Alan Moore leading digital comics to open-source future

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/06/alan-moore-digital-comics-open-source-electricomics-app

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After reinventing the superhero, quarrelling with the mainstream and turning his back on Hollywood, the legendary comic book creator Alan Moore is turning the world of digital comics on its head with a set of open source tools and an app due to launch in early 2015. But don’t ask him what it is about today’s digital offerings he’s trying to improve.

“You’re asking the wrong person,” Moore chuckles. “I’ve got absolutely no idea because I don’t have any online capacity, no devices or tablets and to tell the truth I’m not really involved with the comics scene in any way.”

Moore’s Electricomics project will give anyone with an internet connection access to the means of creation, with free open-source tools for writers to create their own digital comics, an app and a 32-page collection by writers such as Peter Hogan and Garth Ennis joining Moore himself to show what the tools can do.

For all its technological ambition, Moore says he’ll be reminding the Electricomics designers to keep it simple. The most sophisticated technology in a digital comic is “the comics medium itself”.

“It is a very well-developed technology and it’s very difficult to add to or reproduce comic effects in a more elegant way,” Moore says, citing a page in Will Eisner’s The Spirit where the masked crimefighter is investigating a deserted house. “You might have a shot of the darkened kitchen, in the foreground there would be a faucet with a slightly elongated bead of water hanging from its business end. If you were trying to create this as a digital comic, surely the temptation would be to make the tap drip, even add a drip-drip-drip sound effect. But that would not make it better, it would remove the elegance of Eisner’s original, where through the elongation we know that in a second or two it will break free and fall and another bead will form.” Comics are a technology that “works upon the hardware of the human brain, the software of the human mind,” Moore continues. “They are already creating these virtual effects. So avoiding whistles and bells would be one of the first tenets that digital comics should try to stick to.”

For the project’s technical lead, Ocasta Studios’ Ed Moore (no relation), the challenge is to build a set of tools that offer readers the same flexibility as paper publication, while unleashing the possibilities of new technology.

“The experience of reading a comic on paper doesn’t translate well to reading it digitally,” he explains. “You don’t get the same readability and re-readability. The other problem is that digital obviously has a huge number of extra capabilities over a flat printed piece of paper which are not being taken advantage of; the fact that you’ve always got the mobile device (and the app) with you, you can navigate in so many different ways, it can talk to the backend servers and so on.”

As might be expected from the creator of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, the roots of the project lie buried deep in a corner of Alan Moore’s surreal world. More precisely, in The Show, a feature film Moore has been working on since 2012 set in an alternate version of his hometown, Northampton. “There’s a scene in which the kids are sitting around and one of them unrolls a device called 'a Spindle' which has a flexible screen that rolls up into a cylinder giving you a large screen area,” Moore recalls. “On the screen I’d imagined would be some new form of electric comic.” And so, Electricomics, with its “suitably Victorian” name was born.

The project has only just got the green light and “substantial” funding from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts, but has already covered some ground, with Moore’s daughter Leah, who co-created The Thrill Electric with her husband John Reppion, installed as editor. “She has been the backbone of the project and we’re all learning from her and John,” says the proud father.

The four eight-pagers are also complete. Moore’s own, Big Nemo, is a tribute to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, an example of visual storytelling which, according to Moore has “never been bettered”.

“The way he was already suggesting animated movement upon a motionless still page would make his technique the most broadly applicable to this new way of presenting comics,” Moore says. Colleen Doran (Sandman, Wonder Woman, Vampire Diaries) is doing the artwork. The rest comprises “modernist horror” Cabaret Amygdala by Peter Hogan (with whom Moore worked on his ABC series Terra Obscura) and Paul Davidson (Age of X, X-Factor, Dark X-Men). Preacher writer Garth Ennis contributes a first world war piece Red Horse with art by Peter Snejbjerg, while the editor teams up again with Reppion for time-travel science fiction piece Sway, drawn by Nicola Scott.

Some of the content might be grown-up material, but Moore insists the project is aimed at a young audience increasingly left behind by the comics mainstream.

“Kids avoid these things like the plague,” he says. “Why would a 13-year-old bother reading a comic book when they have these different devices and the comics are being made not for them but for40 to 60-year-olds who are actually reading them?”

Moore’s also hoping to offer young writing talent an alternative route to signing up for endless superhero sequels with DC and Marvel, citing the 2012 prequel Before Watchmen – a project which DC published without his involvement or approval – as evidence of the mainstream’s current lack of creativity.

“Surely this contemporary passion for superheroes, unless it’s as immortal as Thor himself, will have its day,” Moore sighs. “Nothing lasts forever. Romantic poetry didn’t last forever and that was bigger than the Beatles!”

He may relish the idea of unleashing a new generation of talent, but Moore still thinks of himself more as a creator than an enabler, reeling off a list of ongoing projects including the screenplay for his feature film The Show, his novel Jerusalem, an HP Lovecraft tribute and the next instalment of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. “I’m creating every day for as many hours as I’m not sleeping,” he says.