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Dr. Spritelove |
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A few days ago, Jim
mentioned that Bill was starting
up a magazine
dedicated to webcomics and told me
that he was going to submit an article regarding the state of sprite
comics. He was also
interested in hearing what I had to say about them.
I told him I’d be happy to oblige, but I’d inevitably end up
writing a great big huge long essay in the process and he could quote a line
or two if he found them useful for his own endeavor.
And if he didn’t find at least one single phrase in this meandering
pile of word-junk, then I would cry. So
here we go...
In recent months, the sprite comic scene has virtually exploded.
It began, as so many innovations do, with an accident.
On April 1, 2000, David,
widely regarded—or just now called for the first time—the Father of Sprite
Comics, put together a series
of strips that used Mega Man sprites.
The idea was that they’d serve as filler material until he got access
to a scanner so he could start his real hand drawn comic.
As we all know, it’s only a comic if it uses art, and it can only be
art if it’s hand drawn. David
didn’t know it then, but he’d be the pioneer in shattering this stereotype
in the months to come. By June
2000, David had finally gotten a scanner and started working on Bob and George
the way he’d
intended it to be. But, in David’s
own words, “I noticed right away that my hand-drawn comics were worse
than the Mega Man material, and returned to what I thought was better.” There was only one more return to the hand
drawn material. It lasted
eleven days. The Mega Man strips
have been going on for over a year now.
By December
2000, Scott and company were inspired, in part, by David’s work and had
been doodling around with comics made with a variety of NES sprites entitled Oldskooled. Jim, inspired by David’s work, started up his own
Mega Man comic entitled Life Of
Wily in January
2001 which took a whole other twist on this now growing webcomic genre.
In February 2001, I was directed to B&G
for the first time by a friend. I
read through the entire archive in one night.
I looked to the massive library of Final
Fantasy 1 sprites I had downloaded earlier that week and made my first
comic the next day. This was
the Golden Age of Sprite Comics because I’m writing this article and I can
sway the facts to make it look like I play a much larger role in this history
than I actually do and, since you are merely the passive reader who will
mindlessly accept these ravings, you will believe every word of it.
But my non-egocentric reason for marking this the Golden Age is that
this was when BigPanda.net was still
functioning normally and was a fair indicator of a comic’s popularity in
relation to others. In these
days, it was common to see Life of Wily, Bob and George, Oldskooled, and 8-bit
Theater taking up positions on the hotly contested main page where only the
most popular webcomics, as determined by BigPanda’s link sharing system (number
five), were displayed. No
other webcomic genre has been so widely represented on the BigPanda main page.
Ever. Yet four or more
sprite comics reigned over that main page for months and were only brought
down by the fact that BigPanda started to go belly up right after David
switched to his domain name, thus negating his phenomenal main page status and
relegating him to the undeserved darkness (near
the bottom, rightfully pleading to be updated).
As BigPanda began the Golden Age that I’ve nefariously included
myself in, it brought it to an end as well.
Of course, there were other sprite comics in operation during this time
(take The Robot
Masters for one) which may or may not have cropped up independently of
David’s work on Bob and George, but these comics have played relatively
minor roles in the grand story of sprite comics history (never mind that the
post-modernists out there would tell us that there’s no such thing as a
grand story to history, just go with me on this).
Now, when I say that we are now out of the Golden Age of Sprite comics,
I don’t mean to imply that we are in some sort of decline in quality,
readership, or new comics. In
fact, just as there are about a bazillion little hand drawn webcomics out
there that you’ve never heard of, the sprite
comic population is growing every day.
So maybe we’re in a period of transition into a new Golden Age.
Or maybe we simply have to redefine what the original Golden Age meant
and stood for. Or maybe I
wasn’t thinking any further than using the phrase “Golden Age” and being
sure to include my own efforts in it when I first introduced the concept into
this article and now I’ve come to the realization that it is not only a
limiting term but perhaps a patently wrong one to apply to the previous era
and I’m desperately, desperately backpedaling to cover my tracks.
In any event, webcomics as a whole is a young form of media, and its
first spin off, sprite comics, is even younger.
But both are gaining audiences and both have a lot of untapped
potential.
Two definite messages have been
sent by the webcomics reading community.
The first was, “Hey, these comics that rip off video game graphics
don’t suck after all.” The
second was, “Hey, these comics that rip off video game graphics look EASY.
I bet I can do this too.” And
so, since the decline of the Golden Age, we have seen a slew of newcomers to
the sprite comic scene. The cream
of the crop right now—in my opinion anyway—comes in the form Savepoint
and Reset. A recent and interesting variation on sprite comics is Not
So Final Fantasy which combines sharp hand drawn art with sharp Gameboy
sprites making it the first to consistently use both methods to tell its story
and, to my knowledge, the first to use Gameboy sprites (they
actually look good too).
And as sprite comics become more
and more visible on the Average Internet User Radar, the more the Average
Sprite Comic Creator is going to have to worry about a couple concerns.
Namely, copyright infringement and being a capital A Artist.
Actually, this is a lie. A
terrible, terrible lie. Why?
To the first, we’re not infringing on anyone’s copyright, so we
don’t have to worry about that. To
the second, we are Artists, so again we don’t have to worry about that.
I have never felt the need to defend my own sprite comic, or any sprite
comic for that matter, against the charges that it is a “rip off” or that
it’s not “really art the way hand drawn stuff is.”
But I’m going to defend sprite comics by showing why we don’t have
to defend them (the short answer is “those above claims are stupid).
You see, apparently more than a few people feel that sprite comics are
little more than taking credit for someone else’s hard work.
For those of you who agree with that, I invite you to consider the fact
that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Sure, we get the images from a
source other than our own pens. So
what? No one would think of
charging a director with ripping off the performances of the actors in his
movie. No one would think that
film can’t be considered art (okay, some people don’t, but we won’t
listen to them). And, as sprite
comics creators, we are very much directors.
We take from talent all ready out there and mold it into something
completely new and unique. So we
can’t draw worth a nickel. Big
deal. Some incredible artists
don’t have the first clue about how to construct a panel or how to place
panels within a page or how to tell a story with pictures or how to write
dialogue or how to arrange that dialogue with the pictures in a logical manner
to communicate something (if you don’t believe me, pick up some of the first
books released by Image and try not
to cringe while reading). Just
because you can draw doesn’t mean you’ve got what it takes to make a
comic. Similarly, sticking with
our earlier film analogy, great actors can go to waste due to an incompetent
director. In most comics, the
images themselves aren’t what’s important, it’s how they’re composed
into the whole. And that is the
art of comics. Not the ability to
make pretty pictures, but the ability to tell a story with pictures, whatever
those pictures may be. If you can
consider other print or webcomic comic artists as Artists, then you have to do
the same for us bastard sprite boys and girls too.
So there.
As for the accusation that we
are “ripping off” something, that too is wrong.
The most important piece of legislation in this case is the Fair
Use clause of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.
The Fair Use clause is so central because it allows for works of parody
that are based on other, copyrighted, materials.
There are four criteria brought up the clause. I will list them and then address each point separately and
show how my own sprite comic, 8-bit
theater, plainly falls within the boundaries of the law as an example of
the sprite comics community as a whole:
- the purpose and character
of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the
copyrighted work;
- the amount and
substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted
work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use
upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted
work.
The first criterion, “the
purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a
commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes,”
can be broken down into two different points.
First, let us look at “the purpose and character of the use.”
The original purpose of 8BT was to “Make something to entertain my
friends and give me an excuse to mess around with Photoshop more often.”
For whatever reason, it started to get really popular.
So the purpose evolved with the size of the audience to change to
“Make something to entertain my friends and give me an excuse to mess around
with Photoshop more often.” The
comic isn’t meant to make me rich or famous, it’s not meant to defame Squaresoft
(the company responsible for the graphics I use to represent the characters of
my comic) or claim their work as my own.
It’s just a fun way for me to gain experience with Photoshop and
telling stories in a visual medium and make a bunch of people laugh at the
same time—hopefully with me and not at me.
As to the character of my comic, it’s created out of my life long
love of video games, story telling, and comics.
More literally speaking, the characters of 8-bit theater bear
absolutely no similarity to those produced by Squaresoft outside of the most
superficial level, physical appearance. The
actual qualities that make up the personalities and dialogue of my characters
are wholly unlike anything Squaresoft did with any of their products, so my
versions are as original as any hand drawn character would be.
And though 8-bit theater is, among other things, a work of parody, its
tone is one of reverence for the source material.
In fact, my comic has, inadvertently, served as a commercial for
Squaresoft’s earlier works. I’ve
lost count of how many e-mails I’ve gotten from fans thanking me for
reminding them how much they loved the original Final Fantasy and that they
actually wished Squaresoft would re-release their older games so we could play
them again legitimately.
Now, on to the second part. Namely:
“whether such use is of a commercial nature of is for nonprofit educational
purposes.” No one pays a single
penny to read sprite comics. Since
readers asked me to sell shirts, I have produced a variety of designs that use
the 8-bit theater cast. One
dollar from each item sold goes into my personal bank account. Also, readers are free to donate money to the site if they
feel like it and this money too goes straight into my bank account.
However, the money gained through both methods doesn’t stay there for
long before being rocketed out to pay for the costs of the site.
Whatever is left after paying the bills gets rolled over to help pay
for the next month’s bills. In
other words, 8-bit theater is not a commercial work because there are no
profits. Next.
The second criterion, “the nature of the copyrighted work,” is much
simpler to deal with. By
definition, a sprite comic uses graphics from video games for a significant
amount of the comic’s visual content. If
we were making video games using these graphics, and then selling these video
games, or in some other way taking money from consumers who would otherwise
spend that money on the copyrighted products, then we sprite comics creators
might be in some legal trouble. However,
since our works are completely free to anyone with an internet ready computer,
this is simply not the case. Also,
no consumer who would buy the copyrighted material (video game) would confuse
a sprite comic for the copyrighted material and thus not buy the copyrighted
material after reading through the comic’s archives.
And never mind the fact that the vast majority of sprite comics use
graphics from games that haven’t been commercially available for years.
So regardless of whether or not any particular sprite comic exists, the
graphics it uses can’t possibly take money out of the copyright owner’s pockets since they themselves no longer sell or promote
the product in question. Next.
The third criterion concerns “the amount and substantiality of the
portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.”
Let’s look at a definition of sprite comics again: a comic that uses
video game graphics in a way that makes them central or otherwise significant
to the comic’s visual content. At
first glance, this might seem a point of trouble for sprite comics creators.
After all, both of those thingies in quotes used words like
“substantial” and stuff. Well,
here’s the amount of copyrighted material I use in my sprite comic:
about 50 individual sprites found in Final Fantasy 1 from a library of
what must be nearly a thousand sprites. So
it works out that I’m using roughly 1% of the game’s total visual
copyrighted material. It’s an
even smaller percentage if we look at the total copyrighted material within
the game, the musical score, character and place names, battle system, story.
In other words: Next.
The final criterion is even easier to deal with than the third.
Let’s take a look at it again, hm?
“The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the
copyrighted work.” One would be
hard pressed to find a sprite comic that did not treat its source material
with nostalgia and respect. How
either of those concepts could lessen the market value of the copyrighted
material, I don’t know. In
fact, nostalgia and respect is how market value INCREASES.
Further, as stated earlier, most sprite comics use the graphics from
games that haven’t been commercially available for years.
How can you impact—positively or negatively—the market value of
that which does not have market value to begin with?
Even more further and as also stated earlier, I’ve lost track of the
e-mails telling me about how my comic has made the author of the e-mail and/or
several of his/her friends go back and play FF1 again.
This basically means, “Okay, if Final Fantasy 1 was commercially
available, then the existence of 8-bit theater, a sprite comic, would serve to
promote it among the very audience that would be interested in buying Final
Fantasy 1.” Another way to
think of it is Free Advertising.
So there you have it. Sprite comics = no different from other comics.
If you’re not convinced by now, then you’re wrong.
There, that’s my conclusion paragraph.
I was never good at these things anyway.
so now that you're through putting up with
this babbling, go back to my regular babbling.
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