Comics & Ideas

Written in Mlarch of 2006

One of the things I like best about comics is their innate facility for education. Comics communicate ideas with clarity and simplicity, and can be replayed countless times without cost at any speed you like, in any direction you like.

Collector's mania for comics can sometimes be considered to have started when editorial notes-which, from one perspective, are early hyperlinks-appeared directing the reader's attention to contextual information in previous issues. "* See issue #12 for the origin of Grim Fin-Headed Backdoorman!" Linking you back to an older comic in your box or on your shelf. Or even "* See Other Series #34 for more on bombastic Boobsock Girl's three-headed baby!", linking you across to another series entirely. Provided you had the money and the access and the bug for it, you could assemble an entire universe shot through with non-linear links that went up and down the timeline, across lives and geographies.

Primitive as hell, of course, but it worked. Particularly for early Marvel, when there was a single writer, Stan Lee, guiding all the books. And he wanted you to read all the books. He didn't want Avengers fans or Spider-Man fans, after all. He had to make the entire line culturally sticky. Due to the nature of Marvel's distribution at the time, which was run through National Periodicals-DC!-Marvel could only release a limited number of books per month. So he needed Marvel fans, full stop, so that every book in the line paid off. He couldn't afford any slack. That was the brilliance of the man-that he created, from scratch, the Marvel fan.

The above is, in part, what Grant Morrison's talking about when he starts declaiming about the DC Universe as a live thing. Since it grows and makes connections while under the command of forces almost totally invisible to the populations within the comics, it fulfills one of the conditions for life inside a creationist universe. This is one of the reasons why people think Grant is mad.

I spoke a few weeks ago about the possibility of a book throwing off a "data shadow"-printing a URL on the back of a book that leads you, should you type it in to an internet-enabled device, to a network of information about a book. This is something that all comics could do. On the assumption that in the Western world few people buying comics are too far away from a library or internet cafe at the very least, the potential exists to build an accessible data shadow above any book.

In fact, it could be done in very sophisticated ways. Electronic hyperlinks could be built right into the pages.

In Japan, there's a system... I have to go back and find the name, I'm in the pub right now and all this is just occurring to me in a stream-of-consciousness rush-there's a system where a link can be encoded into a small square codon-rich graphic that's readable by enabled mobile phones... QR. It's called QR Barcode.The phone reads it and spits a stream of information about the thing the graphic's stuck to, right back to your phone screen.

In Japanese supermarkets, people use QR-enabled camphones to scan the QR tags on food labels. (This connects right back to Spimeworld, see?) The QR kicks your phone over to a phone-optimised website that tells you where the food came from, right down to the name of the farm, what was used to grow it, and even the composition of the soil it came out of. You can even buy things called Stamkeys that let you make your own QR code blocks. Hell, some people are turning them, not just into mobile-formatted links to websites and blogs, but actual blog content in and of themselves.

(I found out about all this via Our Man In Tokyo, designer and event curator Jean Snow.*)

Imagine this, then: reading an issue of, say, Grant's Invisibles, and King Mob's just said something about Guy Debord. And buried in the bottom right corner of the panel is one of those little QR blocks. Shoot it with a phone and the Wikipedia entry on Guy Debord comes back to you from the book's datashadow.

I used Invisibles not only because I'd previously mentioned Grant, but because Vertigo books from the '90s-Invisibles, Preacher, Transmetropolitan-were books about ideas. The three of us were writing about our discrete areas of interest, and, in large part, we were telling you about the things we knew. Which isn't a bad thing. Some people balk at writers having any opinion, interest or intent beyond banging out a neutral yarn, but, you know, fuck that noise. Comics are an educational tool, used for anything from instructional pamphlets for civil disobedience to workplace hygiene. The best fiction, like the best reportage, is about the writer telling the reader where they think they are today, and what they think it looks like.

* http://www.jeansnow. net

Sadly, QR coding hasn't caught on outside Japan. But it's an interesting thought to consider. In the meantime... well, we don't have access to anything quite that sophisticated, here in the West. But I'm thinking about trying something with a project I'm developing right now. I'm thinking about building a wiki on top of a comic.

A wiki, from Wikipedia's definition: "A wiki is a type of website that allows anyone visiting the site to add, remove as well as edit all content, quickly and easily, without the need for registration, which makes it an effective tool for collaborative writing. The term wiki is a shortened form of wiki wiki which is from the native language of Hawaii (Hawaiian), where it is commonly used as an adjective to denote something "quick" or "fast" . In essence, a wiki is nothing more than a simplified system of creating HTML web pages, combined with a system which records and catalogues all revisions, so that at any time, an entry can be reverted to a previous state. A wiki system may also include various tools, designed to provide users with an easy way to monitor the constantly changing state of the wiki."

Just go and take a look at Wikipedia to see one in action. The use occurred to me several weeks back, when I discovered that fans of the TV show Lost had generated a wiki for the show.

If you generated a wiki-essentially, a networked, highly hyperlinked directory of information-in advance of a comics series' release, and stamped the book with the URL of the wiki... and, conceivably, even somehow marked pages and panels with URLs that take you inside the wiki structure, in any of a variety of ways from subtle to as blatant and clunky as that old editorial-note caption box that littered Marvel comics of old... you invite a peculiarly modern involvement in the work. With a single book, in fact, you can create

the sense of immersion in a universe that came, in the Sixties, from buying eight different lightly-connected Marvel comics. Immersion and, in a sense, interaction. Internet culture has become defined in part by what can be termed "extended consumption." Mash-ups. Making music videos out of mp3s and recut anime. The explosion of fanfiction. These things don't always necessarily qualify as art, to some, but they do express a change in the way we relate to and handle our arts.

That would be an interesting way to do a modern comic. One that has its own electronic universe standing behind it, accessible through an URL printed on the front of the book, or multiple URLs seeded throughout the book. The book would not rely on them for its effect and textual integrity, but it would be supported and extended by a directory of information about the book, produced both by the creators and those of its audience who wished to extend their consumption of and involvement with the book.

(Hideously open to vandalism, of course, like Wikipedia itself, but I'm talking pure blue-sky concepting here, so please indulge me before I pass out from the sheer strain of holding a train of thought this long.) (Shit. Too late.)