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Tuesday 24 September 2002

Comic The Sims

Pic of the day: Making a comic out of screenshots is nothing like drawing, but it still requires creativity and patience.

Sprite comics

I spent much of the evening playing The Sims, setting up situations and harvesting pictures. I am sliding in the direction of another Sims comic, not just an illustrated text. But I am not sure I am up to it. Basically it will be like a sprite comic, for those familiar with that concept. For the rest of you, a very brief introduction.

Usually you have to draw a comic. This takes some time and requires some talent. Some people lack one or another, and still want to make a comic. The solution is to use sprites: Pictures of archetypical characters. These are typically harvested from video games. The background is usually also harvested, or is rather vague. Since the sprites – the characters – rarely ever change, there is little room to show emotion or action the way you can do in a drawn comic. This makes it difficult to use sprite comics to convey much more than you could with text and/or stick figures.

Still, some of us are so retarded in the artistic department that it's this or nothing.

***

We can draw a line from pure text, over text with illustration, through sprite comics and then ordinary comics. The line continues into cartoons, animated movies and finally ordinary movies and live theater. I will focus here on the field where text and picture meet, the borderland of comics.

Sprite comics are seen as a part of the "comic kingdom", so to speak. But they depend heavily on text, because sprites cannot convey much unique information in each picture. They can however give some information through the picture: The general setting, the proximity and position of the players. This takes some of the burden off the text. However, unless both the creator and the reader are aware of the limitations, sprite comics can be disappointing. They are not well suited to show emotion, because you don’t have the changing facial expressions and the nuances of body language. Any emotion must therefore be expressed through the text or implicit in the story.

The opposite of this is also a fairly common subgenre, "talking heads" comics. In these comics, there is no storytelling through the background or through advanced body language. Emotion is indicated by facial expression. In some cases, even facial expressions are few and stereotypical. In these cases, as with poorly done sprite comics, you might as well have used pure text. (Although it can sometimes be done as a parody.)

My Sim comics are meant to inhabit the upper levels of sprite comicdom, if we randomly say that text is on the bottom and theater at the top. I don’t think in level of quality here, but rather in realism and sense of "being there". On one hand, Sims don’t have changing facial expressions and I don’t think I’ll be able to draw them in. In this respect, it is a quite normal sprite comic. But it has relevant surroundings, not just characters in a vacuum. The characters can use furniture and some tools; and they can be shown interacting not just with objects but with each other. The sprites also have some capacity for body language.

The lack of close-up detail and facial expressions places a burden on me if I try to make a comic using The Sims. I can try to compensate with symbols, captions or dialog, or I can try to make the emotions obvious from the context. The latter is probably not possible in a gag of the day strip (as my first attempt last summer) but this time I consider telling a story. Will I be able to do that? I am not sure. Will I find the time to do it even if I could? It would cost me time that I already use for something else. I am not really sure why I even try. It’s mostly because the voices in my head tell me to, I guess. (OK, they are not voices as much as independent thoughts, but they are still quite excited about the possibility.)

I expect it to run out of steam pretty soon, as most of my fads do. Then again, this journal has kept ticking for years. You really never know - it is kinda chaotic. As you might expect from a Chaos Node...


Yesterday <-- This month --> Tomorrow?
One year ago: Against better judgement
Two years ago: Snacking
Three years ago: Pleasure attack

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