The Making of "The Bath Crone," Pt. 2: Assumptions

(This is Part 2 of my series on the making of my 3D comic, "The Bath Crone." You can read Part 1 HERE, and you can read the comic HERE. It takes only a few minutes to read.)

I started thinking about 3D comics so long ago that the assumptions I held then about comics, 3D, 3D comics, and even art in general have changed a lot. Some facts I thought were true turned out to be demonstrably untrue, and some beliefs I held dearly I no longer believe. All of this stuff that I’ve more or less abandoned lead to my then AND current conception of 3D comics, so I thought I’d take this post to explain my thought process as I went from my initial spark of inspiration to the finished product that is "The Bath Crone." Just so whether you more align with me now, or me then, or even me never, you can better understand why my personal vision of what 3D comics is the way it is.

I think the biggest difference between me now and me then (where it relates to comic theory, anyway) is my belief in formalism. I read all of Scott McCloud’s books on comics theory and whatever else I could find on the topic, and I strongly believed that comics were defined by certain immutable features. Scott McCloud famously defined comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence,” but I related more to his simpler and more exciting formula for comics: “SPACE = TIME.” In this formulation, space (the page) was the currency that comics had available to spend, and by being read it converted this currency of space into time in the mind of the reader. This idea became very relevant when I began to think about 3D comics. It was an obvious leap to make that if the 2D space of the comics page could represent time, so too could 3D space.

The problem was that you couldn’t exactly experience 3D space in the same way you experience 2D space on a page. You have to move through it rather than just scan your eyes over it. This was an easy problem to solve, all I needed to do was to conceptualize the camera/player character that commonly walks through the 3D spaces of games as an eye in the context of a 3D comic. Where in a 2D comic your eye moves from top to bottom and left to right when reading a comic page or panel, in a 3D comic your virtual eye would move further IN and AROUND to read the space. 

Excerpt from my original proposal document

The bigger problem was the page and the panels that the eye moves over in 2D comics. How could these fundamental units of comics be translated into 3D? After thinking a lot about it I came to the conclusion that they couldn’t really be translated very directly, at least not in a way that wasn’t incredibly clumsy. I think this point is probably the biggest fork in the road for people who try to conceptualize what a 3D comic might be like. If you give up the familiar grammar of panel borders, gutters, and page breaks is it really even a comic anymore? I think most people would be unwilling to jettison these things, but trying to insert a fundamentally 2D unit of space into 3D is misguided.

Initially it might seem like a simple fix. A 2D panel is a rectangle, so a 3D panel would be a rectangular prism, a room. The problem with this becomes obvious as soon as you try to apply different types of stories to this format-- not every space is a room. The thing is that spaces in 3D are NOT just units of time and story, they are also just spaces, spaces that you exist in. How can you expect to see a panel border, much less a gutter, from inside the panel? How can you expect to contain a mountain in a room without robbing it of its inherent spatial qualities?

I found my personal answer to this question in comics that, in whole or in part, do away with panels or lean more heavily on sequential sequences WITHIN panels. This is far from an uncommon thing for comics to do, and even the most conventional comics do it, though I looked more to experimental comics that took it to extremes. I think the easiest way to explain what I mean is just to show you this page from the webcomic A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible that I thought about a lot in the early stages of figuring this all out:

The sequence in the center of the page is one I kept thinking of as I tried to imagine what a 3D comic would actually be like in practice. You can see many common techniques that other comics use to tell stories without the use of strict panel borders, such as substituting elements in the environment for borders (such as the columns and broken sections of wall,) spatial continuity that allows readers to track the movements of the characters (Dale and the ghost dog's whole journey through the catacomb river,) and the duplication of one character within the same unit of space in different points in time (seen in the left-most part of the underground river section, as Dale jumps over the waterfall.) What is fairly unique to this comic is the extent to which space dictates the flow of the story, with the artist, David Hellman, going so far as reverse the direction the comic is read halfway through. To me this seemed like the sort of tailoring of the storytelling to the unique properties of the space at hand that would be required to make a 3D comic work.

One thing that would keep bothering me is that u-turn sign at the entrance to the river. I couldn't decide if Hellman had placed it there as an extra little joke on his own layout, as a bit of security to guard against confusion, or as absolutely necessary signage needed to make the odd reversal work. The water bothered me almost as much, what with the slight dip toward the left signaling to the reader the way the water, as well as the comic, was supposed to flow. To what extent would this sort of signage and subtle guidance be necessary to make a panel-less 3D comic work? And would the medium collapse under arrows and nudges? I now think this sort of thing can happen much more naturally in a 3D comic.

As you can see sequences of panels are far from the only thing comics use to convey a progression. More than anything panels resemble punctuation, creating units out of less rigid sequences, like how periods create sentences out of phrases. Given this resemblance, all I had really figured out in my quest to rid 3D comics of panels is that it was perfectly possible to create the equivalent of a run-on sentence in the medium using the tools 2D comics had already developed. I was concerned about this, I didn’t want to create 3D comics with no sense of pacing or structure or separation between moments.

My solution to this lay not in the conventions of comics at all, but in the conventions of 3D space. Luckily, 3D space has its own sort of grammar. The basic unit in 3D comics would not be the panel, but an area of interest. It’s natural to travel continuously through (more or less) empty space, and to stop at points that hold something of interest. This rhythm of exploration can be repurposed to pace and punctuate a story. The function of panels is to break up space into units and focus the reader’s attention on one unit at a time. On the 2D space of the page your eyes can jump instantly from any point on the page to any other point, and without the structure of the panel grid it can be hard to keep the eyes of the reader on the intended track. In 3D this problem solves itself, with the limitation of travel. You cannot take in any part of the space at any time, you are restricted to what’s directly around you until you move to a different area. This allows areas of interest to function similarly to panels, and with the aid of visual cues like obstructions, light and darkness, detail and relative emptiness, these areas can be clarified into identifiable units for the reader.

With this I felt like I had solved the basic, foundational problems of transferring comics into the medium of 3D space, and I was ready to move on to the particulars.

(Next time: how 3D comics work)

The Making of "The Bath Crone," Pt. 1: Overview

I started working on "The Bath Crone" in 2016 and it's 2018 as I'm writing this. It's finally done! Though it takes only a few minutes to read, it took a very long time to make, and it's hard to believe how different my life is now than when I first started thinking about 3D comics. There's plenty of people who spend years working on art that only takes minutes to experience, even moments, but it's a first for me, so I thought I'd share a bit about what went into it and why I even bothered. (If you haven't read "The Bath Crone" yet and are reading this post you can see it here, free of charge. Like I said it'll only take a few minutes out of your day, but if you can't right now then feel free to keep reading-- I won't get into specifics about the comic in this post.)

It started as an off-hand conversation with my friend Tony, about a specific panel from Scott McCloud's "Reinventing Comics," which I was reading at the time. This was the panel I sent him:

It's from a sequence about the possibilities of the "infinite canvas," Scott McCloud's term for the extension of comics beyond the limitations of print media. I showed Tony the panel because it seemed like a neat enough idea, and easy enough to do in the age of Unity. He looked at it and was unimpressed. What would be more impressive, he said, was a fully 3D comic. He pictured it and said that it would be a chaotic mess, but the idea excited me and I told him I would try to figure out a way to make it work.

I spent some sleepless nights excitedly writing out a proposal for Tony, laying out exactly what a fully 3D comic would look like. The proposal document is an interesting--and frequently embarrassing-- mess, full of digressions, boneheaded ideas, and terrible illustrations, all in an unwieldy, hard to distribute format. But despite all that, it has never failed to make the people I've shown it to excited about the possibilities of 3D comics, so I think it served its purpose. More importantly, it gave me a place to work out my unclear ideas into something more concrete-- the main ideas behind 3D comics all either arrived or solidified while I was putting that document together. With the rush of writing the proposal and Tony's approval I decided that this 3D comics idea was something exciting, maybe even something I was willing to dedicate my life to. I set out trying to make my proposal a reality, but it was slow going. The major obstacles were that I knew next to nothing about 3D, didn't really know if any of this 3D comic theory would work in practice, and had no story of a sane size I wanted to tell. So what followed was probably almost a full year of dicking around, slowly learning the technology and technique of 3D games, trying things out to see how they felt, and bothering Tony with story ideas that I never even started on. Along the way I made another document like the first, except this one was a walkthrough of a hypothetical game, incorporating various new ideas that had occurred to me. This document was intended, again, for Tony, who had volunteered to program a 3D comics engine for me, featuring technology like portals and the ability to walk on walls, both of which I'll explain in another post. Eventually I had gotten a decent grasp of 3D and developed aesthetic ideas particular to 3D that I think are pretty faithfully realized in "The Bath Crone." I was still uncertain about 3D comics in general, though, and also about the story I wanted to tell with them first. At the time I saw 3D comics as a whole new medium and felt a lot of pressure to pick just the right story to start off with. Also, Tony got busy with something else, and I really wanted that engine. So for all these reasons things stalled even harder. Then I started working on "The Bath Crone." It wasn't even intended to BE a 3D comic at first, it was really just meant to be a demonstration that the aesthetic and logistical ideas I had been thinking about could work on the scale I wanted. I had modeled and painted a decent number of objects, but had never done a full scene. I was feeling like I would never actually make a 3D comic, so I just wanted to put something--anything--close to what I was imagining onscreen. I sketched the first idea for a room that came to mind and ran with it. So that's what would eventually become "The Bath Crone" started as-- just a room you could walk around in, with no narrative aspect. The opportunity to tell a story with what I already had became obvious to me partway through the modeling process, and from there I started working on pretty much what you see now, with no major revisions. The planning, layout, and modeling did not take very long-- not sure how long exactly. I was expecting the painting process to move even quicker, for some reason, but that turned out to be incredibly naïve. The painting took up the bulk of the process. You never really realize how many sides an object has until you try to paint it. I worked on painting this thing off-and-on for a few years until recently reaching a good enough stopping point, at the insistence of my friend sam, who said it was finished long before I was ready to stop working on it. The entire texture, including areas that might appear to be repeating, is unique and hand-painted. I'm glad I did it once, I'm proud of my accomplishment, and I think there is a more interesting quality to the texture than one that is heavily tiled. There is also a sort of beauty and simplicity to the process, arduous as it is-- a sort of what-you-see-is-what-you-get, just-start-painting elegance. However it's not a process I would recommend to anybody else, and I myself probably won't be repeating it, at least not across an entire project. For my next comic--which I have already started mocking up in a 3D program--I'm going to take a different approach, and hopefully make something a bit longer in a slightly shorter span of time. That's the end of the story for now, but it's not the last post. In future posts I will focus in on particular aspects of 3D comics, using "The Bath Crone" as the functional example I always wanted. It's not a perfect example, though, considering it started life as something that wasn't meant to be 3D comic at all, and also its very short length. Given its nature it just can't incorporate all of my ideas about 3D comics, so I will also be using this series of posts to fill in those gaps. I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank some people who helped me make this thing. Thank you to Anthony Domenico, without whom this project wouldn't even exist. Thank you to sam, who is always there for me and got me to make it over the finish line. Thank you to Hinchy, for being my biggest fan. Thank you to everybody who played it and gave their feedback, or who supported my idea for 3D comics in general, including Rachel Bush, Austin Amberg, T. Hubish, Sean Porter, Colin Buffum, Roan Berg, Sam Lockhart, Max and Mel Marignale-Caine, Gabriel Hinojoza, John Berge, Camila Perez, and Patrick Roesle Thank you to Scott McCloud, for the initial spark that got me excited about comics. Thank you to my parents for putting up with me as I did basically nothing but read about 3D for a really long time. See you in Part 2! (Next time: the assumptions behind 3D comics.)