Blogging Comics
“New York, NY - The year is 2011, and Jimmy Burns, a young anti-corporate blogger has just seen his Williamsburg apartment blown to bits by yet another terrorist attack on New York City. He’s recorded the gruesome scene on his videoblog camera-footage Burns beams live to a freaked-out world and that makes him an overnight media sensation. Exploited by his own network (Global News:”Your home for 24-hour terror coverage”), enraged by the terrorists, and determined to tell the American people the truth, Burns takes off for Iraq to get the real story of a war that’s been raging for more than eight years…” What follows is one of the most interesting experiments in media convergence in the recent history of comics.
Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman’s Shooting War delivers a story set in the near future that forces us to take a hard look at our immediate past. Inaction will come at a price. That is probably one of the main takeaways of this absorbing story.
The medium, so far (according to Wired, there will be a hardcover print version next year), is an unusual combination of web + comics with an air of blogging that is consistent with the story itself. This is definitively an explosive combination. Right at the beginning of the web as mass media, Scott McCloud reminded us that, at the moment (1993), comics was “one of the very few forms of mass communication in which individual voices still have a chance to be heard.” That assessment remains true today, however technology has made possible other forms of media that are reshaping the toolbox available to independent voices.
It is impossible to summarize the importance of comics as media in this space. Impossible and unnecessary given the brilliant revision of this art form that is McCloud’s Understanding Comics. What we can anticipate is an evolution of comics in the digital form that will mix and remix with other media formats available now as well as with those yet to be invented. Another win for communication and communicators.
Here is a preview of chapter one, take it as my own trailer of this story.
