“Love in the Binding,” Abstract for 2008 Comics Studies Conference, March 21-22 (conference website)
“We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with.” (Sherry Turkle 5)
In Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Sherry Turkle collects a number of essays on the objects that have inspired particular theorists. Henry Jenkins’contribution to the collection is an essay on superhero comics. While his essay describes his lifelong relationship to the stories and to comics in general, woven within his essay are glimpses into the comics’ form; how he can read the blend of image and text longer than straight prose once his eyes have grown tired, how his Jack Kirby books were ripped during a rained-in Boy Scout cabin trip. For comics scholarship, comics are evocative objects for the material they contain as well as for their materiality. As comics achieve greater academic recognition, the need for comics archives and access to those archives increases. In some cases companies have begun to release their comics as digital collections, as with the Marvel Complete Collection CDs for a variety of titles. These digital versions offer a revolutionary improvement for access to the material contained within the comics, but the problem of representing the historical, cultural, and evocative object remain.
Comics as evocative objects or “things we think with” are evocative because of their materiality and because of the feeling that materiality evokes. The material in and materiality of comics has been inextricably linked within the interstice of comics scholarship’s needs—the need for access and the need for materiality—and of those in need—comics scholars are often an amalgamation of scholar, collector, critic, and fan in part because of the evocative nature of the object and in part because of the inaccessibility of the object aside from personal collections. Comics-as-objects remain an important aspect of comics scholarship and an important aspect of scholars’ relationships to their (loved) object of study.
All digitization processes involves a serious of choices, choices on how to capture images and how to alter those images. The digital form is always at least somewhat different and the process always does some damage. It may do violence to the object through human handling, the heat of camera or scanner lights, or the hard glass pressed against the tender comics pages. Altering the captured image, even if done to correct the changes introduced by the capture process, again changes the object from its material self into a captured and then changed representation. These concerns only address a small portion of the larger issues of materiality because the object is always more than its simple image appears.
Comics scholarship’s goals for preservation and access can be met through careful digitization, after accepting that damage will occur. However, widespread digitization also means that comics scholars no longer need to love their objects as they once did. The larger problem in digitization, then, is how to preserve the loving, evocative relationship with comics rendered digitally. This presentation will cover a brief overview of the technical issues and choices involved in the digitization and digital representation process, including the material manipulation and possible damage that can occur, the material changes from print to online, and the display issues inherent with online archives. The presentation will then cover the relationship of comics scholars to their comics in order to define a means for creating equally evocative digital objects.