Music is something that is very important to Cat Garza. Known as a webcomics pioneer and for his experiments with comics form, Garza is also a musician. His recording project, Estrechez, has a number of albums to its credit and hundreds of Garza's songs are available at his site.

Music is also important to Garza's latest webcomic series. Published under the banner of his long running Magic Inkwell Comic Strip Theater, Those Were the Salad Days follows the exploits of Dingbat Cat, an anthropomorphic M.C., and his fellow musicians collectively known as the Squarepegz.

The story follows the group as they prepare for and enter the "Big Beat-Down" a kind of Battle-of-the Bands type of competition. As the character's lives seem to revolve around the band the group's music is central to the story. True to his reputation as a webcomics experimenter, Garza makes music central to the narrative as well. Early on Garza includes an MP3 of one of the Squarepegz songs embedded in a QuickTime file for what he calls an animated meta-panel. Cartoon images of the characters are set to the beat of the music. Not only does the comic tell the story of the music, the music becomes a part of the story itself. It's a unique and little utilized capability of webcomics form that Garza is taking advantage of, the combination and simultaneous presentation of music and comics.

This very combination stands at the forefront of a simmering debate among webcomics circles. With the possibilities that web technology brings, what is a worthwhile addition to comics form, and can the result still be called comics? The works of Garza and others, such as Kean Soo and Neal Von Flue, perhaps point the way to an answer to this question. At the very least, their attempts highlight some of the challenges the integration brings and also the exciting possibilities that come with exploring this new art form.

A THEORETICAL PRECEDENT

There is actually a link between comics and music that stretches back as far as the history of popular comics. Music or musicians play a major role in the narrative of such diverse comics as Peanuts and Love and Rockets, and creators have long listed music as a primary inspiration.

Many cartoonists have strong ties to musical performance as well. George Herriman is reported to have been an accomplished amateur musician, and certainly music played an important influence in many of his Krazy Kat strips. Underground icons, R. Crumb and James Kochalka are each noted for their recordings as well as their comics work.

Some print cartoonists have even experimented with releasing "soundtracks" inspired by or set to their comics, such as Kyle Baker's collaboration with KRS One, Break the Chain, or Trust/ Obey's album Fear and Bullets, inspired by J. O. Barr's The Crow. Alan Moore even co-wrote and recorded his own soundtrack music to his 1984 series V for Vendetta.

Not until the advent of web technology, however, was the true simultaneous presentation of music and comics made readily available. At a glance, the union of comics and music seems to be a perfect fit. Both forms rely extensively on rhythm and timing.

There is a parallel manipulation of intervals alluded to in the comics theory work of Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) and Will Eisner (Comics and Sequential Art). Both forms also commonly combine concrete verbal information (dialogue and other text in comics; lyrics in music) in similar ways. The shared reliance on rhythm, or beat, is strong. It's not inconceivable that comics could mimic the time signature, rhythm, and tone of music in visual-sequential form.

Furthermore, the combination of music and image also has a strong historical precedent. Filmmakers have long used the combination to enhance the narrative of their own pictures. The marriage of music and film is so strong that now it's hard to imagine presenting a movie without an extensively scored supplemental soundtrack (such films are still occasionally released, but it is far from the norm). A variety of techniques have developed for using the music in film, some to great effect. Adapting some of these techniques from film, and using the unique properties of the web, a handful of cartoonists have attempted similar effects in webcomics.

COMICS/NOT COMICS

Cat Garza's earliest experiments in the combination of music and comics were along the lines of the background music method. Dropping a MIDI file of ragtime songs behind strips in the original incarnation of Magic Inkwell, Garza used the combination as a kind of mood setter. The presentation is simple and the song acts as little more than a supplement to the strips narrative.

Webcomics were in their infancy at the time, and technology has improved. Garza's new series Those Were the Salad Days, takes on the addition of music in a more sophisticated and perhaps more controversial way. The characters in Salad Days are musicians. Their music, coming directly from the characters themselves, is brought to the foreground of the storyline.

As the songs, in some segments, carry the full weight of the narrative, tying the music to the beat of the images becomes very important. It's a simple technique in film, but not so easily pulled off in comics form. Music and film, because of the similar ways an audience processes the information in each, are easily synched in time. A movie's score can shift and adapt to the requirements of the narrative in real time. Film and music are both passive media in that the audience has no control over the rate of reception.

Comics, on the other hand, are a more active medium. Like the written word, comics engage the intellect in a much more interactive manner. As stated, music and comics do share a sensibility of rhythm. Due to the differences in interactivity, the concept of rhythm in each differs greatly. Combining comics' subjective rhythm with music's objective rhythm is a daunting challenge.

Garza's solution is to present the music segments as QuickTime movie files. Using animation, the images match up to the beat with tightly controlled pacing. The argument then arises that these segments are animation and not comics. When they are taken standing alone, this is perhaps true. But Garza sees these segments as only part of the comics' narrative. Most of Salad Days is told in traditional panel-to-panel format. Garza sees the occasional "music video" as a kind of splash panel (or "meta" splash panel). "I think, within the structure of a serialized comic where there's a strip before and after the installment, " says Garza, "It DOES count as comics because it's within the structure of a comic."

Inserting an animation into a comics-based narrative may bend the "rules;" but others have found different solutions to this problem.

EXIT MUSIC

A love of music was a running theme and inspiration throughout Kean Soo's Journal comic. His attempts at combining the two forms began simply as single panels paired with MP3s of songs meant to convey or reinforce a certain mood or feeling. He soon expanded these to full comics-narratives with the multi-panel infinite canvas experiment Devil in the Kitchen. He's continued to explore the combination in other stories, many of which are collected at his site under the title Exit Music.

Most of Soo's comics use music in the tradition of the soundtrack piece. Like a pop song playing behind a scene in a movie, the music is presented to convey or enhance a general mood, but not necessarily tied beat-for-beat to any specific narrative event.

Take the example of the most recent comic, Snowstorm. The story, like all of Soo's Exit Music comics, is an autobiographical fragment ñ a brief glimpse at a moment in the author's life. Soo and an unnamed female friend are exiting a movie theater into a cold winter night. Brief chitchat ensues, remarks on the movie and on the weather. It starts to snow. It's a commonplace moment, but a quiet and beautiful one. The wonderful simplicity of the moon shining through the overhead telephone wires, or a string of electric lights winding up a bare tree. Share a quiet moment with someone you care about and the cold night and mediocre movie don't seem to matter too much. The comic ends with the pair walking arm in arm into the gathering snowstorm. The music, Galaxie 500's song of the same name, reflects the feeling of the strip well. With a slow, even layering of sound and a relaxed tempo, the song seems in no hurry to leave this moment. Like Kean Soo in the snowstorm, it finds a comfort in the quiet beauty of the night.

"Usually when I decide to write a music comic," says Soo, "it's either spurred on by a particular song (Passing Afternoon, for example), or I'll write a story and then later go back and try to find a matching song for it (as in Snowstorm). I think in these cases, I'm definitely trying to use music to enhance a particular mood or feeling."

And the technique is effective. The music acts as a kind of emotional background piece and the play between the comics' narrative and the song does color the reader's response. But there are limitations to the effect. Essentially, each comic that makes up Kean Soo's Exit Music is an emotional snapshot of his life. The narratives are necessarily brief, representing a succinct moment and a single emotion. The song pairings work in these cases because, really, not much is asked of them. The songs exist to give a single impression ñ a general emotional context for the comics.

When nothing more specific is needed, the pairing works nicely. A more complex narrative, however ñ one that requires any shift of scene or emotion - demands a more sophisticated combination and a greater degree of conscious interaction between comic and song.

THE SCORE

Bottle Up and Explode was only Soo's second attempt at the combination of music and comics. The strips' silent narrative follows Kean through several shifts of emotion. A passing conversation leads to a simmering anger in Soo. That feeling builds throughout the comic until it reaches a breaking point and emotional climax. Soo paired Eliot Smith's song, Bottle Up and Explode, with the comic. With no dialogue and quite a few scene changes, the music has to carry a good deal of the narrative. Originally Soo had planned to present the comic and song side by side but as separate elements. He realized quickly that the combination didn't scan quite right.

"I noticed that reading the comic with the music at a certain pace, you would hit the splash "panel" (inside the elevator) just as the instrumental section of the song kicks in." says Soo. "At that point I tried to control the reader's progression a little more."

To gain that control, Soo needed a visual cue to pace the reader's attention. The solution he found was to print the song's lyrics at key places in the narrative. Slipping the words in the gutters between panels, Soo provides a recognizable link between the parallel audio and visual narratives. It is an effective way to cue the reader's pacing. The link is direct and easily recognized.

It can be a clumsy solution, however, as a reader is more likely to progress through the comic more rapidly than the songs set rate. Hitting the chunks of lyric before the song actually reaches that point creates a kind of stop-start interruption in the flow of the narrative. The problem is accentuated if the reader is unfamiliar with the song's lyrics. Sometimes several read-throughs are required in order to get the timing right. Tying the music to specific points in the narrative remains a major hurdle of comics/ music synthesis.

But there are other ways to effectively utilize music in a narrative.

MUSIC AS GLUE

Take Kean Soo's first attempt at combining music and comics, for example. Devil in the Kitchen, like most of the Exit Music comics, does not attempt to time the music directly to the comic's activity. The reason in this case, though, is the nature of the narrative itself.

Kitchen is a multi-panel, vertical, scrolling account of an Ashley MacIsaac concert Soo attended. Each oddly spaced, square panel represents a single and specific action or aspect of the night's festivities. There is no direct cause-and-effect narrative to the strip. Instead, the music is what holds the story together. This is more than just source music (although the source is depicted in the comic). The song provides both a setting and rhythm, tying the disparate moments represented by the visuals. Not synching to a narrative allows the reader more freedom to draw their own parallels and follow the comic at their own pace, and the song is absolutely essential to the whole.

Neal Von Flue, whose music/ comic experiments are collected under the title, "Synesthesia Drive-In", is another artist who has experimented with non-specific narration in his music comics. His Sand Dollar Collar (song is located separately, here) is a good example. The lyrics are printed here, as in Kean Soo's BottleÖ, but they are printed inside the panels of the comic itself. We can see how the images match with the song, but there is no direct narrative. The effect is more a collection of fleeting impressions.

The design of the comic adds to this feeling. There are no gutters so the dream-like images blend one into another. Even the printed lyrics have a more organic flow, allowing more room for interpretation.

Von Flue concedes that the combination of music and comics can be a tricky proposition. To him the difference in the elements boil down to control. "It falls mainly on vocals to keep tempo in a song," he says, "And the narrative (text) seems to be what people follow most in comics Ö" The verbal is the dominant element for controlling the pacing. The ideal result, in Von Flue's opinion "Ö is either a silent comic with a fully fleshed out song Ö or a purely ethereal and soundtrack oriented song with a full comics narrative." The words have to weigh in on one side of the music/ comics equation.

COLLABORATION

Von Flue's experiments are interesting cases, as they weren't intended as music comics at all to begin with. Sand Dollar Collar, Dead Baby Army, and The Sleeping Dark Things were each created as part of his series of webcomics, "The Halcyon Years," as standalone comics narratives. But Von Flue's musician friend, Nicholas Von Hulsebus, was inspired by these stories and wrote the music to go along with them. The method of creation is reflected in the presentation of the comics. The MP3s of the songs are listed separate from the comics; each can be taken in independently. The links' juxtaposition in Von Flue's comics index (scroll down to bottom) is only a suggestion that they be taken together.

The approach to the creation of Von Flue's Synesthesia Drive-In comics highlights another interesting aspect of the combination, that of the possibilities of collaboration. Aside from avoiding the serious issue of copyright infringement (Kean Soo uses copywritten work for his comic ñ a fact which Soo himself admits is a sticky situation) collaborating to create an original song (or writing your own as Cat Garza does) adds a new dynamic to the synthesis. Fifteen Minutes on the Downtown Bus by Colleen MacIsaac and Jon Altschuler typifies this possibility. The comic is a series of melancholy reflections and memories that jumps from character to character and across the years. The delicate looping riff of the music quietly holds the stories together. MacIsaac, the artist, and Altschuler, the musician, worked closely with one another throughout the entire process of creation. The result is a comic created as a back and forth dialogue between cartoonist and musician, each artist influencing and inspiring their partner's part of the project. Comic and song are integrated, like Kean Soo's work, as an MP3 embedded into the comic's script.

FLASH-Y SOLUTION

Yet, another synthesis that has been discussed though remains largely untried, is the possibility of Flash integration. The difficulty is in trying to combine music and visuals in a way that avoids the "animation-not-comics" concern of Cat Garza's QuickTime files. Macromedia's Flash application has been used extensively to create web animations, but the interactivity that Flash files offer bring up other possibilities for comics as well.

Joseph Bergin III used flash to present his Uncle Comics IV (link broken). It's a short, click-through gag strip presented one panel at a time, with Flash's sound integration properties, Bergin sets the scene for his comic with a rhythmic loop that runs uninterrupted behind the strip. The party beat provides a setting for his minimally rendered strip. Though synching to the beat is not necessary for this particular comic, Bergin does present a solution. "Click to the beat," he suggests, "It's funnier that way."

The experiment works in an amusingly simple way. The looping beat is easy to follow and giving up control to the external rhythm can be an enjoyable experience for the brief comic. But other cartoonists, such as Daniel Merlin Goodbrey have suggested a more sophisticated integration of comic and sound. Goodbrey is the creator of the Tarquin Engine, a Flash-based, mouse-click navigation platform for creating and displaying webcomics. With one-click scrolling navigation, each panel in a Tarquin comic is displayed individually in sequence.

Regarding the engine, Goodbrey states, "the computer always knows exactly where the reader is looking because to look at that panel the reader will have had to have clicked on it." "It should make it very easy," he goes on, "to compose around the layout of a comic, with sound loops that activate only as specific panels or sequences of panels come into view." As the readers progress at their own rate, the soundtrack becomes a customized experience, bending and conforming to the readers pace.

Here the boundaries of definition are blurred again. A piece such as this would retain its identity as comics, as far as you accept any Tarquin-based narrative to be comics, but the resulting soundtrack would challenge what we think of as music. On the other hand, there is little that is traditional in combining music and comics and the possibility is perhaps worth looking into for its own sake.

THE QUESTION OF "WHY?"

Background or foreground, soundtrack and source, the possible combinations of music and comics are varied. But all of these experiments and possible solutions still face the question of "why?" Comics have always been a strictly visual medium. There is a strong argument that the remaining sense-impressions should be left up to the reader.

Often anything web technology can add to comics ñ animation, sound effect, or music ñ is extraneous and unnecessary. Does music bring anything to the comic? It's worth noting that Kean Soo has brought his Exit Music comics to print ñ without the soundtrack, to no detrimental effect, and many of these experiments, such as Neal Von Flue's Synethesia Drive-In, were full-fledged comics before music even entered the picture.

So why should one bother attempting a synthesis?

For some it's the thrill of the new. "This is the first time in history," says Cat Garza, "that we've been able to share an idea, image, and song with a world-wide audience almost simultaneously and instantly, and that's what I'm most in awe of." Music has unique properties that it can bring to a narrative that only a few are exploring. Adds Garza, "I think it's an underutilized possibility in webcomics."

Says Kean Soo, "I love music simply because it's able to evoke an emotional response in me, which is different from all other forms of entertainment. Film makers have realized this and used music to amazing effect in some cases, and I like the idea of being able to do something similar with comics."

Neal Von Flue also notes the emotional impact of the combination, as well as, the cinematic influence. "Changing and adapting feelings and moods is something music does very well," he notes. "Maybe on a subconscious level those of us who experiment with comics and music feel like we might be on the same cusp as the people who blended sound and film Ö it's possible that there may be a way to do the same thing with comics now that we have the technology to marry them much easier than we have ever had before."

The debate goes on. Comics, like any artistic medium, are about communication. Whether a story, or a feeling, or a comment on form, the artist must find the best way to convey the information. Only time will tell how well the combination of music and comics will work, and if the synthesis adds anything of lasting value to comics. "It may wind up being a complete "noble failure," concedes Garza, "but it's still something that's making me work, so I'm happy about it."

No matter what side of the argument you take, it's hard to argue with that.