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Graphic novels remain stuck in a niche

Ten years ago, the Belgian market for comic books seemed to be in decline. Sure, there were the all-time bestsellers like Kuifje/Tintin - coming this December in your movie theatres, Jommeke and Largo Winch, but less-known series never achieved the same sales rates. The setup of the funding organization "Flemish Literature Fund" (FLF/VFL) in 2000 tried to diversify the landscape a bit in favour of the more 'alternative' comic books. Several promising authors could benefit from good policy and launch themselves into the (inter)national market. Among them debutants as Brecht Evens, Simon Spruyt, Judith Vanistendael, Maarten Vandewiele & Randall C. Also experienced innovators such as Marc Legendre could count on the FLF's financial support. Simultaneously, the trend to use the term "graphic novel" definitely helped to pimp up the perception of comic books as art instead of pulp. The term mainly refers to a (one-shot) comic book with literary aspirations. As always the results only became visible after some time. But they are undeniable positive: with the Flemish presence at the Festival d'Angoulême 2009 and Brecht Evens' award winning project "The Wrong Place", the alternative comics scene got widely acknowledged. In an article in de Standaard today, the economic reality shows up to be slightly different. In spite of all the efforts and investments, the graphic novel hype didn't succeed in uplifting the total sales of the comic book market. One of the issues seems to be the overproduction. Too many releases each year make it difficult to scope the sales & marketing efforts. Less copies are sold, because every new publication only gets a very short attention span from the consumer. Upcoming releases from top-authors as Craig Thompson's "Habibi" won't suffer too much from these problems. But it would be a pity if new authors will have more difficulties to make their living with their art. Does the comic books business model need to be finetuned? Or will comic books - correction: graphic novels - always remain stuck in their niche? Eager to hear inspiring ideas!

#graphic novel #business model #comic books #flemish literature fund #craig thompson #BD Angoulême

Empowering people to tell their stories

Could be a baseline for Apple... Basically, it reflects the same idea Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had when creating their first Macintosh and, later on, the iMac. I used this subject line because it perfectly describes what the guys from Tamaji are doing: they created an iPad application for storyboarding. I hear you thinking "Nice, but nothing special, there are plenty of similar apps". My response to you: yes, there are. But this one is more special. The user doesn't need to have any drawing skills. An app like Sketchpad is great, but you need to be an artist if you want to get out the most of it. Without saying I'm an artist, I'm luckily gifted with some drawing talents and even for me paper or canvas is still preferable above a tablet screen. (However, Belgian artist Kamagurka created a bunch of works with his iPad for the Museum of Contemporary Art of the City of Amsterdam.) So even for experienced illustrators, I think the Tamaji app could be a nice tool to realize your story ideas. I tested the app and it's really user friendly. From creating your storyboard to the set-up of a scene, it's only some finger moves away. Tamaji offers a library of drawings the user can use to represent characters, props, backgrounds, furniture... Really great is that you can determine the position of a character. First you select a man or a woman, next you choose a clothing style and then you can position the character in relation to the audience's point of view. Compare it to a wooden drawing model. Gestures that are hard to draw (like sitting at a desk) are all present. And if you cannot find the right drawing, you can still upload your own or ask Tamaji to do it for you (against a certain cost of course, but anyhow...) Although Storyboards offers some Notes in the properties of each scene, the available space for dialogues and descriptive actions could have been better. Also, it's a pity that Storyboard cannot be linked or exported to a Celtx or Final Draft account. If that was the case, it would really become a killer app! The Storyboards basic app is free, for the Premium version you pay 11,99 EUR (14,99 USD). The difference is mainly in the amount of library items. My conclusion: if you are into screenwriting and need to visualize your concept or screenplay, go for the Storyboards app. People who prefer drawing, can't use this app as a sketch pad. But they definitively gain time by using it to prepare the scenes they want to draw in detail afterwards.

#tamaji #ipad #applications #storyboards #storyboard #screenwriting #drawing

I have just read - correction: seen - a nice news report on the first 'greeter' at the Belgian Coast. 'Greeters' are volunteering locals who are willing to guide tourists through their city. For free. In contrast with guides, greeters focus more on having a dialogue with their visitors. Where a guide focuses on telling some well-defined facts & figures of a place, a greeter mainly tries to share the love for his/her city with the tourists. It's an emotional story. Stories told by people who actually live(d) the story have much more power to engage the audience. In the terms of The Marketing Bible (no, not the one from Kotler, but the ancient one, listed as one of the most best-selling books of all time) we call it the power of 'evangelism'. Evangelism is often used for doubtful reasons, but in this case I can only applaud for the initiative. Sharing beliefs, sharing love while welcoming people reinforces the mutual understanding. Eventually, it can lead to a sustainable tourism. If I am fascinated by a home-made story about the place I'm visiting, it will color my experience. If a local explains me the dunes protect the fauna of a particular region, I tend more to dislike real estate projects that are trying to destroy those dunes. Good stories stimulate empathy. Certainly when they're told without any commercial objectives in mind. That's why the 'Global Greeter Network', originally founded in New York, is a non-profit organization. The volunteering aspect is very important. Real love can't be bought.

#global greeter network #storytelling #tourism #sustainability #evangelism

Stories bringing order in the social media chaos

As the era of social media is getting more mature (LinkedIn is preparing to go public, Facebook even reaches the revolutionary in Tunisia & Egypt...), we're shifting towards a new paradigm, the Semantic Web. Where Web 2.0 made information shareable & social, the Semantic Web will structure all information in a meaningful way, mostly by using tags. Tagged information will not only create a higher interconnectivity between data and people, it will also enable the web to gain a certain level of intelligence. (Compare it to the human brain, who is also working with 'memory tags' to retain information and create liaisons between them).

Now, curation of content is a very first step in this direction. The information overload coming from e-mail and social media messages, needed already some filtering via applications as TweetDeck or Seesmiq. But even when these filters decrease the amount of information clutter, keeping up with all tweets and status updates is still too heavy a burden. We need a filter for the filters, e.g. people curating content to... tell a story!!

Stories structure the human brain, they learn us about life. So nothing better than a story to structure information on the internet!

In my opinion, the guys from Storify have made the correct analysis when they started building their curation platform end of 2009. Via Storify people can be reporter in social media land: while scrapbooking bits and bytes of information on a timeline, they actually add logic and relevance to unstructured data (relevant tweets can stand out of the crowd thanks to Storify). Professional media as The Washington Post and De Volkskrant are already experimenting with this kind of storytelling. No surprise, because Storify just reinvented the journalist's role in social media times. Yes, everyone can 'storify' information, but it doesn't say anything about news value or trustworthiness. And that's were the 'real' journalists come in. One could say, in a certain sense, Storify helps them to regain their gatekeeper role.

And for the readers it will be one step closer to a better filter and less information overload.

Note: Storify won yesterday the SXSW Accelerator Award and they recently raised $2M from Khosla Ventures. Good story, guys!

#storify #storytelling #curation #journalism #sxsw #semantic web

Awesome Canal+ commercial about the power of storytelling. Also a great example of a story within a story... so perfect to share on frametales :-)

No better subject to start this blog with than the work of artist Luc Tuymans. Last month, his Retrospective was launched by the Brussels Centre of Fine Arts (BOZAR). I had the opportunity to visit the exposition - and from all the artworks, I was mostly intrigued by the painting "Apotheek/Pharmacy" (2003). It is represented by the picture above.

Concretely, the painting depicts nothing more than a gray-paved sidewalk, colored by the pale reflection of a green cross in the morning sun. Despite of its minimalism, most people will immediately recognize the iconic green pharmacy cross. The real subject - the pharmacy - is not depicted within the frame that Tuymans set. Most interesting is that Tuymans forces the spectator to look outside the frame. Ironically, this is done by leaving things out of the frame (the painters view), even by hiding the frame that usually holds the canvas. These tactics make the painting a very physical object, that gets an additional signification in the 3D reality. By materializing the painting, Tuymans succeeded in guiding my thoughts out-of-the-frame, without losing touch with the depicted reality on the canvas. Without knowing the painter's intentions, for me the image presents a metaphoric view on religion. Religious beliefs become only important when we are on the 'sidewalk of life' and traditional religion - Catholicism in this case - loses territory to drugstores. The pharmacist has become the church of modern people. Want to get rid of your sorrows? Take a pill... The pharmacy as one-stop shop to solve all your problems.

#bozar #luc tuymans #painting #art #frame #pharmacy

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.

Jean-Luc Godard, French filmmaker and publicist

#godard #quotes #story structure #timeline #three act structure

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