UPDATE 6/20/2009: For those finding this site while searching for more info about Longbox Project have a look at Rantz’s Livejournal post on 2/19/2009. Ideas are explained. Thoughts answered. Recipes shared.
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The Longbox Project seems to be a venture to bring comics to mobile digital media. Your basic iPhone bringing you you’re Funny Books.

I likes the idea.

Myriad Issues talks with Rantz Hoseley about the score and Rantz puts into words exactly what I don’t like about “animated” comics.

MI: What do you think about the “animated” comics some publishers are experimenting with?

RH: Motion comics are basically a throwing shaky cam on a still medium. Please, what are you on? Didn’t we already see this in the mid 90’s when Flash first appeared on the ‘net? It wasn’t a good or satisfying experience then, [so] what has changed that would make the end result any different? It all feels like art and film school demo reels when they first start playing with motion graphics tools like Flash or After Effects.

[Reading] comics is both passive behavior and active behavior on the audiences’ part. They control how fast they read things. You start putting in dialogue with voiceover and flipping pages for the reader, then you take away their [the reader’s] control and it’s no longer comics anymore. I don’t think that’s what makes comics interesting, what makes it powerful as a storytelling medium, or what makes it seductive. I think it’s a really bad band-aid solution.

He’s not wrong. Sorry, Mr Kirkman. I saw what MTV did to INVINCIBLE. That dog don’t hunt for me. Maybe if they picked voice actors (for parents, mind you) that were older than 15, it wouldn’t be so jarring and uncomfortable. But they didn’t and it is.

MI: Do you think smart phones and iPhones are a viable platform for digital comics?

RH: It’s not an impossibility. But by the nature of what the iPhone is, and in a sense the Kindle as well, you’re automatically at an inferior platform for most comics. Trying to maintain things like readability, detail and still have page context [from the traditional comic book format] means you’re already behind the eight ball, and trying to come back from that is not a trivial thing. Dealing with it on a computer screen, or a TV via modern game consoles is a much easier… a much more viable solution.

Aside from the fact that, in order to deal with those issues, you have to create unique, platform-specific content, I think mobile comics are a bad idea until there is a little more stability in the phone market. Between the iPhone and what companies like HTC and Samsung are doing, trying to deal with a market-wide solution right now is basically jumping into the middle of the leapfrogging that’s going to continue to take place in cell phones over the next 5 years as the companies jockey for market dominance;

The entire article is worth a read, for those who want more info on Future Comics type stuff.

(via myriad issues)