Image&Word

On his blog David Bordwell published an extensive article on the Screenwriting Research Conference in Brussels in which Pascal Lefèvre and Silvia Van Aken took part. He referred to the presentation by Pascal Lefèvre as follows:

“Pascal Lefèvre, one of Europe’s leading experts on comic art, provided a brisk, packed account of the history and practices of scriptwriting for Eurocomics. He described patterns of collaboration, format, and creative choice, placing special emphasis on comics as a spatial art different from cinema. His example was a page from Regis Franc’s ulta-widescreen album Le Café de la plage.”

The full article can be found here: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2011/09/18/scriptography/

België mag dan wel internationaal bekend zijn voor haar stripproductie en illustratiewerk, toch staat deze creatieve sector alsmaar meer onder druk. Tot op heden heeft niemand een precies idee over de actuele sociaaleconomische situatie van de illustrator of stripauteur. Daarom nam het studiebureau van SMartBe het initiatief om een grootschalig onderzoek uit te voeren. Door middel van een online vragenlijst werd bij illustratoren en stripauteurs gepeild naar de belangrijkste pijnpunten bij de uitoefening van hun beroep. Deze enquête richtte zich zowel naar zij die al een lange artistieke carrière achter de rug hebben, als naar debutanten.

DATUM
19 | 11 | 2010
PLAATS
SMartBe, ingang Coenraetsstraat 82, 1060 Brussel

Informatie: http://www.smartbe.be/

Inschrijven bij Quentin de Ghellinck: deq@smartbe.be
deq@smartbe.be – 02/542.19.73

Call for Papers: Graphic Novels, Comics and Popular Culture
PCA/ACA & Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations Joint Conference, April 20-23, 2011, San Antonio, TX

http://www.swtxpca.org

The national French comics centre in Angoulême (Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image) organised in July (5-7, 2010) a summer school about cross-media and the impact on comics publication (Trans-média, cross-média, média global: de l’album singulier aux écrans multiples). Benoît Berthou of the university of Paris 13 stated that while people are gradually reading less books, they are spending more time in front of a screen (in France the average is about 12 hours a week). For him it’s clear that it won’t be books that will be at the focus of cross-media but games. Books or comics about those games do only exist, because they help to sell the game even better. For example Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell is in fact a creation of Ubisoft and the The Splinter Cell novels are written under the pseudonym David Michaels by different authors. The cost for the development of game is about 5 million euro and involves about 100 people – which is quite different from the production of a book. He also referred to the sales figures of Blizzard Entertainment, the firm that launched World of Warcraft, with its 3,28 billion euro it surpasses the sales figures of the complete French book industry (about 2,8 billion euro).

How the digital revolution will affect the book industry is yet not clear. Today there are multiple standards, formats, platforms, business models. Before Apple’s iPad the existing reading tablets (Iliad, Kindle) only had a screen which could display some shades of grey and were consequently not ideal for reading comics or illustrated books. So the coming of new full-colour e-readers may open many possibilities and various firms have jumped on the band wagon. In France this lead to a firm reaction of the comics artists: their syndicate GABD (Groupement des Auteurs de Bande Dessinée) launched in March a petition (Appel du numérique) on Facebook. Today already more than 1.300 people signed this letter denouncing that the publishers had started making their work digitally available without consulting with the authors. The comics artists demand therefore a general regulation between publishers and authors.

Moreover the role of the comics artist will be quite different in cross-media productions. He or she won’t be any longer the sole creator but rather the executer of a concept formed by someone else. More and more other specialists will be involved in the production of digital comics or picture books, because it goes much further than a simple scan. A firm as Tekneo presents on his platform MComics animated comics, whereby they give a rhythm to presentation of a sequence, let the ‘camera’ move about the drawings, and add a score. The result can be viewed on smartphones and other digital e-readers. (Also in the Dutch language similar projects exist: the firm Levende Boeken produces animated versions of existing picture books).

At the summer school also Thomas Cadène presented his project of a drawn soap: Les autres gens. since March it offers  on a daily basis a new episode of a continuing story, written by Cadène and drawn by various artists. A subscription to this ‘BéDénovela’ costs less than 3 euro per month. But as many other digital projects in the French region, this project too is yet not profitable, but everyone hopes that one day it will be.