See You in the (Multimedia) Funny Papers

Hollywood’s baby moguls swear that multimedia’s interactive future will be as video-game-inated movies--sort of a Nintendo-fied “Jurassic Park.” The cable companies envision multimedia as the highway to the virtual mall, while the computer digerati scoff and say, “It’s the software, stupid!” as they furiously rewrite their scripts in C++.

Enough already. The truth is that tomorrow’s interactive multimedia will probably draw less design inspiration from the silver screen and computer consoles than the funny pages and comic books. When it comes to creating the characters and contexts of new digital media, you’re probably better off being a Matt Groening or Tim Burton than a Michael Crichton or a Steven Spielberg.

It’s not merely that comic book characters like Superman, Batman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have enjoyed global success in a variety of media, but that comics offer ways to structure character, perspective and story that more naturally lend themselves to the multiple-path, interactive properties of the emerging media. The comic--far more than the video game, mini-mall or movie--simply represents a better scaffold around which to build a compelling multimedia experience.

“Comics and interactive media are on a collision course,” says Scott McCloud, a cartoonist who wrote “Understanding Comics” (Tundrapress, 1993), a brilliant comic book discussion of what makes comics work. “Comics are not just a genre but a real medium. . . . The lines between comics and other media are going to get fuzzier and fuzzier.”

Comics for grown-ups are already commonplace in much of the world, including France, Mexico and Japan, where manga are the subway reading of choice in Tokyo. Like movie and video games, comics are inherently global.

Defining comics as “sequential art,” McCloud argues that the way comic artists use such devices as frames and word balloons creates an environment where text and image can seamlessly coexist rather than interfere with each other. In fact, the text can be read as image.

“Any idea--concrete or abstract--can be conveyed in comic form,” he says. What’s more, the comic frame offers a natural window or gateway to the kind of interactive animation that digital multimedia can provide. “The still picture will be a staple of interactive media,” contends McCloud, who now plans to immerse himself in computer technology.

On one level, this should come as no shock to any director or animator in Hollywood. Most directors use storyboards to map out their movies. But what’s a storyboard if not sequential art?

Ironically, the real multimedia potential of a Disney animation or a “Jurassic Park” may lie more in the storyboard sequences than the finished products. The simplistic multimedia design challenge may be editing a movie into a video game. The real design challenge will be creating a new kind of experience around the storyboards: Where should text, graphics, sound, animation and interaction now intersect? At the core of that question isn’t a movie or a video game--it’s going to be a comic sequence.

“The comic book is a very good design metaphor because it allows character and multiple perspectives,” says Bill Gross, chairman of Knowledge Adventure, a Pasadena-based software “edutainment” company. “The video game metaphor is fight-or-flight. The driving force in a video game is the threat of death, not the thrill of interactivity . . . When we do focus groups with kids, we see the adrenaline mode they get into when they’re running from something or killing something. . . . It’s more of a primal thing.”

In other words, marrying story lines into video games as the design model for multimedia may undermine the fundamentally visceral reasons why video games are so successful with teen-agers. On the other hand, blending interactivity and multiple viewing perspective into comics may well create precisely the sort of compelling media experience that a broader range of people are looking for.

When people pick up their portable media displays, will the overwhelming majority of programming be movie-like video games? Or will there be images that integrate images, text and animation in ways the viewer can determine? Unless you honestly believe that text goes the way of T. rex in a multimedia domain, then the captions and word balloons that shape the visual experience of comics will inevitably find their way onto your high-resolution screens.

“Actually, I see this horrible bifurcation between text and moving images--they don’t work well together,” says Bob Stein, managing partner of Voyager Corp., the Santa Monica company that’s one of the world’s largest publishers of CD-ROM interactive movie programming and text-based electronic books. “I don’t know how to marry them. . . . My own bet is that while the comics metaphor is interesting, it’s not going to be enough.”

On the other hand, says Stein, who will publish Art Spiegelman’s prize-winning comic (but hardly comedic) novel “Maus” on CD-ROM later this year, “If I had to bet on movies, comics, video games or books, I would have to say that the comics guys are the wild cards--they could go either way.”