Over at Bookslut this month, I’m talking about what I love about comic books. Buried in the middle, though, is a rant about ‘motion comics’. Here it is again:

More and more, comic companies are hoping to supplement sales by offering digital versions of their titles with limited animation and voice acting that sounds like a first take at best. They think it’s just adding a gimmick to an existing story, like, say, slapping 3D on an old film.

What they don’t understand is that forcing this motion onto sequential art actually breaks something fundamental about comic book storytelling. It suggests a group of executives throwing a comic on the ground and poking at it with sticks. “Look!” they say, jabbing at the page. “It’s moving! It’s moving!”

Every time I see another attempt at selling motion comics, I’m surprised at how many ways they find to fail. First there’s the dialogue. A lot of what sits happily in word balloons sounds utterly ridiculous when spoken out loud by even the best actors – and the quality of actors featured on these animations is, uh, variable. Yes, let’s be polite and say “variable”.

There’s also the problem with redundancy, as illustrated by the Watchmen motion comic. It has an actor speaking the narration and dialogue – at the same time as the words are appearing on screen. Transmedia theorist Geoffrey Long points out that this could be because one narrator is doing all the voices, much as they would in an audio book, and the visual component “thus gives viewers a sense of who’s talking”. That’s true – but unless it’s a children’s read-along affair, you don’t usually read a book while also listening to its audio equivalent at once.

(Geoffrey Long’s piece is a much more even-handed survey of motion comics than this one, so go read the whole thing. Now back to my ranting…)

Problems like these are secondary to something much more problematic. In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, he declares that if you want to paint a world full of motion, “then be prepared to paint motion!” And sequential art has developed an astonishing number of techniques to imply motion, both within a single panel and between them. Not just the closure required by two panels in sequence, but speed lines, dialogue placement, panel size, and endless others. (For the academically-inclined, I wrote more about this last year for Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal.)

Introducing literal moments of motion into these panels somehow doesn’t add to these techniques – it just replaces them. Look, I’ve clocked up so many years of comic reading that I’m as conditioned to the idiosyncrasies of sequential art as anyone. And yet the moment I see art creak into motion, something inside me feels like when Homer Simpson saw someone in a wheelchair:

“Hey, they have chairs with wheels and here I am using my legs like a sucker!”

It might not be rational, but there it is: if the pictures can move on their own, why am I bothering to turn stillness into motion in my mind’s eye?

Anyway, Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men motion comic is the most ‘animated’ I’ve seen. It loses the speech-and-text redundancy and makes much more effort to find cinematic segues. It’s almost a cartoon, but it’s still less effective than any fully-fledged, traditionally animated TV episode. At best, it is still – as comic commentator Chris Sims recently put it – “a comic for people who will do anything they possibly can to avoid reading”.

Hollywood is still learning the hard way that comic art doesn’t function as easy storyboards; now animators need to discover sequential art doesn’t provide instant keyframes. And I agree wholeheartedly with Long when he says that “while motion comics may offer interesting differences from both animated shorts and actual comics, they arguably offer real advantages over neither.”

If nothing else, motion comics should try a new name. ‘Motion’ only draws attention to something they do rather unconvincingly. And ‘comics’? Once they move, I’m not sure they’re comics at all.