Motion Comics are weird things. I'm a comic lover, and I'm a motion designer, so on the face of it I might be expected to like them. But every motion comic I've seen so far has disappointed me. I used to make animatics for a big advertising agency. The illustrator in the other building would send over some layered Photoshop files and I'd comp them together with some camera moves, z-space, lighting effects or whatever to make a sort of moving illustration. Motion comics are exactly this sort of aftereffectsey, puppet-like animatic - nothing more than re-hashed illustrations. Even the latest title, Jonah Hex, which uses 3D camera-mapping and more subtle facial distortion, just feels like Captain Pugwash to me. By an animator's standards, motion comics are simply very poor quality animation, and as they are developed to their logical conclusion that is becoming apparent.
"As soon as you get the lip flaps going, you're in full animation. But do you add a run cycle? Yeah, we are doing that in some of our upcoming projects. And it's basically turning into full animation from a printed comic." says Ian Kirby, Jonah Hex producer and director.
The problem is that the publishers have failed to capitalise on the fundamental difference between comics and movies - comics are not a passive medium. The reader can dwell on a panel or a page before moving on, she can skim-read the dialogue or contemplate it slowly. Comic artists have developed very sophisticated conventions of design and layout in order to encourage a certain pace or progression across the page, but ultimately it's the reader who imagines how things are moving and what they might sound like. It's this power of imagination, the interplay between the artist and the viewer, that gives comics their enduring, unique attraction. But turning them into animatics with voiceover robs them of it. With the release of the iPad, and comiXology's app (which powers the Marvel Comics app) I see something with much more potential. This app can show the viewer a page at a time, or a panel at a time (hiding the other panels in the story) and so the artists have instantly gained a set of new, cinematic tools in terms of graphic matching, 'jump-cutting', suspense and surprise without sacrificing the viewer's essential imaginative component.
It will be interesting to see how comics develop on the tablet / e-reader platform. I can imagine how tempting it must be to use the shock of movement within the frame, yet as soon as you do the viewers suspension of disbelief is eroded... It brings to mind a certain moving sausage which for some unaccountable reason absolutely thrilled me as a child, and might just have been the first ever motion comic.