Enter The Story, and comics

Words are good. Pictures are good. Words and pictures are better.

You may have noticed that Enter The Story is like a book with pictures and speech bubbles. A bit like a comic in fact.

Comics are a lost art form: they can be a universe of ideas, a never ending, ever expanding soap opera of amazement. Comics have lost their way in recent decades, trying to be like TV and failing. But I dream of what they can be, and what they will be one day.

How Enter The Story began

Many years ago, before computer games ruled the world, 'Enter The Story' was going to be a series of comic books. The picture is me, aged 16, with some of my comics.
As I grew older it became obvious that comics were changing. Weekly and monthly comics had lost their way and were dying, and other forms of comic were going digital. At the time (the early 1990s) I was working in multimedia, and I became clear to me that my "comic" should be a game.

Why comics?

Comics are the most efficient way to tell a story. Take abridgments of classic novels for example. The original book may take a week to read, the abridgment may takes five hours, a movie could tell the abridgment in two hours, and a comic could do it in thirty minutes. Comics are also cheaper to produce and require fewer bytes of to store or transmit.

Since the 1980s most comics have been rubbish, because they they try copy movies, and of course they fail. But the very best comics are about efficient story telling, and they become works of art in their own right.

The most efficient medium of communication is always a comic

A comic is a story told in sequential words and pictures, as needed. Comics let you choose whatever medium works best - words or pictures - and read at your own pace. So comics can tell a story in the smallest space and shortest time possible.

"When aliens land here, or when we land on another planet, we are going to communicate with pictures, illustrated stories, comic books."

- Jim Steranko, quoted in Rolling Stone magazine, 1971, five years before Voyager 1

In religion...

If you're a living god, in the longest surviving superpower the world has ever known, how do you teach your people about the afterlife? With comics of course. This is from The Egyptian Book of The Dead, telling how you are led by Anubis to the judgment hall (frame 1), how your heart is judged (frame 2), and how you then meet Osiris (frame 3). Medieval churches and Mayan codices used the same methods.

Image from ComicAttack.net

In art...

If you're a great artist, and you want to tell a bigger story than you can fit into one picture, what do you do? This is Hogarth's story of the Harlot's Progress (click for larger images):

In the news media...

If you publish a newspaper, and you want to get across a complex idea as powerfully as possible, what do you do? You use a comic of course. In Britain the master of the craft is currently Matt of the Daily Telegraph: his panels are frequently quoted on BBC Radio 4's Today program (the one the politicians listen to), as they sum up the day's news in the most efficient way possible.

In entertainment...

If you plan to make a movie, or a 3D animation, you need a way to tell the same story to your production team, but in less time and with less money. What do you do? What medium can do the same job as a movie but faster and cheaper? A comic of course (they call them storyboards)

Images from Wikipedia, the Blender Foundation, and Wikipedia

Images from the Comics UK history pages

In business...

If you're in a meeting and need to get a message across as efficiently as possible, what do you use? A comic of course. As Austin Kleon points out, PowerPoint presentations (and their accompanying storyboards) are sequential narratives using words and pictures: comics by another name.

Image from Austin Kleon's blog

In science...

If you're sending the Voyager spacecraft into deep space, and you want a message for any aliens out there, what do you do? You use a comic of course. Now obviously we don't know what language an alien would use, or if they read from left to right (or from the middle), but we use words and symbols that tell a story: the characters say hello, the ship is from Earth, taking this route... it's a comic! Of course, spacecraft also take up videos and disks and stuff, but first you have to tell the aliens how to work the thing. So you create a story in images and symbols: comics always come first.

Image from DamnInteresting.com

In politics...

If you're a major historical figure, and you want to tell the world about your triumphs, what do you do? You could write a book and just hope people read it... or you make a comic. Take the Bayeux Tapestry, or Trajan's column, or the thousands of other tapestries and bas reliefs around the world.

Trajan image from the Comics UK history pages

The future

The bottom line is that comics are the most efficient form of communication. Sadly, modern monthly comics have tried to imitate video, making them less efficient and more expensive, and consequently monthly sales have collapsed. But to anyone who cares about communication, comics are alive and well and always will be.

What I want

I want comics that

inform,

inspire,

and are cheap.

I want comics that are the most efficient vehicle for bringing the world's greatest ideas into your brain.

Enter The Story is my attempt to show what I mean. Hopefully as time goes on I will become better and better at it, and people will catch the vision of what I mean.

At least, that's the plan.