From marble obelisks to threaded cloth to chiseled stone, all the way up to the dawn of four color printing press comic books as we know them today, the medium has changed, but there remains a common bond: telling stories through the tools and resources available. Whether commissioned by an emperor, a king, or a publishing company, the concept of explaining ideas with pictures has always existed, albeit with different intents.
Propaganda is the first and possibly the last reason, selling an idea to the "ignorant masses" so as to create a fiction around the empire, telling of its enemies crimes and showing how "we" are the benefactors of god(s). An image will always speak in bolder terms, relating to some deep reptilian part of our brains that can't distinguish fiction from reality. On some level we lose ourselves in well designed illustrations, we become the everyman and let slip our individuality.Education and instruction is another purpose, such as agricultural information vital to surviving the jungles or a calendar to make sense of our time in space, historical recordings with monks detailing out a battle in stained glass or mass produced safety measures on an airplane. We see examples of what we need to know, blank faced figures facing peril we may one day face ourselves.
And lastly, well at least as I see it now, there's entertainment, escapism. This seems to require a level of comfort in a society, where we have leisure time to lose ourselves in another reality. We may still learn something or be presented with ideologies, but we're transported from our current stream of consciousness to one where we sort of melt away, going with the flow of the narrative, a distraction from our everyday lives.
So that seems to be a simplified dissection of visual chronicling through the ages and the uses thereof. Where does that leave us in the here and now? At the true dawn of the digital age people can still grab paper, scribble drawings, add text, bind it, and give it to others to enjoy, whether it's photocopies and staples or scans and PDF files. Our tools are changing and as fast as that's happening, it's still too early to tell where it will take us.
Paper will exist for years to come. As Marek himself even said in reply to my question about digital comics, electricity and bits of information are things we may not be able to count on in the future. After losing a few hard drives myself, I all too well know the transitory nature of digital information. Paper is something we can hold and what's on said paper is (for the most part) permanent. But it's limiting in the scope of physical space that it takes up. Can you imagine having just one book with you for the rest of your life?And maybe that's part of the problem. In these historical examples presented there's a community aspect to it. They are on display in a main square, a church, a public arena of some manner. No one owns any of it, yet it belongs to all. Nowadays we all want a copy of everything we've ever read, perhaps buying into that capitalistic idea of ever expanding collections of anything and everything. How often do we revisit any given piece we've enjoyed?
I'd say not often. We're too busy looking for new input. Something fresh and new, even if it's a moldy oldie classic, and if anything a devouring of any materials from your current era will, I believe and have experienced myself, an enhanced enjoyment of things from far gone eras. My love of superhero comics and action movies set the stage for me to fully embrace the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, my favorites from literature.
What does this mean going forward? As I prepare my digital comic and a motion comic for the iAge of users to consume, I hope that I make my own mark on the history of visual storytelling, here at the beginning of an evolutionary leap forward in medium, if not content and experience.
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