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Amelius at 1:04PM, Dec. 6, 2024

Seconding dragonsong12's comment, did not like there being obvious AI-- seeing actual art is vastly preferred. Just sends mixed messages when we forbid comics made with generative AI (and rightfully so) to have it prominently on the main page. Thanks for changing it.

dragonsong12 at 6:39AM, Dec. 6, 2024

Thank you for changing the picture. I didn't like coming to the front page with AI art there, and I wasn't reading the post because of it. Not being snarky, I genuinely appreciate it being changed. Love you guys.

strixvanallen at 5:01AM, Dec. 6, 2024

(cont.)Sorry for writing an essay on the comments, but narrative structure x essay structure was a part of my PhD studies on Science Comics. ^^" I just want to finish those musings by saying that one of my best literary experiences was reading a book in which half of the words were either [i]very[/i] obscure regional slang or flat-out invented. The narrative was non-linear, full of asides from the narrator talking to his implied audience, and made no effort to establish if it was supposed to be a realist story with fantastic exaggeration from the narrator, or a fantastical story in which everything was really happening. For most of the book, I wasn't even properly reading, just gliding my eyes over the words. And yet, I always vaguely [i]knew[/i] what was happening, like I was recalling a dream, and I felt it all in my soul. I dunno, sometimes, a book or a movie or a comic isn't made to be understood, just [i]felt[/i] or mused about, and it's OK.

strixvanallen at 4:54AM, Dec. 6, 2024

(cont.) How-EVER, this isn't the goal of a lot of people. And even people who would WANT to make commercial art that is a bit more on the standardized-to-fit-all side do benefit from moving towards it after a bit of wilder experimentation. I bring this all to say that there's a good reason why academic critics praise so much "confusing" non-linear books and movies. And it's because subverting the objective of an art medium or stretching it until its breaking point and still producing something fascinating or eliciting emotion is a way for us to better understand how that medium works. Poetry, for instance, often strips words so much of their meaning that, suddenly, we all remember that words are just... drawings ("ce n'est pa une pipe"-style). Which is obvious, but we forget it so easily that it's always intellectually provocative to muse about the consequences of it. Same with abstract art. Or, yes, confusing story-telling.

strixvanallen at 4:42AM, Dec. 6, 2024

While I do appreciate that language was originally created for sharing information coded in narrative form, I'll also defend counter culture art a bit in this. In my loooong journey through storytelling, both in book and comic form, I've stumbled into loads of writing manuals, writing tips, critiques "aimed at helping people improve at their craft", etc. etc. (heck, I've even committed a few of those back in the day). Lots of those are laser focused into convincing authors to make their works as easy to understand, economic in details and grammatically standard as possible. Which is not necessarily [i]bad[/i] advice, obviously, but I don't like that lots of advice in this vein come from a place of "...and doing so will make your work easier to sell for more people." I mean. Sure, if you want to write for a living and you don't mind the compromises you have to make with your vision to make it easier for larger scale consumption, it can be very rewarding. There's nothing to judge here.

Ozoneocean at 5:40PM, Dec. 5, 2024

I Liked Mullholland Drive when I saw it. I didn't see it as a single story... to me it was more of a collection of of fantastical scenes- some linear stories told out of order and then abstract fantasies centered on the main character... I can't really remember it very well now because it's 0ver 20 years since I saw it haha!

Ozoneocean at 5:34PM, Dec. 5, 2024

You're right Banes, it doesn't make a story better, it's just another way of telling a story. I think where it comes from is that although we naturally think in a mostly linear fashion (though a bit more scattered) and experience reality in a linear form, most people tell stories to each other (in person), in a non-linear fashion, and we THINK about stories in a non-liner fashion (we focus on the important parts, character back stories, the end etc). It takes a LOT of skill and patience to format a story into a proper linear form! That's why non-linier styles work: because it's exactly how we think about stories. Though many non-liner stories are done by formatting a full linear story and then going back and changing the order of things.

PaulEberhardt at 10:21AM, Dec. 5, 2024

@J_Scarbrough: that's a good point to mention, too. I hardly ever even draw panels in the sequence I intend to arrange them later. So what if I just omitted that last step? What if you didn't rearrange the story to its intended order afterwards? Just go with the creative flow and let the readers / audience share in. Needless to say it's not going to work well in every case, possibly not even in very many cases, but I can well imagine that's how story tellers invented non-linear plots in the first place.

J_Scarbrough at 8:14AM, Dec. 5, 2024

While my storytelling generally isn't non-linear, my creative process definitely is, and it depends on many different factors. More often than not, I find that I may know how I want to kick off a story, and/or I may know exactly how I wish to resolve everything in the end, but all of the pertinent details in the middle to get us from Point A to Point B will still need the kinks worked out. In many cases, those details will only start to develop the further into the creative process I go.

PaulEberhardt at 3:58AM, Dec. 5, 2024

What non-linear story telling isn't is a collage, although it resembles one, because the parts fit together so that you know them to belong to the same story, instead of unrelated stuff being cobbled together in the hope that it forms something new, like a collage. I'd say it's a tool, or should be. Showing the events out of order sometimes actually makes them make more sense, without spoiling the tension. Like violence, it's one of these things that shouldn't be done gratuitously for its own sake. At least not totally so - in Pulp Fiction for instance it depends on what in your own interpretation is the point of the whole thing. Perhaps it's also a message not to worry too much about what the point is and just enjoy watching the characters do their quite out of the ordinary thing. Anyway, Strange Darlings is on my wanna watch some day list now. Sounds cool.

bravo1102 at 3:15AM, Dec. 5, 2024

Watching all the anime I do, I've gotten used to the "start in the middle and don't explain stuff until the very end" story telling. I understand it's an entire genre of detective fiction as well. It doesn't make sense and the detective is piecing things together and nothing is revealed until the very end.

plymayer at 12:49AM, Dec. 5, 2024

The Conan stories, Tarzan, John Carter, etc. were all originally published as chapters in pulp magazines and not in chronological order. Only later, that they were put into order for the novels published with those stories many decades later.

plymayer at 12:14AM, Dec. 5, 2024

As movies go, the Godfather II confused a lot of folks because it jumped back and forth in time. I thought it added to the stories (there were two but they meshed together to create a bigger story).