 You might not be aware of it, but you are constantly surrounded by comics. Whether it's choking hazard sign in a restaurant or the IKEA instructions you're trying to decipher, at one point or another in your life, you've read a comic. Ever since action comics introduced the world to Superman in 1938, modern comics have been a huge driver of art and culture. What used to be ridiculed and cast aside has now become a modern day cultural phenomenon, generating billions of dollars. Comics have come a long way, and thanks to new digital platforms, comics are more accessible than ever. It really feels like we're in this kind of weird comic renaissance. There's just more of everything. Yeah, there's so much diversity, small publishers are doing really well. Small publishers, big publishers seem to be a little more organized. I mean, independents now can just go out and do it and just publish themselves. But I really like, I don't even know where to start anymore. Where do we begin with comics? When I started out, I could just like go, mmm, and imagine the entire world of comics, you know, in 1984. I could just see it in my head. You can't do that anymore, it's too big. This is Scott McCloud. He's a major figure in comics theory. You may recognize him more like this. In 1993, he created the seminal comic book Understanding Comics. It was a comic book treatise of sorts, illustrating how comics leveraged many different disciplines, from semiotics to sequential art. He's kind of a go-to guy for anything comics. You know, the comics industry has changed even since the last book, even since 2006, or since 1993. It's a completely new industry. Six months after Understanding Comics came out in 93, the first graphical web browser came out. Web comics came just crashing into our art form and completely changed the rules. Meanwhile, a graphic novels movement finally takes hold, and that was a tremendous change. You also saw the influx of manga and a lot of storytelling techniques that I think could be tremendously valuable in comic storytelling. So these are four massive changes in comics culture. The result is we have this tremendous biodiversity of the comics that are out there, of the kinds of subjects that people can talk about in comics, of the people making comics. We're seeing more diversity there. And we're seeing a tremendous diversity of formats and technologies. This is how you have a healthy art form. You want an art form that's so diverse that you can't see from one end of it to another. It's also diversity in terms of format, too, especially with digital comics right now, because they can think beyond just the page convention. Right. People are doing things that are really innovative in digital comics. For instance, one really great example that I can think of is Symbolia. Symbolia was an interactive comics journalism magazine that was published on iPad and through PDF. This is Joyce Rice. She was the creative director of Symbolia. She knows a lot about digital comics. How you make them and what they can do. And she really believes that they can enhance the comics reading experience, if you make them right. One of my favorite inspirations for interactive comics actually is Raw magazine, which was a magazine that was printed in the 80s and 90s. They would include like sound discs and packs of bubble gum and like all of these different kinds of interactive things in their printed magazine. And so I look at Raw and I'm like, what can we do on the computer that's totally different? Symbolia deals in nonfiction, and that sometimes means dealing with data. So in this case, they combined a map graphic into a single panel thanks to a GIF. If you wanted to do that in print, you need a bunch of additional panels. Now over here, we're shown a street. By tapping on this icon, you can hear what that environment sounded like. The audio and visual combination lets you enter that landscape in a way that couldn't be possible in print. So digital comics aren't just changing the way that we read comics, they're also changing the way that we buy them. You know, there's still a surprising number of apps like actually let you read and purchase comics. There's Marvel Unlimited, for example. There's Dark Horse, and of course, there's Comixology. There are tons of digital comics reading apps, but Comixology is my app of choice. It's less buggy than most, and it sports a larger selection than any other digital comics store. To read a book on your tablet or phone, all you have to do is buy it in the online store, and then you're off. But Comixology is more than a store. The company also pioneered a comics reading interface called Guided View. The origins of Guided View is that we needed a cheap way to present a portrait style image onto a smaller screen or device. At the start, everybody was just cutting out panels in Photoshop. It's a huge overhead, right? You gotta get a bunch of people sitting in front of Photoshop, cutting out panels into 480 by 640, the iPhone size, and we're making slideshows. We felt like the rhythm of the story was gone, the feeling of the page was gone, the layout of the page was gone, but at the same time, you're talking about a very small device. So we had two goals. One, make it very readable so that the text was readable without a lot of pinching and zooming because that's a pain. Two, we wanted the whole page there. So the idea of Guided View came in. We basically show you chunks of the page, one screen at a time, but do it in a way where we're telling a story. So we're not simply just moving around the page, we're actually going with the flow of the story, and then sometimes we'll actually crop out unnecessary parts of the artwork because they're not integral to what the story is. And then one of the nice offsets of this is that we actually invented a new way of telling stories which is Guided View Native, which was completely done by accident. What happens is when you go from panel to panel, it slides, but when you go from page to page, there's a crossfade. And so we had a lot of people see that and say, I want to create stories in this manner. It seems like there's a lot of possibilities with Guided View Native, but it really just makes you think of the device that you're using a lot more than maybe you should be because you're constantly tapping the screen and waiting for bubbles to appear. It also comes down to authorial intent. Like, people, a lot of these comics were written with the page in mind. Like, that's something to keep in mind, especially, for example, Scott McCloud, who made a big deal with a sculptor and being something you should, first and foremost, read on paper. This thing was in every way designed to take advantage of what print can do in full knowledge and awareness of print's limitations. You know, I have one moment where my protagonist early in the book is shown deaf, you know, with a little help from a supernatural entity. He's able to understand what death is, something that all of us maybe understand on some level, but you need a little help to really understand it. Some people have described understanding death as like seeing the back of your own eyeball, the idea that that consciousness can't even conceive of the absence of itself. You know, so I, and the way I choose to show it in the book is two blank pages. The idea of putting that on an iPad and having people think that it's malfunctioning, you know, I mean, what do you do? It's like it's designed for print. It exists in print. It's a printed artifact, you know, paper without ink. With that said, I mean, paper is always going to be beautiful. I think this is a great constriction for people to kind of experiment with the format, but digital is a way to expand the entire audience. Yeah, more people are reading comic books because of the digital format. I think that, you know, people who don't live close to a comic book store have more access to comics in general, and then it also just, you know, for people who maybe wouldn't feel comfortable going to a comic book store as, you know, a newbie, I think that it allows them to explore a world and, you know, gain some knowledge before having to step into a comic book store. And honestly, anything that brings more people to comic books, there's nothing wrong with that.