CFP: Digital Comics, special issue of Networking Knowledge (July 11)

Call for Papers
Digital Comics
A special-themed issue of
Networking Knowledge,
the journal of the MeCCSA-PGN
Deadline for abstracts 11th July

The medium of comics has always evolved alongside the technology via which it is produced, distributed and consumed. In this age of easily accessible digital technologies, the comic form is undergoing a series of transformative changes. This remediation of the form has seen the medium change to accommodate the wider range of story-telling tropes and functionalities offered by the digital environment. Through portable touchscreen displays we are able to consume comics, film, animation, prose, games and other forms of interactive visual media. The multimodal capacity of these devices allows for the emergence of hybrid forms of comics which incorporate tropes from these other screen-based media.

Against this background, papers focused towards the following areas would sit well within this themed edition of Networking Knowledge:

• New and emergent digital comic forms and technologies.
• Changes to the underlying structures of the form as a result of digital mediation.
• Crossovers, adaptation and hybridisation between comics and other digital media.
• Acts of reading and the impact of digital mediation.
• Aesthetic and literary analysis of digital comic narratives.
• Digital distribution, changes in the industry and the threat of piracy.
• Webcomics, widening readerships, minority voices and fan cultures.
• Multimodality and comics relationship with larger transmedia narratives.

Other areas relevant to the study of digital comics will also be considered.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words for papers of 5,000 to 6,000 words should be submitted via e-mail to Jayms Nichols and Daniel Merlin Goodbrey at netknow@e-merl.com by Friday 11th July 2014.

Abstracts should specify the research question and make a clear connection to one or more aspects of the digital comics theme. Proposed papers must be original and must not have been published or accepted for publication elsewhere.

If you have any questions about the issue, please e-mail the address above. If you have questions about Networking Knowledge in general, please contact the editor, Sam Ward, at aaxsjw@nottingham.ac.uk.

CFP: Writing Visual Culture: Digital Comics / journal issue (August 19)

Call for Papers
Writing Visual Culture:

Digital Comics

Writing Visual Culture is the open access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal of the University of Hertfordshire's TVAD Research Group. The journal's focus is the relationship between text, narrative and image. We are currently seeking submissions for a new themed edition examining the world of digital comics.

The medium of comics is undergoing a period of transition as the popular mode of creation, distribution and consumption shifts from print to digital display. This is a transition that has been underway since before the general adoption of the World Wide Web and recent advances in portable digital display has only served to accelerate the pace of this change.

Digital comic pioneers have pushed at the boundaries of the medium and explored the possibilities offered by the inherent interactivity of the medium and the multimodality of computing devices. Today, smart phones and tablet computers provide a single platform of consumption on which comics, film, animation, games and other interactive visual media are equally at home. Now as comics gradually leave behind the tropes and trappings of print and embrace those of the screen, we also see the emergence of new hybrid forms that appropriate tropes from other screen-based media.

Against this background, papers focused towards the following areas would sit well within our themed edition of Writing Visual Culture:

• New and emergent digital comic forms and technologies.
• Changes to the underlying structures of the form as a result of digital mediation.
• Crossovers, adaptation and hybridisation between comics and videogames.
• Motion comics and animated adaptations of the form.
• Acts of reading and the impact of digital mediation.
• Aesthetic and Literary analysis of digital comic narratives.
• Digital distribution, changes in the industry and the threat of piracy.
• Webcomics, widening readerships, minority voices and fan cultures.
• Multimodality and comics relationship with larger transmedia narratives.

Although other areas relevant to the study of digital comics will also be considered.

Abstracts of 200 words for papers of 3000 to 6000 words should be submitted via e-mail to Daniel Merlin Goodbrey at wvc@e-merl.com by Monday 19th August. Abstracts should specify the research question or issue that you are addressing and make clear the connection between your paper and the Digital Comics theme. Proposed papers must be original and not have been published already or accepted for publication elsewhere.

iPad App Review - Johnny Cash: I (Can Almost) See a Darkness

JOHNNY CASH: I SEE A DARKNESS (SOUNDTRACK EDITION) - HD
by Reinhard Kleist
Ave!Comics
$5.99

Full Disclosure: The music of Johnny Cash is in my blood. His songs were my lullabies - and I don't mean that figuratively. When I was little, my parents kept a turntable in my room and a stack of their Cash 45s on the spindle. I'd go to sleep listening to the hits and, if I stayed up late enough, the b-sides. In my memory, these songs still have the vinyl pops and hisses in them, and I know them all note for note.

Needless to say, when I learned about Reinhard Kleist's graphic novel JOHNNY CASH: I SEE A DARKNESS, I was excited. And when I discovered that it was available for the iPad, I jumped on it. I'd been reading and enjoying some free comics (like those from comiXology, and Throwaway Horse's Ulysses "Seen") on my iPad, so I figured that my first actual digital comics purchase was only a matter of time. The fact that DARKNESS for the iPad was a "soundtrack edition" (it plays portions of relevant songs as you read the graphic novel, if they're in your iTunes library) just seemed too cool to pass up.

Story-wise, I SEE A DARKNESS follows the young Johnny Cash up through the concert at Folsom Prison, with a brief coda from the end of his life, at a recording session with producer Rick Rubin. It'll all be a bit familiar to anyone who's seen the WALK THE LINE biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon; much of the plot emphases in both tellings are identical. But DARKNESS focuses almost exclusively on Cash himself - June Carter's role, while pivotal and important, remains rather small. This is definitely a "warts-and-all" presentation of Cash, with his pill-popping and stubbornness central to his portrayal. (I admit, there were times in reading DARKNESS where I did not much like my hero.)

Cash's life story is balanced by two other narrative strands. First is that of Glen Sherley, a Folsom inmate who's obsessed with Cash and who has written a song that he hopes Cash will sing. The second strand is actually a series of occasional song adaptations, all starring variations on Johnny Cash as the various protagonists. These adaptations help to build the mythology behind Cash, just as the main narrative helps to ground his life in reality, and that balance helps make the book sing.

A final word about the story-telling: Kleist's renderings are beautiful. His Johnny Cash is particularly impressive, always recognizable no matter what age he is supposed to be. More than just photographically realistic, the images live and breathe. This is fine cartooning.

While overall I was impressed with the book as a graphic novel, as an iPad app it leaves much to be desired. First, the "soundtrack" option simply doesn't work very well. The song snippets don't always play when they're supposed to - they usually only played a while after the relevant portion of the narrative had already passed. This problem was accentuated when re-entering the app after using another app (I did not manage to read the entire book in one sitting) - not only did the songs seem to get progressively later, but once the app even lost my place entirely, and I had to re-find my page (there is no bookmark feature that I could find).

But music is only an add-on, one that's peripheral to the reading experience. More importantly, the book itself has a serious display problem. You really only can read it in the "animated frame," or panel-by-panel view. The "full page" view, bizarrely, uses only a portion of the screen, not its entirety, as you can see below:

The lettering in the book is on the small side to begin with, so when the page is presented at this miniscule size, the lettering is pretty much indecipherable. You can pinch the image to make it fill the screen, but (1) you'd need to pinch and hold on every single page, since as soon as you stop pinching, the image reverts to its original size, and (2) the resolution is such that, when you enlarge the images, they get blurry and hard to read. I cannot understand why an app designed for the iPad fails to make use of the entire screen. And even in the panel-by-panel view, there's lots of wasted screen real estate.

The app also seems generally unstable. Occasionally during the animated frame presentation, usually when it was showing a full-page panel, the display would get stuck in a loop, zooming in and out and back again. And several times the app simply crashed for no apparent reason.

If I had it to do over again, I would have spent the extra money and purchased the printed book instead of the iPad app. The innovation of having relevant music play as you read doesn't work as well as it should, and the lack of a real full-screen reading experience is a definite disappointment. JOHNNY CASH: I SEE A DARKNESS is a book that deserves a better presentation.