Story time

The old school meets the new with online graphic novels

By Jess Kilby

I came late to comic books. Actually, I never really got into comic books, per se; it was the graphic novel that lured me in. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, to be exact. And although I understood on some level that I should be buying and reading the dark, glossy $20-a-pop books in the order the author had intended, the volume I needed never seemed to be in stock when I had the cash to buy it. So I bought what I could when I could, devoured each issue the minute I got home, and never ended up accumulating the entire series. Now a disjointed, incomplete version of Gaiman’s oeuvre rattles around in my head, nattering like Delirium herself whenever I cast my thoughts in that general direction.

For years after the Sandman debacle, I restrained my serialized-fiction purchases to works that had already been completed — like Alan Moore’s From Hell — in efforts to avoid any further literary dementia. A beginning, a middle, an end — I owned them all when I walked out of the store, a tome the size of a phonebook under my arm. The promise of sweet, unbroken story stretched out before me, there to devour at my leisure.

And then we got broadband. At first there wasn’t much to do with our fat new pipe except download songs from Napster and revel in the fact that graphics-heavy pages now loaded in less time than it took to make a pot of coffee and thumb through a chapter of From Hell.

But eventually that changed. Artists and designers began to realize the potential of software like Macromedia’s Flash, especially as more people acquired the means to view such bandwidth-heavy offerings. And in the days before Flash became the most grossly abused piece of software on the Web (Note to site designers: Flash is not a navigation tool! Note to immersive-ad designers: pissing people off is not a good marketing strategy!), a new genre of fiction was born: the online graphic novel.

We’re not talking about a series of silent, static pages here — stationary text and images that the user clicks through like a standard, linear Web site. But we’re also not talking about fully-animated movies, replete with characters who walk and talk and leap tall buildings in a single bound.

What the online graphic novel achieves is a unique balance between the two; a product that draws the viewer in with sound and music and motion but still demands that you read. Or at least, that’s how things began. The genre is already evolving, and not necessarily for the best.

The original, quintessential online graphic novel is Broken Saints (www.brokensaints. com), a 24-chapter saga by Vancouver trio Brooke Burgess, Ian Kirby, and Andrew West. Broken Saints was launched in January 2001, and its creators originally expected to have the final chapter in the can by the end of this month. But — good news for those of you who like to get in on things while they’re still unfolding — the team is still on Chapter 18, with the next installment due to be launched any day now.

It takes a while to get the gist of the medium, but give it a chance. I thought the animation was hokey as hell at first — characters sliding across the screen instead of walking, fight scenes fading from one frame to the next to represent motion — until it sunk in: I wasn’t watching a third-rate animated movie. I was reading a fist-rate graphic novel. One that murmured and screamed and flickered and spooked me out so bad I had to get up and turn on a light in my pitch-black, after-midnight, home-alone-with-incense-burning apartment.

If you can approach the story from that perspective, and allow for some fairly melodramatic writing (because graphic novels really are nothing more than grown-up comic books, after all), you’ll be sucked in by chapter four. And the best part, besides never having to get off your ass to go buy the next issue? It’s free.

“We don’t make MONEY with Broken Saints. Period,” Burgess writes in the site’s FAQ. “We make something that can be seen. We make something that can be heard. We make something that can be EXPERIENCED. We make art.

“Are we daft? Maybe, but it’s hard to convey how satisfying this whole process has been to people who are obsessed with the bottom-line.”

Broken Saints isn’t the only game in town when it comes to online graphic novels, though it’s probably the best so far. There’s Ninjai: The Little Ninja, a talkie to Broken Saints’ text-based dialogue and exposition, which unfortunately makes high demands on bandwidth and system memory and is prone to crashing. Another downer: though 12 chapters are in the can, the creators (probably due to bandwidth limitations of their own) are posting one chapter at a time, every two weeks. Chapter one is up now.

There’s also Float ¤http://www.yimagination.com/float/index.html), an online spin-off of the print comic of the same name, which works on the same text-and-sound-effects principle as Broken Saints and has actually been around for about a year longer. Unfortunately, access to all but the four most recent of the 121 strips is blocked until some time in the near future, while the creators revamp their Web site and prepare for a new product launch.

But don’t sweat it. Broken Saints already has more than six hours of material to offer, with probably another two hours to come before the story wraps up. So light up — the incense, that is — and turn out the lights. It’s story time.

Jess Kilby can be reached at jkilby@phx.com. “Technophilia” highlights the latest and greatest of the tech world and runs once a month.