Note: This essay is in response to Gary Groth's two-part review of McCloud's Reinventing Comics, "McCloud Cuckoo-Land," which can be read online here and here, respectively.

Armed with such legitimate complaints, Groth broadens his attacks and attempts to persuade Journal readers that my belief in the potential of selling comics on the Web is a dangerous pipe dream fueled by corporate propaganda, while my ideas for the aesthetic potential of digital comics on the Web are crack-pot nonsense; and after a blistering array of attacks from every conceivable angle, I'm guessing many readers were indeed persuaded, if only by the sheer scale of it all. Those same readers were left, however, with a depressing choice at the end of this bloody massacre. Having so thoroughly excoriated the supposed blind optimism of my own suggestions, Groth proceeds to offer only bitter pessimism in return, never once in the course of 10,000 words allowing for even the barest hint of a benefit to placing comics online.

In short, for anyone genuinely interested in examining the potential of comics on the Internet, the two contrasting viewpoints presented in the article are about as enlightening as a comparative religion course taught by Jerry Fallwell and Charles Manson; and one could hardly blame such readers for throwing up their hands, looking skyward and pleading for a third choice. Fortunately, such balanced assessments of the changing landscape do exist. Essays like Dirk Deppey's "Format Wars: What Cartoonists Can Learn from Other Media in the Digital Age" (also in TCJ #232) managed to discuss both problems and solutions, while not rushing to judgement regarding the worth or goals of Web-bound hopefuls. Many cartoonists, meanwhile, are actively creating comics for the Web already without any particular dogma attached, speaking through their work alone and adapting to new technologies on a case-by-case basis. And in the Web community, independently minded designers and programmers are working day and night to encourage open standards and accessibility in full knowledge of the odds against them and of the rewards to society should they pull it off.

Finally, there's another source of useful information that I'd like to draw from, and that I hope you'll consider worthy of your attention. Namely: What I actually said.

Part One: Disasturbation

For those who haven't read Reinventing Comics, the book is divided into two halves. The second half (called "Catching a Wave") is the subject of Gary Groth's review and includes all of my ideas on comics and computers. I divided it into four chapters:

1. "The Thing about Tools" discusses computers generally.
2. "Through the Door" is about computer-generated art.
3. "The Frictionless Economy" covers the digital delivery of comics.
4. "The Infinite Canvas" is about the aesthetics of digital comics.

Groth found this structure impossible to grasp for some reason. He reports "The second part of Reinventing Comics is divided into two chapters" (latter italics mine), and then promises to focus on "Economy" in his first review and "Canvas" in his second. Later he complains about "chapters within chapters" when stumbling across the ostensibly non-existent "Tools." This would be little more than an irritating gaffe, but Groth's sloppiness ends up making me look sloppy as my marionette doppelganger careens wildly from talking about specific opportunities available to individual artists on the Web to far-flung topics like virtual reality, artificial intelligence and "wearable computing" as if there was any meaningful relationship between them.

Anyone willing to actually read "The Frictionless Economy" will find that the chapter makes some very specific claims (most either ignored, mischaracterized or generalized to the point of absurdity in Groth's review) and the presentation of those claims follows a genuine logical sequence. Here, then, is what I actually said, in the order that I said it. Each statement or passage will be followed by Groth's reaction to it, and my attempts at a response.

"The Frictionless Economy" starts out with a brief look at the origins of the Internet and the World Wide Web. For a phenomenon as widely celebrated as the Web, I thought it was strange that so few people seemed to have an accurate mental picture of how it came into existence, and decided it would be worth 6 pages to commit the events to paper. For research, I turned to the Web itself and found the unabridged writings of early theorists like Bush and Licklider and some scattered accounts of the early days, but by far, the best source for first-hand accounts (and some desperately-needed visual reference) seemed to be the 1996 book Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon.

Groth seizes on my choice by describing the chapter as offering "... a potted history of the Internet cobbled together, as nearly as I can tell, entirely from Where Wizards Stay Up Late..." (half-right, as noted) "...and is told with the same narrative momentum as the book: a small band of intellectual techno-heroes, financed by the Defense Department, and thinking out of the box, invented the Internet (then the ARPANET)." Groth then identifies J.C.R. Licklider as a "key player" and goes after the guy, calling him "...a true believer and the spiritual antecedent to McCloud's feel-good prognosticatory career." Groth doesn't offer any evidence that my 6-page history of this period (1945-1993) is inaccurate in any detail, but the tone of the thing clearly pisses him off, suggesting as it does that the creation of the Internet might have actually been a good thing. The deliberately shallow term "techno-heroes" was Groth's invention, not mine; most of the people I portrayed were merely tackling technical problems in interesting new ways; but there were a few people like Bush, Licklider and Baran who were manifestly ahead of the curve and I see no reason not to give them credit for it. (In fact, Licklider's early 1960s study "Libraries of the Future" anticipated vast stretches of the Internet's structure and purpose at a time when the very idea that computers might ever have any reason to "talk" to each other was considered patently absurd.)

The rest of my bibliography comes in for repeated scolding due to the books it doesn't mention. This is an outgrowth of the otherwise reasonable complaint that Reinventing Comics doesn't spend enough time on the potential for corporate abuse, but such passages spill over into irrational heckling in places. "Every book" Groth claims "is basically by a well-known cheerleader for the industry; no dissidents are allowed in the McCloudian world view." Then, in the next paragraph, Groth zeroes in on what Theodore Roszak in The Cult of Information says about two such books: Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave and John Naisbitt's Megatrends. They're "potted social science," says Roszak "Sunday supplement journalism, and soothsaying." They're pitched at "the intellectual level of advertising copy" and filled with "zany catchphrases." OK. Well, in fact Roszak may be dead right about The Third Wave and Megatrends, but I wouldn't know, because I've never read either of them -- and they sure as hell aren't in my bibliography! Groth doesn't bother to mention this, of course, regardless of how many of his readers naturally assumed in context that the books were on my list. More absurd still is Groth's indignant proclamation: "One would think that at a time when books such as IBM and the Holocaust point out the malevolent uses to which computers can be put... that one should exercise greater judiciousness when extolling technology and refrain from conferring such exclusive benignity to such devices. But quite the contrary: As the power and ubiquitousness of computers grow, McCloud enthusiastically claims..." (and onward, to a long irrelevant quote from another chapter of Reinventing Comics). Fact checkers, please note: IBM and the Holocaust was published in February of 2001 -- nine months after my book!

In the next four pages of "The Frictionless Economy" I attempt to paint a picture of the sheer scale of the Web followed by a ten panel list of the Web's many current faults including this: "...The vision of the Web as a colossal mail-order catalog is hardly the brave new frontier described by its earliest boosters. As of 2000, the Web is already well-stocked with hucksters and pests... suits and stiffs... sociopaths and predators... and monumental crimes of bad design." Yes, that was me talking, not Groth. Two more pages follow on past and future changes on the Web, and what I mean by "digital delivery" (basically, the delivery of comics in electronic non-tangible form) and another two on the current Web comics scene.

Seven pages then form one of the chapter's most important sequences, tracing the advent of new communications "technologies" from speech to stone to paper to broadcasting; each clearly presented as offering both advantages and disadvantages every step of the way, landing on the present this way: "Today's mass media have become synonymous with multinational corporate culture. Despite their technological differences, print publishers and broadcasters serve the same master -- the one in control of limited resources. Whether it be shelf space in a bookstore, screens at your local multiplex, display space in catalogs, slots on a network TV schedule, or the perfect space between one number and another, the content of what you can see, read and hear has been led on a very short leash down a very narrow path."

Then I talk about how one communications device, the telephone, has not followed that model; how, regardless of who owns the wires, what we actually say to each other when we get on the line is up to us; and how the Internet has been taking on that shape far more than the broadcasting model.

Groth has been dead silent for 13 pages at this point. Why? Is it possible that the idea of me Web-bashing, or discussing the drawbacks of communications technology doesn't fit with his cozy caricature of my book as filled with "wholly uncritical, indeed breathless and drooling enthusiasms for technology"? Perhaps it would strip bare statements like "McCloud embraces all Internet and digital technology without reservation" or "It never occurs to McCloud that technologies could ever be anything other than the benevolent tools of mankind."

After six more pages that compare print to digital delivery (giving considerable space to print's current advantages and to the current disadvantages of computers), we arrive at the final twenty pages of "The Frictionless Economy," where Groth and I finally go head-to-head and where, for all his sarcasm, Groth makes some solid, legitimate points that deserve to be answered. I'll try to sum up those 20 pages first, then address Groth's criticisms of them one at a time.

I start by anticipating the question: "If print is so unnecessary, why are you reading this as a book?" then give two answers: One, that the Web is still inferior to print in several important respects, all of them described just a few pages earlier; and two, that I'm not prepared to support a family of four for two and a half years on no income whatsoever. In other words: The Web isn't technically able to support a 240-page graphic album and the Web isn't economically able to support a 240-page graphic album -- at least, not yet. Next, I describe why selling physical products and advertising have taken off while selling "bits" -- i.e., the content of the Web itself including comics art and stories -- has been so rare to this point. I suggest that "...most people will never pay for Web content as long as they still feel like they're paying with their time. They won't pay as long as the [technical] quality of that content is low. They won't pay as long as paying is a hassle. And they won't pay until the price is right." (Word-balloon exclamation points zapped for readability's sake). The first two are identified as byproducts of slow connection speeds; the other two relate to the question of payment systems and that's where the chapter takes us next.

It's also where we hit the one big "IF" in my thesis: The prospect of a viable method for making small direct payments over the Web without fixed transaction costs wiping them out. This is the idea known as "micropayments" and it has both advocates and naysayers in the computer industry, but everything I describe from this point forward is on the path that starts from that particular fork in the road. Why does price matter? Because when comics artists and their readers establish a direct connection, they bypass an army of middlemen that previously took 90% of the consumers' dollars. In such a climate, there's no reason to charge even remotely the same price as in the print market. A dollar's worth of comics could plummet to 33 cents and the artist would be making upwards of three times as much as before, while the reader would have three times the buying power. Bandwidth surcharges could still take a bite out of the creative budget, but not an uncontrollable one, and it would eliminate the financial threat of too much traffic currently giving "success" a bad name in Web circles.

From there, I describe why I think that this economy would be vastly different than the one we have now. It would turn "supply on demand" on its head since the supply would, in essence, be created by the demand. It would deeply undermine the economies of scale in the area of price per unit and the bridging of distance to the customer. It would render the entire notion of "shelf-space" untenable. And it would amplify word-of-mouth, because hearing about a work and finding it would be one and the same. Despite an acknowledged advantage in the amount of money available for production and promotion of the bland corporate fare, I argue that consumer loyalty can't be coerced for long online, and that the small-but-great will gradually find its level, because its better-funded rival cannot force other work off the shelves as it does everywhere else.

This is how I see the market evolving for comics, music, prose and the like -- basically, any form of art that can travel as pure information.

Groth sees the landscape differently:

"In 1993 -- the point at which McCloud's history of the Internet ends -- the U.S. government privatized its portion of the Internet backbone, wiping out any possibility of treating the Internet as a publicly owned communications sector favoring full citizen participation, and instead ensuring that it would be a corporate-run for-profit branch of global media." Groth goes on to give us some good, solid information about the growing threat of corporate control, the ill effects of 1996's Telecommunications Act, and the monstrous epidemic of recent mergers. He continues "...the same corporations that dominate media, telecommunications, software programming, and computer manufacturing are succeeding in duplicating precisely the same level of hegemony over Net marketing that they currently enjoy in their respective fields and in creating the same economic hierarchies and the same financial obstacles to using the Internet as exist in traditional business practices that dissuade most of the population from participating in the economy as anything other than wage slaves."

OK, now we're getting somewhere! Groth sees the entire game as rigged from the start and he has evidence to back it up. He argues that the giant media conglomerates "...are all maneuvering themselves into impregnable positions whereby they have complete control over every aspect of media transmission -- from content creation to digital delivery directly into the homes of every consumer." This argument sounds plausible. If corporate colonization continues its rampant pace, isn't it a foregone conclusion that AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Newscorp and the rest will indeed control "every aspect of media transmission -- from content creation to digital delivery directly into the homes of every consumer" just as Groth says?

Yes and no.

The infrastructure that brings the Internet into your home -- whether it's a standard phone line, DSL, Satellite or Cable Modem -- might indeed be owned by one of those conglomerates soon, if it isn't already. The room in our family's apartment where I work got a Verizon Cable Modem back when it was still GTE (Verizon is the creeping blob formed by the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE). Sure enough, a lot of our local independently operated ISPs have fallen on hard times since. Fact is, the dirt under your street is not available to just anyone, it takes money and political clout to dig it up. It's a limited resource, and like the limited resources of shelf space, theater screens and radio frequencies, the control of it will always accrue to the deepest pockets exactly as I described it in "The Frictionless Economy."

But this is true of phone lines, too, and has been for many years despite the 1984 AT&T break-up. As of this writing, Verizon also provides my phone service. If Disney bought Verizon tomorrow, would my phone conversations suddenly lurch out of my control to incorporate laff-riot punch-lines from The Drew Carey Show, rave reviews for The Emperor's New Groove or the latest Mighty Ducks scores? Obviously not. And the reason is that phone numbers, unlike the dirt in front of my house, are, practically speaking, an unlimited resource. My friends and I may not be able to get the rights to dig up our neighborhood like TCI and Verizon, but we know we can always get our own telephone number. What Disney would get out of the acquisition of my phone calls is a helluva lot of money (after they'd recouped the initial investment) and the ability to spam me the old-fashioned way, by stuffing ads in my monthly bill and selling my address all over creation. But the content of my phone conversations is not for sale and it never will be. Disney can't tell me whom to call. Disney can't control who calls me. And Disney can't control what we say to each other.

On the cable TV front, it would be a different story by far. Cable channels are a limited resource and ownership of the lines would give Disney considerable influence over what franchises were allowed a precious seat at the table. Their power isn't ultimate in this regard. The market would abandon them in a flash if they dropped CNN, MTV or Fox. But if you or I decided we wanted to start a cable channel of our own, Disney would laugh in our faces. 100 channels are not enough. 300 channels are not enough. There will always be far more who want to speak through that medium than will ever get a chance to speak and whoever has the deepest pockets will always go to the front of the line.

But wait; I said I had a cable modem, didn't I? If Disney did indeed buy Verizon, wouldn't they then control my Web access and be able to force me to only visit their approved roster of websites? Again, obviously not. Such control is no more likely than the paranoid phone-call scenario above. And why? Because IP addresses are like phone numbers. Though not literally infinite, they are, practically speaking, an unlimited resource. $70 registration, $30 a month hosting and you're off. Disney can't tell you whose website to visit. Disney can't prevent you from starting a website of your own. Disney can't tell you what to write or read using your email account. Furthermore, Disney can't force you off the shelf to make more room for ABCNEWS.com because there is no shelf.

When Groth says "complete control over every aspect of media transmission -- from content creation to digital delivery directly into the homes of every consumer" he's missing a crucial piece of the puzzle. Yes, AOL-Time Warner, Disney, Newscorp, Bertelsmann, Viacom, Sony and TCI can own the pipes and yes, they can buy up or create content from here to Timbuktu, but the "complete control" of content creation and content viewing on the Internet will never be theirs, because they can't stop you from making it and they can't stop me from looking at what you've made and they never will.

Which brings us to Groth's next point -- and again, it's a reasonable one on the face of it -- that even if you can get your comics online, your chances of getting anyone to look at them without corporate backing are practically zero: "McCloud's main argument here is that the Internet will preclude the manufacturing cost of a physical product, giving the "lone creator" the necessary edge to fulfill the dream of McCloud's level playing field. This would be almost touchingly naive if it weren't so morally and politically complacent. First, it is unlikely that digital culture will ever entirely displace physical objects of culture; they will probably always co-exist, which will give larger corporate entities the scale-of-economy edge they enjoy in perpetuity." Examples follow, such as DVDs, amusement parks and restaurants. "Second, even assuming that all physical vestiges of culture disappear tomorrow, there is the question of how exactly individuals would discover work -- art, entertainment, journalism, et al. -- on the Web. If you don't already own all the media necessary to drive consumers to a corresponding website, the only answer is advertising or media attention in one of the vehicles owned by one of the global conglomerates too busy promoting their own cultural product to give you the time of day."

Trust Groth to miss "McCloud's main argument" by a mile (see my previous summary of those 20 pages for the real thing) but again, his own argument deserves some consideration. How can we prevent, say, AOL-Time Warner from driving millions of lemming-like consumers to their content through their online and offline promotional juggernauts? Here, the answer is simple: We can't. A new AOL user, for example, will inevitably be exposed to plugs for Spinner, Mapquest, Moviefone and other AOL properties. They'll be directed to Time Warner's Pathfinder and the gargantuan roster of websites tied into Time Warner's magazines, broadcast interests and Hollywood properties. No question, those customers are in the tent and there's plenty to see.

Is that the end of the story, though?

Groth suggests, in essence, that it is; that once inside the tent those witless consumers will never leave. As evidence, he offers the following quote from McChesney's 1999 book Rich Media, Poor Democracy: "With 11 million subscribers, AOL[-Time Warner] accounts for 40% of all online traffic, and 60% of home use. Fully 80% of AOL users never venture beyond AOL's sites." Then Groth quotes a Fortune magazine article: "Launching an e-commerce site without a portal partner is like opening a retail store in the desert. Sure, it's cheap, but does anybody stop there?"

First off, I'd be curious to check back with those "80% of AOL users" who were surveyed in 1998 to see here in 2001 if even a quarter of them could still claim they "never venture beyond AOL's sites." Hell, Napster alone must have yanked away anyone under thirty last year. How did every college student in America find out about them in the days before the legal shitstorm hit -- by carrier pigeon? In late 1998, the Web as we know it was only five years old. The Web was in a period of exponential growth, meaning the lion's share of those users had probably been online for 12 months or less at the time. (Many hadn't even owned a computer for that long.) I was one of those users way back in 1993, and indeed, I stayed close to "home" when just starting out; but that didn't stop me from learning there was a world outside in pretty short order and dumping the service for a real ISP. AOL's churn rate (the rate of new customers coming and going) was huge in 1998 too, contributing to the likelihood of an extremely high newcomer ratio in that number. I also go into great detail in Reinventing Comics about the many ways that word of mouth can be amplified online, how the portal model is incapable of creating a truly impermeable container for consumers and how the improved competition I'm describing doesn't translate to an instant mass audience at all; it merely guarantees that the work that speaks to 10% of it's potential audience can grow to 11% "without being smashed to zero by a 90 always grabbing for more." Again, you can't be forced off the shelf if there is no shelf. (I have a related sequence on the lack of consumer choice in traditional markets -- asking how often you had been forced to settle for less due to the unavailability of your first choice -- and Groth inexplicably interprets this as me calling consumers "dolts!")

The above notwithstanding, I do consider those McChesney statistics worth heeding. He's onto a significant threat and I think Groth is right to bring it up in this context. I even think it would have done me good to incorporate such a study into my research for Reinventing Comics (if McChesney's book hadn't come out months after I finished writing it). As it is, though, I want it on the record that I do acknowledge the presence of massive corporate consolidation and attempts at portal-based coercion in "The Frictionless Economy"; just not enough to satisfy Groth who scoffs at the mere 6 pages devoted to his own personal obsession.

Ironically, despite coming from opposite ends of the pessimist/optimist axis (not so much the political axis by the way, I've been drifting farther left lately) and though I'm sure he would find Reinventing Comics every bit as appalling as Groth, I do have one thing in common with writers like McChesney: We propose solutions. In McChesney's case, the solutions may be centered on government support of non-profits or the strict regulation of monopolies -- not bad ideas by the way -- in my case, the solutions may center on individual participation in the non-corporate creation and selling of art and ideas; but we both know that wasting thousands of words describing a dire societal problem without offering any solutions whatsoever would be pointless and irresponsible. He knows it. I know it. You know it.

But Groth doesn't.

In 10,000 words, Groth proposes no solutions of any sort. My analysis is ridiculed and all of my solutions are rejected, but no other paths are offered except the path straight back to apathy and resignation. In the mid-1990s, some futurists coined a word for this sort of dead-end theorizing. They called it "disasturbation." As I see it, if the new robber barons really do plan to steal this revolution from our generation and every generation to come, then disasturbation like Groth's is their best ally.

And an army of productive independent creative imaginations is their worst enemy.

Part Two: I Said What??

In Part Two of Groth's review of Reinventing Comics, he shifts his focus from "The Frictionless Economy" to the book's last chapter "The Infinite Canvas." This shift (from politics to art) seems to sour my critic's mood, because his attacks become twice as random in this article, and his versions of my own statements become so consistently distorted you'd think we were running for President. Groth's distortions follow a few themes. Inferring value judgments where there were none; yanking passages from other sections wildly out of context; ignoring counter-evidence; and mangling my views through paraphrasing. If you thought Groth was arguing with McCloud when you read this travesty, think again. I wasn't even in the room.

Here's a partial summary of what I actually said: I start this last chapter of Reinventing Comics by revisiting the first chapter of Understanding Comics where I defined comics using Eisner's term "sequential art." One of the things I liked about the term was that it said nothing about any particular style, kind of story or physical medium such as paper and ink. Thus if Charles Schulz had ever gotten it in his head to spray-paint a Peanuts daily on The Great Wall of China, we could still call it "comics," it just wouldn't be a printed comic. I also used the definition to return to a few specific works in art history that I felt were essentially the same art form: The Tomb of Menna the Scribe, Trajan's Column, The Bayeux Tapestry, The Codex Nuttal, etc. I called them "comics," some call them "proto-comics," but any close reading of them would reveal that they're all deliberate sequences of narrative art.

Next I show how the advent of print introduced visual devices we associate with today's comics. Rectangular panel borders show up in the mid-1400s, word-balloons and captions by the mid-1500s (this part isn't disputed by Groth, and by the way, you can find examples in David Kunzle's The Early Comic Strip.) I suggest this is an example of an art form taking the shape of the technology that delivers it.

If this art form could pre-date print, it should be able to post-date it as well, but not without the same kind of dramatic changes the form encountered the last time it jumped from one technology to another. Unfortunately, we have a tendency when encountering a new technology to interpret it using the shape of the previous one -- early movies were filmed stage plays, early TV was radio with a camera aimed at it -- and now we're making digital comics that are just printed pages of comics scanned in and thrown up on a screen.

I propose that the page itself is the barrier; that for all the many advantages print clearly brought to comics, that forced rectangular sub-divider is an example of a technology dictating the shape and rhythm of an art form and we should be free to pursue other shapes and other rhythms as our stories require. I suggest that if we treat the screen as a window, rather than a page, we can allow our comics to grow to any size and shape. We would still have the option to subdivide the work as before, but that subdivision would no longer be an arbitrary, technologically mandated one.

There's a particular beauty to comics that grows out of the simplicity of the idea behind the form. As we move from one panel to another we're navigating a kind of temporal map; moving through space and time simultaneously. Despite their differences, all of the proto-comics that pre-dated print followed this idea in an unbroken reading line. Whether moving up a tomb or winding up a column or marching across a tapestry, they always kept with the idea that adjacent images represented adjacent moments. Print provided irresistible advantages, but this one design idea had to be left behind to make comics fit onto the page. Now I want to see us reclaim that idea and run with it.

There's much more, but first let's hear from Groth:

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.

Groth's zeal to paint me as anti-print the way a politician might brand their opponent as anti-family is taken to outrageous lengths in cases where he characterizes value-neutral or even complimentary observations about print as negative. Groth reproduces my quote "Print subverted space, folding it upon itself, allowing stories to grow to any length without relying on fraying cloth or crumbling stone." This is clearly one of print's signal advantages, yet Groth strips my next, less complimentary, sentence of its "but..." to replace it with his own "worse yet" as if both of my quotes were an insult to our cherished paper heritage. In the very next paragraph (see above) he's paraphrasing me as condemning "the twin evils of convenience and practicality" two qualities I consider essential strengths of print, and claiming that I have "no patience for how comics adapted to the environment of print what with all those 'tiny boxes'," even though I spend at least two pages (202 and 221) describing exactly that -- not to mention a 215-page book on the subject in 1993.

Oh yeah, and I'm also anti-language, we're told! In a description of the lure of immersive media (and ultimately, V.R.), I write how all storytellers "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." Groth, of course, presents this observation as an endorsement (it's not) but there's more. I referred to text and speech as "simple" so Gary believes he has a right to deliver the following personal insult:

Presumably, text is 'simple' in contradistinction to the infinite, complicated gadgetry - and, hence, superiority -- of the computer. But, it's clear that he doesn't really mean 'simple'; he means 'low-tech,' which, to someone who has no love or respect for the infinite -- yes, infinite -- complexity and variability of language married to imagination and insight, is probably the same thing.

In case Groth's meaning isn't clear, he reiterates it immediately by claiming that no one who had any love of language (and a familiarity with a roster of great poets and authors) "...would have the temerity to refer to text and language as 'simple'."

Make no mistake, I'm not just being accused here of a disrespectful attitude toward great literature. I have been classified twice in as many sentences as having no love whatsoever for the single greatest ability humankind has. Anyone who buys this line of reasoning would be duty-bound to conclude that I must somehow be less than human. These sentences verge on demonization and were out of line.

Meanwhile, I'm guessing everyone else knew what "simple" meant in that context, but for Gary's sake, I was referring to the simplicity of language's constituent parts, not the complexity or subtlety of those parts in collaboration or the effects of their collaboration on the minds of listeners and readers. Clear enough?

Much of the rest of Groth's article is centered on three approaches: Questioning whether my pre-print examples should be considered comics at all; trying to ridicule my supposed claim that those ancient works of art are "superior" to printed comics; which, once again, is not what I said; and finally, trying to convince you that the new shapes I propose for comics are all worthless nonsense.

On ancient comics Groth writes "...you would only bother to make this argument if you were willing to accept that what McCloud calls 'proto-comics' were really comics at all. It strikes me as 'academic' in the worst sense of that word to trot out and wrench from their radically different historical contexts three examples of pictorial narrative done over a period of more than a thousand years and cite these as examples of 'pure' comics whose form we should now try to duplicate (or surpass!) through digital technology."

The reason this particular conviction -- that such works are indeed comics -- has only grown in me over the years is that the more I learn about these old picture stories, the more I realize that any criterion used to exclude them just wouldn't make any sense.

Probably the strongest argument against including them is one Groth alludes to; the idea of cultural continuity; that The Tomb of Menna the Scribe had no direct influence on Trajan's Column which had no direct influence on The Bayeux Tapestry and so on (not proven in the latter case, by the way, but let's take it as a given for now). They're all from different, disconnected moments in history, different cultures and different artistic traditions. But if this is true wouldn't such reasoning also apply to instances of music or the written word that sprung up in different parts of the ancient world? Were Aztec writing and music different art forms than what was being written and played in Sub-Saharan Africa or ancient China simply because there was no common cultural heritage? Groth throws the additional requirement of belonging to the tradition of "mass culture" which I find even more unnecessarily restrictive.

Such wildly different physical media also seem to argue against inclusion. Bas-relief sculpture and Deerskin are a far cry from what you might find at a Borders graphic novel section. But if a Fort Thunder artist decided to borrow his next-door neighbor's bed sheet and silk-screen a day-glo comic about Godzilla on it, do we really want to say that isn't comics because it wasn't on paper? If Louise Nevelson came back from the dead and began incorporating rows of little boxes into her sculptures that told sequential narratives of her childhood, would we want to say it wasn't comics because it wasn't flat?

Finally, there are questions of style and visual convention. Are panel borders necessary? If so, better be ready to throw out Feiffer, and some Eisner too. Does it have to be flat color and line? So much for Mattotti's Fires or all those painted superhero books. How about word balloons? If so, you can forget about Jim Woodring's Frank stories - and all those stories in Comix 2000 while you're at it.

See either of my books to get a sense, visually, of why I think that The Tomb of Menna the Scribe and Tomb of Dracula are just two wildly different applications of the same aesthetic idea. (It's hard to explain it without showing it.)

Do I claim that my examples of ancient comics are utterly "superior" to printed comics? No.

I clearly acknowledge that print brought enormous benefits to comics. Comics became a mass medium, the creation of comics proliferated wildly, almost anyone could have access to them, and the union of comics and print led directly to the explosion of comics in the 20th Century. In order to gain these benefits, print required us to break those visual moments into disconnected pieces and fit them onto a much smaller canvas, but it was worth it at the time. I also think that in struggling against the limitations of the page, artists have consistently created beautiful and moving works that should be cherished alongside great works in all other media.

But to willfully retain a limitation that no longer exists out of habit is misguided. We're about to earn a chance to create comics that have all the advantages of print without the need to restrict ourselves to the same 6" x 9" rectangle again and again and again. Why would we want to turn back now?

I also talk about the "complex protocol" of printed comics' left-to-right and up-to-down reading order. Many of us have friends or relatives who can't read printed comics at all. Even long-time readers sometimes read the wrong panel next. I point out that the unbroken reading line of those ancient works shown merely asked readers to follow a path; and that once shown, it's virtually impossible to get lost.

Groth claims I've got it exactly backwards and modern comics are simple while my ancient examples are the complex ones. "One could argue with surpassing vigor that print technology liberated pictorial narrative from inchoate, cumbersome, and impractical forms that few people could read and forced the medium to adopt those 'complex protocols' that McCloud now disdains..." to support his claim, he quotes the report of art historian H.W. Janson that Trajan's Column was impractical because you'd have to run around it "like a Circus Horse" to keep reading.

Well, first of all, until you see me at a convention with a chisel, scaffolding and a 100-foot tall block of granite, you can safely assume that I'm not suggesting we begin making our comics on stone columns again. That physical form was indeed "cumbersome." That's why print was such a step forward. But the protocol of following a path from beginning to end was every bit as efficient as I say. Groth can get away with portraying modern comics as easy to understand and all the older forms as hard for the simple reason that you've read the former and you haven't read the latter.

Finally we get to some of the new forms I suggest could be possible in the near future. Among them are the prospects of long vertical or horizontal scrolls, descending "staircases" of panels, spirals, cubes, comics in which each panel is embedded in the previous panel, panel chains that turn at 90 degree angles, and huge matrices of interconnected panels. I'm obviously trying to give a sense of the outer boundaries of a new frontier.

Groth is bone-crushingly literal in his reactions; calculating exactly how many hours it would take to read "a comic as wide as Europe" (it was an expression, you yutz!) and ridiculing a 40,000 panel comic whose only purpose in context was to discuss scalability and some technical points about display technology (there's even a note where I clearly state "...not that I'm seriously suggesting anyone try this" but Groth lets us believe otherwise).

Of course, some of these forms are more practical than others. I've already used a series of vertical scrolls totaling over 140 feet in a 16-part Zot! story online and quickly found many genuine narrative advantages to the form (as several thousand readers of that story can attest to). Among those advantages was the simple fact that the space between panels could vary dramatically for narrative purposes without "wasting paper." I'm currently working on a comic in which each panel is embedded in the previous panel, and discovering numerous ways the form helps to bolster the themes of the story. Meanwhile, the weekly When I am King at www.demian5.com has been exploring the design opportunities of horizontal scrolls to near-unanimous praise, even on TCJ's own message boards, and an increasing number of smart young cartoonists have had no trouble understanding the symbolism of a phrase like "The Infinite Canvas" and building around it.

Groth can point to every single shape I envision and call them "paltry, jejune" or "crack-potted" with impunity because he's comfortably wrapped-up in the warm certainty that no one will ever build one worth reading. I'm sure that in the case of some of them, he'll be proven right. But a quick glance at the online comics scene in 2001 will reveal that in other cases he's already been proven wrong.

And we have a long century ahead of us to sort out the rest.

The Blind Optimist

At the beginning of the second half of Reinventing Comics, there's a brief 10-page introduction to computing called "The Thing About Tools." Groth yanks two passages from this chapter into his discussion of "The Digital Economy" but I'd like to address both points on their own now.

Groth writes:

As the power and ubiquity of computers grows, McCloud enthusiastically claims that 'some far more dramatic scenarios suggest themselves.' Naturally, a list of these 'more dramatic scenarios' follows:

'... the growth of a new generation utterly at home with digital media ...'

'... a radical realignment of industrialized economies ...'

'... the advent of wearable computing ...'

'... the first stirrings of genuine artificial intelligence ...'

'...the maturing of virtual reality as more than just a headache-inducing novelty ...' and

'...the first imperfect prototypes for the ultimate 'killer-app' -- a universal translator ...'

Aside from the banality of the list -- computer clothing of all things! -- it offers an insight into the underlying ideological assumptions informing McCloud's point of view: every one of these forthcoming technological "virtues" is something to be consumed (computer clothing, the universal translator) or something that will facilitate consuming (the shopping cart icon illustrating the glorious realignment of industrialized economies is truly sinister). McCloud describes the second half of Reinventing Comics as "a full-blown manifesto for radical change," but as the above makes clear (along with his breathless obeisance to e-commerce and his general prostration before all communication technology that will facilitate e-commerce), his "radical" position is merely the standard neo-liberal agenda of global capitalism and universal consumerism proffered by most western governments and corporations, not to mention the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. McCloud even adopts the same populist rhetoric that corporations and governments are fond of: wider bandwidth, high-speed Internet access and interactive television will make us all liberated consumers."

The last part of this is patently absurd. I never once mention "interactive television" in 242 pages and the other two on that list, "wider bandwidth" and "high-speed Internet access" are the exact same thing, meaning my "populist rhetoric that corporations and governments are fond of" comes down to wanting higher speed Internet connections.

As for the accusation that everything on the list can be consumed, I defy anyone reading this to come up with a list of significant technological inventions in the last 150 years that didn't all enter the market in some fashion. Are The Automobile, The Radio, The Computer, The Telephone, The Motion Picture and Human Flight to be dismissed out of hand because they all made money for someone?? For better or worse, they changed the world and that's all I'm saying some of these others could do -- for better or worse. He's also misleading you by inserting value judgments that weren't present. I didn't call these "virtues," I didn't call economic re-alignment "glorious." I said these were "dramatic scenarios" and they are.

This is just Groth grinding his political axe (even stooping to associate me with the W.T.O. and the I.M.F.). Still, there's something else implied by one of his comments that goes beyond politics. It was only a throwaway line, but I can't help thinking it holds clues to the basic difference between our two world views:

Groth finds the list "banal."

I don't.

When I began that same chapter, I talked about hype; how marketers and employers had taken much of the excitement out of the computer market and replaced it with phony the-future-is-now products and hollow promises. I discussed how "the gulf between hype and reality can produce both suckers and cynics" and offered my rule of thumb that "If it's about the present, it's probably about hype. If it's about the future, no amount of hype can do it justice." In other words, be wary of anyone whose "future" is already shrink-wrapped and on the shelf -- but at the same time, don't lose your excitement for the days ahead. This is a time of staggering change, likely to exceed that of the 20th century in the first 50 years alone. And as in the 20th century, that change will include the good, the bad, the inspiring, the tacky, the weird, the miraculous, the horrific, the exciting, the irritating, the life-saving and the life-destroying. No one can guarantee there won't be a downside to that change and indeed I made no guarantee. But anyone who can stand on the threshold of this century, consider prospects like artificial intelligence or a universal translator... and be bored by it all? That person just isn't paying attention.

My father appears in this same chapter as the above quotes. He was a successful inventor and engineer with several patents to his name. He was the one who first told me about Moore's Law (way back in the early 1970s) and the predictions he shared with me have all come true so far, even beyond his death in 1982. He was an optimist by nature, and I seem to have inherited that trait. He also happened to be blind, giving the phrase "blind optimist" a whole different personal resonance for me. Yet, if you'd asked him if there would even be a human race in 2100, I doubt he would have given us great odds.

Me, I'd say our chances of surviving this century are only about 30%; there are far too many ways we could still screw it up. But being an optimist doesn't mean denying such a prospect. Being an optimist means that if you have a 7 in 10 chance of failing and a 3 in 10 chance of success, then the only rational response is to concentrate on the 3....

And work like hell to make it happen.

Final Notes:

Check http://www.scottmccloud.com for links to some first-rate Web comics and for any last-minute bitching I decide to include (there were a lot of corrections I wasn't able to get to). If I have the energy, I'll also offer a response to Dylan Horrock's excellent piece on Understanding Comics in TCJ #234. My thanks to Gary Groth. He may have hated Reinventing Comics, but at least he read the book -- have you?