Stop the Paper Doll animation. It’s embarrassing.

Almost along the same lines of yesterday’s thinking about why flash based webcomic players are bad for classic sequential art, there’s an uptick in the “motion” or “animated” comics. Where they take a classic sequential page, have a program like ToonBoom or flash and chop them up and move them around and add a voice cast. It often feels wonky and out of place, because it is. A rundown of my thoughts.

#1 It’s wonky and out of place. Much like me asking the question of WHY use a flash viewer to view webcomics, I ask, why do we need this? What is the point? It’s lazy content milking of classic sequential art. Wonky, because the movement is often bad and lazy (more on that later) and out of place because often the voice casting is terrible. Take the Watchmen moving comics on iTunes, Silk Spectre’s voice is a MAN. So she comes off as having a bad smokers throat at best. See, the thing is if you’re going to take a GREAT comic like Watchmen and then do something like that, you’ve just sort of dumbed the content down. You’ve probably made fans of the book throw up a little in their mouth.

#2 Stop calling it “animated”. Just because something moves around or tweens does not make it an animated cartoon. It’s a real insult to REAL animators. Why not hire them to do an animated series right!? Oh, that’s right, the comic book industry is notoriously low on cash to pay people what they’re worth. Seriously, calling this stuff “animation” or animated anything is an insult to animation. Ask John K. what “animation” is – A good example of just how wonky this is would be to tell you that i have

#3 Talking Paper Dolls - That’s pretty much what they’re doing. Fancy paper dolls. I want to see comic companies say, “Check out or PAPER DOLL THEATER version of Watchmen!”- Imagine if I told you that I had ACTION FIGURES, but then I whipped out cut-outs that you could dress or pose, like those old stick-up books back in the day. Hey, I mean, it’s the same, right!? You can totally play with them even though they don’t have articulation and stuff, and it’s SO cheap to make, we just cut out the shapes of the characters in different poses and VIOLA!!!! McFarlane Toys, eat your heart out, we’ve got PAPER FUCKING DOLLS!

#4 Why? - The only answer as to why do this is because it’s EASY. The stuff has already been drawn and colored by a team. It’s just sitting there waiting to be cut out! It makes sense from a weasily business perspective. But why not hire a small animation company to do it up right? I happen to know a guy who owns an animation place, they put out dvds and everything I hear… and guess what? He’s a webcomic dude. Comics like Least I can Do, PvP, Ctrl+Alt+Del and Looking for Group all have animation through them. I guess my point is I’d rather see something like “Secret Saturday’s” come out than the shaking paper dolls of something like Invincible.The answer to why is always MONEY. It’s easy because the content is there to chop up, and if you can trick a company or network into paying you for this content that’s not in demand, god bless you, but can’t we do BETTER? It’s a little embarrassing. The talking paper dolls.

#5 There is no demand – If people were beating down the doors for this type of crapola, then Platinum Studios would be rich by now off of these things. I saw somewhere that Watchmen said it was the “FIRST” animated comic, but wasn’t sure if they meant the first DC Comic, because Platinum have been experiementing for some time with paper doll animation. They even have their own player called “Splastk”. And yes, they even have a Hero By Night paper doll theater on there in 6 parts. (which they still need to pay me for) Right now it’s even sponsored by the HULK dvd, but nobody is making money off of it somehow. Go figure, huh??? I must admit, as a creator, it’s nice to have someone show you your sequential art moving around and talking in paper doll fashion, but my readers, the actual comic fans out there, they don’t give a rat’s ass. They see it for what it is, LAZY animation. Smoke and mirrors and paper dolls.

#6 You know the only people benefiting from this?

• Voice Actors
• Whoever is collecting that Ad money from the Hulk DVD on Splastk?\

Of course this is only my opinion here. Maybe there is a whole slew of people who LOVE these and clammor for more. I’ve never talked to a single comic fan like that though. Most of them when the topic comes up they sort get a “cringe” look on their face and make a sound like “meh.”– I guess there is something to be said for a paper doll theater version of INVINCIBLE (available on itunes) which isn’t half bad at all. But why do I think it’s different when I look at it? Is it because the paper dolls shake more and FLASH! Is it better voice acting or the animated word balloons that type across as the people are speaking for no apparent reason I can think of but to be built in closed caption for the deaf? — No, it’s probably because I’m just an Invincible fan. But even though I love the comic and own the hardcovers, I still haven’t watched a full episode of the “animated” series. The argument for that could be that this is targeted at non-comic readers, and may even, according to some reviews on itunes, bring more readers back to comics or bring first time readers back. My kids didn’t like it though. I use them as a litmus test sometimes. They’d rather run and watch “Secret Saturdays” — but heck, Kirkman gotz an MTV payday of some sort, but that’s not something to build a business model around, which I think he’d agree– it’s what they call in those circles “rarified air”   – He’s rare because his comics he’s adapting don’t suck. What about Watchmen though? THAT is a great book, but a pretty terrible paper doll theater.  I guess we’ll only know if it was a huge success if we see more and more seasons available or produced.

I’m willing to concede that there is a way to do this RIGHT. We haven’t seen it yet though. Might I again suggest hiring ANIMATORS to actually animate?