

tolkien_0

 

Once the line art was finished, it was a simple task of scanning and stitching all 4 images together.

tolkien_1
We used color coding to denote which season were which as we worked and on the far left, added a portion of the first part of the wrap from the fall season to the beginning of the winter season in order to generate the additional portions of the fall pages leading into winter.

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From there, everything was carved up into “slices”. These increments were the space which each page selection would move and then be exported from, giving the effect when turning each page of moving across the landscape. Additionally the color was added in Photoshop in a flat manner so that elements in the scene could be altered for each page or slice. Alternate versions of trees were drawn, and hobbits, wizards, and dwarves were drawn separately and digitally inserted.

tolkien_3

Once each scene was colored, text was added, and the process of moving along the landscape and exporting each page or slice was undertaken. We estimated that the time to generate a comic like this from beginning to end was about 60-80 hours.  The real struggle  came when the file size of the image became too cumbersome, and  scene sections had to be broken out separately (fall-winter, winter-spring, spring-summer, summer-fall). Also the day changes made lining up the phases of the sun and moon tricky – we altered that a few times and it required changing the lighting across the landscape as much as in the sky itself.

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