📝This archived post is originally from my old comics focused Wordpress blog from 2011-2019. That site was a space to publicly commit to learning the art and craft of cartooning and self-publishing. These posts are full of a naive enthusiasm that though at times embarrassing, I'm proud of. I hope you find them useful in some way.❤️

I’ve been exploring animating comics. I’m above all in making comics that encourage the viewer to “read” animations. GIFs in comics tend to be a novelty, a background texture. These thoughts are rough. I’d love to hear what any one reading this has to say about the intersection of animation and comics.

Instead of seeing animations in that way in comics, I want people to see the arrranging of animations as a practice where the animation is an essential part how meaning arises from the sequence. As comics makers we get to be architects of time and space. I’m trying to figure out how this kind of sequencing fits into that architecture.

For example: Reading these sequences feel SIGNIFICANTLY different to me. (Click to enlarge for best experience).

136-wayne-2 My big concern is that I want people to be reading animations as “words”. (I hope to find a better way of describing this). The animations that I put together occupy a physical space on the screen and their physical relationship to each other affects the way that those “words” are read. In video there is an ever forward moving timeline. By juxtaposing looping video sequences you can embed those timelines into a larger timeline.

Embedding these animations in the grid frameworks conventionally used in comics, that larger timeline can be interacted with by a viewer along the conventionalized reading hierarchies of a given culture. That seems really cool and novel. It’s exciting to me and is the reason why I’ve been making these sequences.

I hope that these comics can expand the 1-dimensional timeline into a 2-dimensional plane where there are co-existing timelines.

(The idea of having gifs sitting side by side with unequal numbers of frames is an interesting idea to me when mixed with the idea of percieved timelines.)

These are my recent animation collage experiments. This is how I’ve been playing around with this. Some are way more successful than others at playing around with this time-space idea! (my suggested reading practice for these comics is to move through them slowly.)

tumblr_nihy0nRZaF1rc4waeo1_1280 tumblr_nm95o4sYOX1t8ifffo4_r1_540 tumblr_nm95o4sYOX1t8ifffo1_540tumblr_nm95o4sYOX1t8ifffo3_540tumblr_nm95o4sYOX1t8ifffo2_r1_500tumblr_nifp7stJaB1rc4waeo1_1280 tumblr_nils8kiLO61rc4waeo1_1280 let me know what’s on your mind.