Defining Terms (part 2)

Doohickeys and Whatchamacallits

    At the risk of descending to the hilarious depths of Mort Walker's Lexicon of Comicana, which I highly recommend, I'd like to propose some new terms to will hopefully help out in the discussions of how digital comics seem to work now.

The Turn

    In my own humble attempts at crafting a new working definition of comics, one of my main focal points was the mechanic of reader advancement of the image sequence. This mostly consists of the reader moving from one panel to the next whenever she feels like it. There is one additional component to sequence traversal, however, that I propose we call the turn. The turn is any non-reading action required by the reader to advance the sequence. In paper comic books, this would include turning the page. At some point, there are no move visible panels for the reader to read without engaging a turn. In a digital comic, this is most often seen as a "click" of either the mouse or an arrow key. I'm proposing the term turn both for backward compatibility (so that we can still talk about non-digital comics) and for it's clear reference to play. The turn is an abstraction (turning the page is a turn, clicking a key is a turn) that will come in handy for discussing digital comics since there is no real concept of a page. How do you discuss "three clicks ago"? I mean, you can say "three clicks ago", but what if the digital comic in question responds to voice commands, or advances whenever the reader touches the screen? Also, the U.S. military uses "click" to mean kilometers, so there's the potential for confusion there.The whole idea of the turn is to settle on a general term for these acts of advancement. I am more than open for someone to propose a different term.

    Another aspect that occurred to me later, is that the turn is not only the advancement of the sequence, it is also the grouping of advancement. A turn is therefore a co-visual sub-sequence of the overall sequence. In paper comics, this would be a page. So, I'm making the term do double duty here as both the act of advancement and the total content that is displayed by the act of advancement.

On The Swipe

    Apparently, some of the practitioners over at Thrillbent.com have already taken to labeling smaller transitions as "on the swipe". You can see this in some of their published scripts as well as in some of their discussions on the form. These guys are on the front lines and they're inventing terms as they need them, and thank goodness they are. I'm not trying to tell them they are wrong, I just think we can expand some of the concepts they are working with a little bit.

    For one thing, the use of "on the swipe" seems to include mostly smaller transitions. Screens are still announced in these scripts like pages would be with a paper comic script. I think we can embrace the new possibilities of the medium even more. I conceive of a turn as a set of all additions and subtractions to the visual plane. There would then be no replacement for the page, there would be no screen. My main disagreement here is that Jeremy Rock refers to these as "Swipe Effects", more like special features. I'm viewing these seemingly incremental updates as the central mechanic of the form.

Conclusion

    I feel that we need this concept. One of McCloud's most interesting types of analysis in Understanding Comics was his look at panel transition type frequency. Likewise, I think there is some mileage to gotten out of looking at digital comics through the types of turns they use. In digital comics, turns tend to be much finer in their granularity. Often single panels are advanced into the reading area. Paper comics are always static, not in the number of panels opened up by each turn, but the overall amount of panel real estate that appears. Digital comics might include turns involving no more than one speech balloon appearing.  
    Also, the turn concept could help with the definition of digital comic readers. The CBR format, for example, consists of full page images. Each turn moves to the next image. Something more advanced could include a configuration file that specifies which images are added (and which subtracted) at each specific turn.