"This book is my bid to describe comics' external life, in which some value judgments will be inevitable," McCloud states in the introduction to Reinventing Comics. "Of course, the world of value judgments is a messy place and I'm not a messy guy, but I'll try anything once, so..." he continues with a reluctant but courageous perseverance, "Into the breach!"

McCloud's stated distaste for value judgments is an odd admission, considering that the intellectual validity of Reinventing Comics rests upon a single value judgment that McCloud insists upon over and over, to wit: Digital technology will allow comics to fulfill the aesthetic potential that the limitations of a previous and inferior technology (print) have heretofore stifled. This is worth emphasizing: McCloud is not merely pointing out that digital technology will play a role in the future of comics (as it unquestionably will in the future of culture generally) and enumerating some of the ways the technology will have an impact on the form; rather, he is asserting that digital comics have a quantifiably greater aesthetic potential than print comics precisely because of what we may call their uniquely digital characteristics. As extravagant a claim as this is, it is no more extravagant than many of the claims he makes in this book, and it's in the last chapter, "The Infinite Canvas," that he must make the case for the absolute superiority of digital technology and its application to comics over and against the print medium's, where he must, in short, put up or shut up.

It does not look good.

Paradoxically, McCloud believes that digital technology will resurrect the true potential of comics as exemplified by what he considers ancient (pre-digital) examples of comics: the tomb of Menna (circa 1200 BC), a series of ascending pictures on a pillar called the Trajan's column (113 AD), and the "Codex Nuttall" of pre-Columbian Mexico. These expansive forms of comics, McCloud claims, were subverted by the advent of print technology. "The ancestors of printed comics drew, painted and carved their time-paths from beginning to end, without interruption," McCloud explains, and continues somewhat judgmentally, "Print, though, presented a landscape of tiny cul-de-sacs, asking readers to leap to new paths every few panels based on a complex protocol." (Why complex protocols of reading are considered a liability is not made clear, but more about complex protocols in due course.) "When the 'cave wall' of the page came to an end, readers learned to simply move on to the next one," McCloud writes approvingly. But as soon as Gutenberg came along, "Print subverted space, folding it upon itself, allowing stories to grow to any length without relying on fraying cloth or crumbling stone." Worse yet, "...to reap the benefits of print meant keeping comics' core assets packed into tiny boxes." It's pretty clear that McCloud hates the idea of those "tiny boxes," at least if they're confined on a finite page, despite the fact that the design possibilities of panels on a page have served artists as disparate as Winsor McCay and Gerald Jablonski quite well: he emphasizes this in one of his Internet columns (obnoxiously titled "I Can't Stop Thinking!") when he wrote, "Perhaps most importantly, by maintaining that single unbroken reading line that those strange new trailing scrolls afford, we may be on the 'trail' of a new form of sequential art that recaptures the pure expression of comics' pre-print ancestors..."

In order to buy this dubious theory, you will have to believe that the "pure" or unsubverted form of comics is represented only by those pictorial narratives drawn on cave walls or on 125-foot high pillars or on animal skin, and that books, with their page size limited by the twin evils of convenience and practicality, subverted this original conception by artificially constricting "the infinite canvas," even if the infinite canvas happened to be a finite cave wall or a finite pillar. This luddite condemnation of the then-revolutionary print technology along with the concomitant and frankly bizarre approbation applied to drawing comics on deer skins or rock surfaces seems like a contradictory, even opportunistic, stance for someone who extols technology with as much fervor as McCloud does. Earlier, McCloud states gamely that the evolution of comics "will hinge on comics' ability to adapt to its environment. An environment that will include both the new technological landscape and the needs and desires of its potential audience." This conceptual liberality apparently applies to emerging digital technology, but not to then-emerging print technology; notwithstanding McCloud's eagerness for comics to adapt to their new digital environment and to the needs and desires of the Internet's potential audience, he has no patience for how comics adapted to the environment of print what with all those "tiny boxes," nor to the "needs and desires" of the mass audience that print technology ushered in, to which print comics clearly catered.

Moreover, McCloud's distinctions here are arbitrary. McCloud's bias in favor of ancient modes of proto-comics and condemnation of the "complex protocols" involved in reading printed comics is ass-backwards. In fact, reading a cave wall or a 125-foot pillar is obviously more difficult than reading a book. H.W. Janson, in his magisterial history of art, even ridicules the Column of Trajan on precisely these grounds:

If we could unwind the relief band [of the Column of Trajan], we would find it to be 656 feet long, two-thirds the combined length of the three friezes of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and a good deal longer than the Parthenon frieze. In terms of the number of figures and the density of narrative, however, our relief is by far the most ambitious frieze composition attempted up to that time in the ancient world. It is also the most frustrating, for the beholder must 'run around in circles like a circus horse' (to borrow the apt description of one scholar) if he wants to follow the narrative; once he gets above the fourth or fifth turn, he finds himself defeated by the wealth of detail unless he is equipped with field glasses. One wonders for whose benefit the elaborate pictorial was intended.

One of McCloud's central tenets is that bigger is better, that the more advanced the technology used in the creation of art the better -- or at least potentially better -- the art. This may strike you as crude as it does me, but McCloud remains unambiguous on this point. He summarizes the glories of digital technology at the end of the chapter with a series of exclamatory sound bites: "Comics is a powerful idea, but an idea that's been squandered, ignored, and misunderstood for generations." The comics form, he continues, is "like an atom... waiting to be split," from which we may logically infer that McCloud believes comics' potential has remained unfulfilled in its "pre-atomic" phase. "It's time for comics to finally grow up and find the art beneath the craft... It's time for comics to balance the scales, see the world, and broaden its horizons." McCloud writes that, technologically speaking, "No art form has lived in a smaller box than comics for the last hundred years" (to which he adds, his icon gesticulating wildly on the page and with characteristic team spirit, "I say we blow the lid off!"). The only logical interpretation of all this turgid breast-beating on behalf of digital technology is that primitive technology had strait-jacketed comics and the latest and future technology will liberate comics - or "blow the lid off!" This is audaciously presumptuous. Its reductio ad absurdum is a smug condescension toward traditional modes of art.

Am I the only one who detects a whiff of philistinism among the advocates of technological supremacy and their manifestoes? Their rhetoric is laced with a magniloquent elitism combined with a populist hucksterism and, at best, a lack of appreciation, or at worst, an underlying disdain for (or simple ignorance of) past artistic achievement that I find disconcerting and vaguely repellent. McCloud has a penchant -- paradigmatically philistinish in my view -- of flattening artists into categories and sub-categories. Understanding Comics was largely an exercise in reducing art to a series of crude mechanical functions; no ars est celare artem for our theorist. Or does anyone remember the pyramidal chart McCloud devised to demonstrate the spectrum from "realistic" to "abstract" cartoonists, the only effect of which was to steamroller over and schematize the individual traits of all the cartoonists on display -- tidily placing round cartoonist pegs into their properly designated round holes, domesticating them into neat little academic cubby-holes.

Another recent example of this among our windy theoreticians is Steve Conley's illiterate condescension to Shakespeare from his interview in Journal #232: "Just because Shakespeare limited himself to 26 letters, 10 numbers, and a handful of punctuation doesn't mean we have to. We can use every device at our disposal to tell our stories. And our work has potentially more power for it." Earlier, he laments literature "being confined to an alphanumeric prison." This a shocking display of deculturated hubris that would be justly held up to universal ridicule in a more civilized society. I don't know when learning HTML gave one license to patronize Shakespeare, but this is as perfect an example of the more-is-better theory as I could find. After all, if Shakespeare had only 26 letters, imagine what he could have written with 50 or 75 or 100 or, hell, an infinite number of letters! It would be like... like... Othello with special effects or Hamlet on steroids!

McCloud's prejudices aren't quite this transparent; values are more insidiously communicated in clots of breezy vapidity masquerading as commonsensical, value-neutral observations such as this:

Storytellers in all media and all cultures are, at least partially, in the business of creating worlds. It's a mark of their success when those worlds are so vivid that we forget they aren't real. This can be done through a medium as simple as text or speech, but the reproduction of sight and sound in the minds of the audience will be outbid by new technologies that reproduce them in full. And at the first sign of a technology that can deliver vivid, uncompromising immersion, few will be able to resist its spell -- and many may even trade in the world they're given at birth for the new worlds that technology and imagination will combine to create.

It's inconceivable that someone would have the temerity to refer to text and language as "simple" if he had a love for language and the most nodding familiarity of innovative 20th century authors. Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Woolf, Beckett, Nabokov, Gaddis, Kelman, or poets as divergent as Robert Creeley and Anne Carson, to name just a few, stand as a testament to the artistry of language, which is to say its ability to continually find fresh ways of relating and interpreting human experience.

And this is, quite simply, what I mean by the taint of philistinism: the concoction of a theory that displaces supreme imaginative achievements in favor of abstract speculation of a future, superior, technologically-enabled art, of chasing desperately after the new.

At any rate, McCloud goes on to grapple with the difference between temporal (e.g., film, music) and spatial (e.g., comics, painting) arts and describes how the spatial nature of comics can best take advantage of digital technology and the Internet without betraying its intrinsically spatial nature. He writes, "Preserving the idea of the temporal map has an aesthetic appeal for guys like me, but it can only survive as comics' central unifying idea if it can help extend the reach of comics in a digital environment as dramatically as other options. I think it can. Not by merely 'preserving' the spatial nature of comics -- but by taking it all the way." But, what does "taking it all the way" mean in practice? After a build-up that lasts another half-dozen pages, the central conceit of "taking it all the way" is the revelation that the computer monitor "which so often acts as a page may also act as a window." The examples of aesthetic possibilities that the "window" can yield, despite huffing and puffing about the "design opportunities of an infinite canvas," turn out to be paltry, jejune or simply crack-potted, but very much part and parcel of the bigger-is-better thesis: a 500-panel story could be told vertically (by scrolling down); designed in the configuration of a staircase; appear on a slowly revolving cube (or presumably any other geometric shape); within the shape of human heads; or in rectangular shapes positioned at right angles like a deck of cards. As for crack-potted, get this: "There will never be a monitor as wide as Europe, yet a comic as wide as Europe or as tall as a mountain can be displayed on any monitor simply by moving across its surface, inch-by-inch, foot-by-foot, mile-by-mile." This was such a transparently preposterous example that I did a little homework. Europe is approximately 2,100 miles wide (from the eastern coast of France to the border of Russia) or 11,088,000 feet. If you can scroll across a comic at 15 seconds a foot, which is a pretty good clip, it would take 46,200 hours -- or 5.27 years to read a comic as wide as Europe. It's true, I suppose, that someone could create a comic strip the width of Europe just as someone could make a film that could only be shown on a screen five miles high, or chisel a sculpture as tall as the World Trade Building, or write a play that runs for six months without intermission -- but to what purpose except for the sheer novelty or freakishness of it?

Equally preposterous is McCloud's idea of "a giant comic holding 40,000 panels in a square matrix..." He admits that this would be impossible to actually view because -- get this -- "We haven't reached that threshold of human perception yet." A comic composed of 40,000 panels that the reader couldn't view pretty well sums up the practical application of "the infinite canvas."

(A list of "special effects" available on the computer and presented as another advantage of digital technology from the previous chapter are similarly trite and mostly "effects" that have been done with pen-and-ink or Zipatone or camera-work.)

This sounds, in fact, like nothing less than a desperate attempt to wed a form and a technology that aren't particularly suited to each other, and McCloud seems aware of this contradiction: on page 210, he writes "As the goal of 'coming alive' is fulfilled more and more by sound and motion which represents time through time, comics multi-image structure -- the portrayal of time through space -- becomes superfluous, if not a nuisance, and isn't likely to endure." Yet, all of McCloud's examples of the marriage between comics and Internet technology desperately try to retain this essential character of comics. Yes, one could place panels on a revolving cube or run panels on a virtually endless scroll and one could even imagine this being done artfully. But isn't it more likely that, with increased bandwidth, the medium that the Internet will be best suited to exploit -- and the medium that would suit "the needs and desires of its potential audience," as McCloud put it when arguing for comics to adapt to the Internet -- is the moving picture with sound, i.e., film? One could, after all, theoretically "watch" a comic strip in a movie theatre: the screen could fill up with panels that dissolve into new panels after the appropriate amount of reading time elapses. But there are good reasons why this isn't done and why people prefer to see moving images on a theatre -- or TV or computer -- screen rather than a series of still images. The greater the use of technology, the closer we get to film or, at least, something other than comics. Not that this is bad: there's no telling what kind of creative forms could evolve out of this technology, but at some point such a form becomes something other than comics, in which case it would be more scrupulous to say that comics on the Net will evolve into something other than comics, which is not the same as saying that comics will be reinvented and remain the same art form.

McCloud seems confused on this point. At one juncture he seems to acknowledge that the technological possibilities of digitalization and the net are not hospitable to comics as an intrinsically low-tech spatial medium using a panel-to-panel progression. At another he appears to concede the logical outcome of his more-technology-is-better thesis when he writes (on page 210): "The goal of making comics 'come alive' seems closer in such works where the sound, motion and images create an immersive experience." ("The goal of making comics 'come alive' " is a telling phrase. Why is this a goal and whose goal is it? McCloud appears to assume a legitimacy to this "goal" where none exists a priori.) He continues, "Here, though, the goal itself becomes a slippery slope. If sound and motion can help create an immersive experience, won't full sound and motion do the job more effectively?" Recognizing that adding sound and motion to comics results in animation, McCloud concedes that "When it comes to time-based immersion, the art of film already does a better job than any tricked-up comic can." Virtual reality, we are told, is the next step: "The promise implicit in the idea of virtual reality is the final destination for the collective journey taken by storytellers throughout history... the journey toward the creation of a world so real it can make us forget the one we live in.... Think of it: if you were a Spider-Man fan. Would you want to see him in partial motion or full motion? Would you like to see him in 2-D or 3-D? In little boxes or on a full screen? In fact, would you want to see him at all, if you could be him instead?" This is an aesthetic version of Francis Fukuyama's End of History: McCloud sees art on a linear technological path where the "final destination" is that which employs the most technology - the terminus of art, if you will. If an "immersive experience" is good, "becoming" a character within the art is even better. (Admittedly, it's impossible to say with absolute certainty that McCloud approves of this; one of the more infuriating aspects of McCloud's rhetorical style is that there is no real way of distinguishing between what may purport to be objective description of present and future trends and advocacy of same; I tend to see Reinventing Comics as a work of advocacy generally.)

I agree with McCloud that the Internet would appear to encourage the "immersive experience," but that a) this is anathema to the comics form, and b) anathema to the very experience of art. One does not truly experience art as a bystander, as one would have to in an "immersed" reality, nor can one "become" a character without relinquishing one of the great, I should say essential, characteristics of art, which is not to identify with one character (much less become a character!) at the expense of others, but to sympathize with all of them to one degree or another. Which is to say that this observation, too, would appear to disadvantage comics in a digital medium.

The central thesis of this chapter, and the most significant claim of the book -- that the reinvention of comics by digital technology will represent a quantum aesthetic leap from print comics of the 20th century -- is, in my view, fundamentally unsound. The various hyperbolic outbursts ("I say we blow the lid off!") don't begin to prove that digital technology is innately superior to the printed page. McCloud writes, "It's my guess that those who will do the most to reinvent the look of comics, whatever their age, will do so with an attitude much like my 4- and 6- year-old daughters." This is undoubtedly true; after all, 99% of the special effects found in movies look they were masterminded by 6-year-olds (e.g., The Mummy Returns) for an audience of 6-year-olds. (And let's be charitable to those who turn out theatrical motion pictures here: the 4-year-old mentalities are all working in TV.) One of the likelier reasons movies have gotten dumber and more meretricious over the last decade is that they've been tailored to accommodate special effects born of computers and digitalization -- and audiences' "needs and desires," obeisance to which is another central tenet of Reinventing Comics, has been incrementally shaped to demand or expect more sophisticated digital effects and to passively accept a concomitant decline in the expression of human values.

I see no reason why the same inverse ratio of technological effects-to-human relevance wouldn't apply to Internet comics as it does to movies, all the more so as the Internet becomes as commercialized as Hollywood. Watching a new generation of Internet artists creating "comics" full of rotating cubes and fulgurating figures dancing across the page would be entirely unsurprising and just another loathsome reality we'd have to tolerate. It would be equally unsurprising for a few artists of genuine merit and discipline to use the available technology judiciously and to distinctly humane purpose, although they would surely, as always, be in the minority. But to say that is not also to say that digital Internet comics by virtue of their advanced technology will rank the works of E.C. Segar, Walt Kelly, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and all the other cartoonists throughout the 20th century that have made comics worthy of serious attention.