Forget distribution… how might iPad change art?

Hmm, I guess this would be part 2 of my reaction to iPad.  There are too many angles to consider, and I’m not sure how much I have to say, or don’t want to say, on the subject.  So maybe this is part 2 of Nth, or part 2 of 2.  Anyway.

As a print publisher, one of my tendencies is to look at devices and think how their design replicates the experience of reading on paper, how it may affect the print business, and brick and mortar retail, etc.  A lot of readers do that too.  But that’s biased.  Narrow-sighted.  Artists are probably looking at the iPad and asking “how will this change my art?”  This has greater implications than all the hype about the LongBoxes, the ComiXologies, all those new publishing paradigms.  Let me give you two examples which, on the surface, seem rather trivial…

Increasingly, on Japanese mangaka websites, you’d see these comics whose panels are arranged into columns that seem much too tall.  If you were looking at the image on a browser that resizes them to fit the screen, you might think you were looking at a strange, broken vertical line.  It’s yonkoma on steroids.  Some Western artists have begun to adopt this odd paneling style, yet not all of them understand the reason behind it.

Can you guess?  Here’s a clue… hardcore yaoi readers probably run into this kind of manga more than anyone else.

These super-long rectangles, panels arranged in a single column… they’re made for consumption on cell phones.  Each panel fits the phone’s width perfectly, so the reader only has to scroll in one direction – down – to enjoy it.  Reading on cell phones is a popular pastime for young women, hence the greater percentage of this kind of comic being yaoi.  Working in this format, the artist has to change the way she draws, the way she places word balloon, discard the blank spaces between panels, consider the scrolling effect rather than the page-turn effect… it’s basically a new dialect in the language of comics.  Manga is becoming specialized for the cell phone, and the format is not transferable to print.  That is key. The cell phone is not only the target format, but the exclusive format for this kind of graphic storytelling.

The second example doesn’t deal with comics at all, but music compression.  The quality of an audio recording lies in its dynamic range – the amount of high and low frequencies that is preserved.  (This Rolling Stones article explains audio dynamic range quite well).  To compress audio into an MP3 file, the dominant digital format, the dynamic range is reduced, which introduces noise and gives MP3s their “crispy” sound.  Serious audiophiles can readily notice this reduction in quality.  But a study (which I can’t locate at the moment, unfortunately) which polled its subjects on their music preferences found that younger listeners were more likely to prefer lower quality recordings that replicated the crackle of MP3s.  They had grown accustomed to it because of the ubiquity of compressed audio.

Now let’s bring it all back to comics.  The iPad and devices like it approximate the paper medium in many ways, fall short in some areas, and offer features that cannot be reproduced on paper.  How could this change the way artists approach making comics?  Would they look at how the iPad is similar to paper, and accentuate the qualities of print comics, or use its extended functionality to go in a direction that is completely divorced from print?  Could the device become so popular, that artists decide to target it as the primary format so that it is the superior medium to view their work, utilizing paneling techniques that just won’t translate to a static 6.625″ x 10.25″ page?  And as the MP3 example shows, when quality differences are minor, familiarity trumps it.  Digital devices still have a long ways to go to match the quality of print, but they may not have to do that to supplant print, they just need to get close enough.  The iPad doesn’t need to have unassailable technology.  With the help of comic creators, it just needs to redefine the fundamental expectations of the general public, to shift the goal post for what a comic should look like, what it should offer.  Create a new dialect of comics to usurp all others.

What that dialect may sound like, I do not know.  But I pray to the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster that it’s not motion comics.

Edit: both Journalista and The Beat have a bevy of punditry links for your consideration.

Edit 2: Matt Blind reminds us all that the criticisms against the iPad have an eerily familiar ring to the ones lodged at the iPhone and iPod at their initial launches.

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Missed it… ICv2 reports that Wisconsin-based printer Quad Graphics has acquired the Canadian printing company formerly known as Quebecor.  At one time, Quebecor was the largest printing company in the world, and despite financial problems, it is still the printer of most comics sold in the United States.

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Spotted via MangaBlog… British comics historian Paul Gravett offers up his list of the 18 best manga releases of 2009.  I kind of wish he had saved the two spots given to Akira and GitS for a couple other books… they were not new translations, and in the case of GitS, not even out of print.

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For you amusement… are Chinese characters sexist, and need they be changed?  This person apparently thinks so.  I dearly want to believe that this is a parody.