by Neal Von Flue, Alexander Danner,
and Joe Zabel
Previous installments of Aggressive Experiments have focused on recent comics by newcomers to the webcomics arena who pursue the webcomics tradition of radical experimentation. But what about the artists who blazed these trails in the first place? Whose work in ancient times (i.e., two or three years ago) has become the stuff of legend?
This month we take you on a whirlwind tour of three of the most significant experimental artists: Demian5, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, and John Barber. (Note that elsewhere in this issue we've penned a retrospective of another artist in this vein, Patrick Farley.)
Joe Zabel
demian5.com
Demian5
Free
You'd be hard pressed to find a webcomics fan or creator who hasn't
heard of Demian5. The Swiss artist's breakout comic, When I Am King, was a fantastic and
well-executed foray into experimentation with format and animation in
webcomics, as well as an excellent adventure into situation comedy and
body-function humor. Everyone who read it loved it. But where has he
been since?
In the goldfish memory of the Web, popularity goes quick. If you step
out for a few minutes, you'll find your audience is already down the
road and raving about the next big thing. And, if you remember way back
to a few years ago, experimenting was king. We all ran from artist to
artist, from innovation to innovation, and, frankly, it seems like
Demian was left in the dust. Well, this assumption may be
unwarranted, as Demian5 has been working and innovating. But it may be
that he was focused on revolutionizing something that an audience isn't
too keen to follow: how to get them to pay.
Demain5.com was turned into a subscription site, something that -- at a
time when Modern Tales was still shaky and wet (that's a deer
reference, you perv) -- was a pretty ballsy thing for a single creator
to do. He posted a number of exclusives and subscriber-only content and
began a new comic: The Truth About
Elephants.
If there is a successor to what Demian started with his little
happiness-seeking King, it's The Truth about Elephants. All of
the earmarks of the former are there: the minimalist illustration
style, the use of images in place of verbiage, the decompressed
slapstick comedy. The only real difference is that he's telling a story
explicitly about animals, albeit animals that he has created to fill
the same basic human characteristics from his previous opus.
The story seems to center around an uptight giraffe who has problems
finding food. He's helped out by a well-meaning and simple elephant who
inadvertently turns the giraffe on to the wonders of the grass that is
normally too far away to be edible. This portion of the story then
falls a bit too close to the relationship between the King and the
Camel in When I Am King, but,
given that Demain5 has only currently finished 4 out of 14 or more
chapters (and a motherless bird egg recently joined the story), he may
take us in a wholly new direction.
Also available to subscribers is the truly infinite canvas piece, Life Code. This may be the best
example of a step forward from When
I am King. Life Code is
expansive, colorful and subtle. It's a story that begins and ends in
the same place, with a few small (and occasionally humorous)
improvements. As it follows a duckish icon of an alien creature, it
(sometimes subtly) lampoons science, hereditary biology and desire.
If there can be any major theme found in Demian5's work thus far, it
would be exploration into attaining desires. This moves almost all of
his characters. The King looks for happiness and the camel looks for
love. The giraffe looks for food. They are all tied to their wants, and
it propels the story. Through his decompressed storytelling, we gain
insight to their reasoning and are eager to see where they go next. The
joy of his work is not in decoding his "message," as with some art, but
in sitting back and watching these motivations play out in each new
situation. Through his iconography and potent stories, we see us
looking back. We root for them and worry. We are engaged, and the whole
time Demian5 makes it look easy.
A subscription to Demian5's site will set you back three dollars. Yes,
three dollars. For a year. Any one of these stories is well worth
the price. Not to mention the other comics included for subscribers,
such as his ex-Serializer.net comic Square
Fiction and the print strip Email
for the Dog. He has also posted some older print comics and
created a downloads section with wallpapers, screensavers and a
downloadable version of the complete When
I Am King series (which has always remained free to view on his
site).
Now, before you run over with your Paypal password in hand, it must be
said that his site is currently on hiatus. Demian has posted in his
forum that he is busy with "Civil Service," which (in his words) is:
"something Swiss people do when they don't want to participate in the
Swiss army." He has stated that updates will resume in March of '05. In
the meantime, it appears he is still a regular visitor to his forum and
seems open about his schedule and intentions to get back to work on
webcomics. So this enforced hiatus gives you ample time to check up on
what he's been doing since his first critical success.
Neal Von Flue
Read this comic.
e-merl.com
Daniel Merlin Goodbrey
Free / Subscription (Serializer.net)
Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's first major impact on the
webcomics
world came in 2001 with the release of Sixgun: Tales from an
Unfolded Earth,
an impressive Flash-based experiment in non-linear narrative. The title screen presents six character
portraits, each of which acts as an entry point to a different
narrative
chunk. Each of the six narrative chunks
uses a different experimental mechanism for exploring a series of story
threads, all of which take place in an "unfolded Earth" where portions
of
reality have recently disappeared, only to reappear much altered. It is a world populated by mutants, aliens,
and the risen dead, where all sense of internal logic has been eschewed. History itself, like the narrative
structure, has become non-linear, allowing futuristic Cit-Cop robots
and a
gun-toting, chainsaw-dueling Abraham Lincoln to wander through the same
timeless landscapes.
While Goodbrey Ěs world setting for the story is
fascinating
and his characters are intriguing, it's his experiments with the
narrative mechanics
that really made Sixgun the groundbreaking event that it was. In one sequence, the reader explores a duel
between Abraham Lincoln and Isambard Kingdom Brunel by way of a series
of
sliding panels that must be manipulated alternately up and down or left
and
right with the mouse. In another, the
reader can glimpse the inner lives of each of six people waiting at a
bus stop
by clicking on the individual panel containing the character. A third presents the entire comic as a
single large sheet viewed through the window of the Flash frame. The reader slides the entire sheet,
following a series of trails through small snippets of story about a
man
condemned to lifetime imprisonment in a maximum security sitcom. Simply following the trails here is not enough
-- in
each corner of the comics sheet, unconnected bits of back story hide,
waiting
for the exploring reader to find them.
This emphasis on innovative story mechanics
continues
throughout Goodbrey's work. In 2002, he
released Doodleflak, a self-contained series of disconnected
and darkly
humorous gag strips arranged as a series of branching spokes. Doodleflak was notable primarily for
debuting the Tarquin Engine, a Flash-based tool developed by Goodbrey
specifically to aid in the development of branching, infinite canvas
comics by automating trails, zooms and scrolling. Goodbrey
continued his experiments with the
Tarquin Engine in Externality, a somewhat more ambitious
experiment in
improvisational infinite canvas work.
(Rumor has it that Goodbrey will eventually make the engine
commercially
available. He has already lent it out to Scott McCloud for use in
one of
McCloud's own daily improv comics.)
Goodbrey's interest in the purely theoretical side
of comics
narrative becomes even more evident in The Mr. Nile Experiment
and his
most recent self-contained piece, The Formalist, a pair of
semi-narrative comics form essays that directly explore the structure
of
reality within the comics form. The
Mr. Nile Experiment was originally presented as a month-long
experiment in
producing a daily comic, wherein each day represented a new formal
experiment
hosted by the amusingly evil and meta-fictionally self-aware Mr. Nile
(an
anagram of "Merlin"). As usual,
Goodbrey displays his affinity for looping narratives; of particular
interest
is his exploration of the ways in which dynamic panels can be used to
change
not just the forward movement of a story but the nature of the story
thus far.
Mr. Nile later returned as the lead character in
the Mr.
Nile Journals, Goodbrey's ongoing comic on Serializer.net. Backed up by Spooky and Ignatz, a pair of
characters first introduced way back in Sixgun, Mr. Nile once
again
stands in as host to a series of formal experiments.
This time around, Goodbrey has imposed limitations on himself,
including a three panel layout in the spirit of traditional newspaper
strips
and a pseudo "journal comic" premise, all of which are intelligently
deconstructed through Mr. Nile's continued meta-fictional
self-awareness. While Goodbrey's ideas
have always been
intriguing, until now they have largely been pure theory with only
hints of
how they might play out in a more ambitious story.
By blending the best of his ideas with the most memorable
characters from his previous works, he's produced some of his best
comics to
date. For what may be the first time in
Goodbrey's work, characterization and plot are playing as much of a
role as the
structural experiments, making for a comic as entertaining as it is
intellectually exciting.
Alexander Danner
Read this comic.
New York
John Barber
Free
When I first encountered John Barber's cartooning style, in an extremely good comic called New York, I wondered what I was looking at. It was certainly animated-- more animated than any comic I'd ever seen. But nevertheless it was solidly based in the comics medium. It was not by any stretch of the definition an animated cartoon.
It retained its comics identity because the insides of the panels didn't move. Instead, it was the panels themselves that moved-- sliding in from the sides, or constructing themselves before our eyes. As anyone who's read him knows, the animation always stops after a few moments, allowing you to read and study what's before you; then you click in the window and the animation starts again and gives you the next layout.
Eventually I realized what I was actually looking at. It wasn't a cartoon. It wasn't a series of isolated panels that had been set in motion. It was a canvas. It was a variation of the infinite canvas Scott McCloud had written about in Reinventing Comics-- a canvas too large to fit on the screen, and instead presented to us a piece at a time.
But this canvas wasn't merely long or tall, and viewable by scrolling. Nor was it a canvas like Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's Doodleflak, which pivots and zooms in on a fixed plane of graphic art.
No, this was like something out of Little Girl Lost. You remember Little Girl Lost? The Twilight Zone episode written by Richard Matheson, in which the little girl crawls through a dimensional hole in the wall? Her parents grew frantic, because they could hear her in the bedroom, the living room, all over the house. In that other dimension, her body occupied space that was beyond our comprehension.
That is the dimension where John Barber's canvas lives.
It's exciting enough to see a comic that has broken through to another dimension. But the utilitarian in me wants to know, what is it good for? Barber's New York shows that it has plenty of uses.
For one thing, it's analogous to the environs of New York; crowded, constantly in motion-- a bit threatening. Scenes are played out over grids, like they're being reflected in windows; characters emerge from smoky blurs within traffic jams. In a subway station, shafts of the picture slide in from opposite sides of the frame to interlock-- like the doors of a subway opening and closing.
For another thing, the Barber canvas portrays psychological states. At one point, the hero of New York breaks into an apartment and gets in a fight with some pornographers who've tied up and blindfolded a young girl. The violence is depicted staccatos, with panels appearing in the middle of the page and stacking up on top of each other, like briefly glimpses building up to create our our impression of an event. The Barber canvas is analogous to human consciousness, where nothing is laid out side-by-side. Our minds are like a deck of cards being shuffled and reshuffled, and finally knocked from the hands of our consciousness, scattering to the far corners of our brain.
Most intriguing of all, the Barber canvas has the plasticity to suggest connections where we least suspect them. In an absorbing sequence from New York, the picture frame passes over a birds-eye view of the city, sweeping from neighborhood to neighborhood, always encountering irregular edges where the graphic is cut off by a field of white. Then suddenly, the graphic drops back into the frame, and we see that the irregular edges are actually the silhouette of a man. Is the city the man? Is the man the city? Barber poses these questions without saying a word.
New York is an excellent comic, lyrical, funny, and mysterious, with some of Barber's boldest, most improvisational art. And it's certainly emblematic of the Aggressive Experimentation the medium needs to stay vital.
Joe Zabel
Read this comic.
