Why would an Aussie library get its designers to build a drag and drop comics website?

Aren’t there already plenty of free comic makers online?

What are you even playing at?

Last year, Talia Yat and Phil Gullberg of the State Library of Queensland’s innovation space the Edge built the Fun Palaces Comic Maker. It was based on a comic book dice game I devised at the Manila Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in the Philippines.

The maker allowed people to create their own five-panel comic strip by dragging and dropping images. These were published online as part of Fun Palaces, an annual celebration of community, arts, and science around the world.

Our pilot project in 2015 encouraged users worldwide to surprise us with non-narrative comics, cheeky horror stories, and even comics in Te Reo Māori.

This year, people won’t just be surprising us with their stories – they’ll be free to reimagine the project wholesale, as we’ve released the code behind the Comic Maker on Github, with the help of developer Steven Moschidis.

Putting the maker on Github means the public can download the code and adapt it to create variants, add different images, or develop brand new features. The only limits are your ambition and imagination.

In 2015, the Comic Maker permitted web users around the world to create stories which we couldn’t have predicted – smart, sophisticated, crude, dark, funny, twee and all points in between.

This year, releasing the code behind the project opens the doorway to an understanding of “digital literacy” which is not just about consumption, or one institution’s objectives.

We aim to encourage a digital future which is open, flexible, community-led, and most importantly, capable of surprising us all.

So what’s all this got to do with libraries? And what are we playing at?

• Physical, digital, it’s all materialIt turned out that MCAD Manila had a plentiful stock of cube-shaped cardboard boxes which we were able to transform into comic book dice. Players drew on each face of their cube, rolled them like dice in teams of five, and then the teams told stories by arranging the five images that landed face up.And of course, wonderfully, the kids and teens we worked with didn’t just do as they were told. They began rearranging the cubes in other ways, creating towers and pyramids which told the stories they wanted to, in the way they wanted.
• The collaborative approach meant that you didn’t need to be the best at drawing, or the best performer, to contribute to the finished product. You could tell stories in English, Tagalog or any language you pleased. The aim was to juxtapose images in space and then weave a tale which linked those images.
• The comic maker was born from necessity – running a workshop in a modern art gallery with a bunch of Filipino kids aged from infants to teens, not all of whom spoke English.

Fun Palaces: The Next Generation

The dice game evolved into a biographical comics version based on the art of MC Escher and a text-based version intended for professional development workshops – alongside appearances at street fairs in Brisbane and London.

That was great, but we also wanted to explore digital offerings with a similar degree of freedom and unpredictability.

One example was a choose-your-own book review for Australian magazine The Lifted Brow, which saw you trapped between the panels of a comic book – but even that was still too constrained by authorial intent for my tastes.

In the UK, I began working with Fun Palaces, an international movement which helps communities to celebrate their own talents and ambitions in the arts and sciences. On the first weekend in October every year, communities around the world take over local venues so that their friends, neighbours, colleagues, and strangers can come together and try their hand at the arts and sciences for free.

The Fun Palaces manifesto “everyone an artist, everyone a scientist” chimes well with the vision of libraries as “the TARDIS on your street corner” – a public gateway to all knowledge and culture, which lets anyone, from any background, explore whatever they want to from the realm of human understanding and imagining.

As part of a co-producer role on eleven simultaneous Fun Palaces in the London Borough of Lambeth, I arranged for the State Library of Queensland to build a pilot online comic maker.

Some people wondered why we would do this, when there were already free comic book makers available online.

We turned the question around.

This was about process, not product – the aim was not to build the best comic maker in the world in a matter of weeks during late 2015. It was to invite the community to join a conversation and use our resources – much as we like them to use our collections!

If libraries offer creative play, storytimes, makerspaces, and, yes, Fun Palaces in physical locations – why don’t they do that online too?

Encouraging the library’s web team to design this game meant acknowledging their creativity and capacity to do amazing and innovative things beyond “business as usual” – because good work, in any sector, means respecting your team’s ability to innovate and think for themselves.

Releasing the code behind the Comic Maker meant that we were empowering the community – in the very broadest sense of “all web users” – to play with the infrastructure as well as the content of our digital offering.

The essence of a library project is that it’s not meant to teach, preach, or fulfil the requirements of a curriculum: it’s meant to open doors for people to learn and create on their own terms. Comparing it to existing free cartoon makers is like saying we don’t need libraries because we have Amazon and e-books.

• Games have their own art historyBut the truth is more complex: digital and physical traces are interwoven in the Maker’s history, going back through its comic-game forefathers.These images came from Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s Panel Lottery, an exercise to help people devise their own comics.McCloud had devised a game called 5-Card Nancy, where players laid out individual panels from the Nancy comic strip as playing cards. The aim is to create a five-panel comic, with players voting to decide if each panel is judged worthy to continue the story.
• McCloud pays tribute to the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse in his account of 5-Card Nancy’s origins, but he also acknowledges a Usenet post written in the 1990s by Barry Deutsch. The comic maker of 2016 traces its history back through physical comics to the Surrealists, to the iconic Nancy cartoon, and back once again into digital space, and the early days of open-ended Internet discussion.
• However, games have their own art history – Abel and Madden were inspired in turn by the work of Scott McCloud, whose Understanding Comics remains one of the defining studies of the medium.
• The original Comic Book Dice challenged players to tell stories using three simply drawn characters: a tall person, a short person, and a penguin.
• We’re always so attracted by new and shiny things. With the current vogue for everything digital, it would be fun to hold up the Comic Maker as a bright example of 21st century library outreach.

• Nothing new under the sun?An old quarry was transformed into a space with three play areas and a thousand-book library, plus indoor games like table tennis, and workshops for kids to learn dressmaking and woodwork. Brisbane’s Sunday Mail described it in 1937 as a “kingdom of happiness”.Yet the truth is this: libraries have always been about play and exploration, not just shelves and storage. More and more we recognise that that kingdom of happiness should be open not just to children, but to everyone, regardless of their age or identity.And that journey into the kingdom of happiness has already begun…
• US librarian Justin Hoenke compares libraries to video game platforms: if they host storytimes and makerspaces within their walls, stock fiction on their shelves, and participate in events like Fun Palaces that embrace the whole community, then you should expect to find playful as well as pragmatic offerings in digital library spaces too.
• Stories like that make me smile. So often people marvel at the novelty of 21st century libraries being about more than books, or we have to battle against dumb detractors who think that digital media has somehow removed the need to support public access to knowledge and culture.
• I live just down the road from a suburban Brisbane play area called Bedford Playground. It was founded in 1927 after a number of children had been injured playing in the crowded, dirty streets of Spring Hill.

Take your next step here.

Creative/Researcher at British Library Labs and 2016 Creative in Residence at the State Library of Queensland

The first time someone mentioned the term transmedia to me I was already collaborating with four project teams. We were working to produce a comic anthology centered on my urban fantasy novel Fallen Heroes. I was also co-writing the first episode of an audio drama spin off. The name I gave to this transmedia project was Unseen Shadows, which referred to the trilogy I was working on, of which Fallen Heroes was the first.

My goal in using transmedia was to create stories in other mediums that could be enjoyed as stand alone adventures. However, when those stories were combined with the novel they would expand the world established within its pages. This meant that a single line of prose within the novel could be transformed into a 22 page comic or a supporting character could take the lead in a five part audio drama.

An Unseen Shadows project begins when someone, usually a writer, reads the novel and wants to become involved. I start by asking them what character they want to work on rather than choose one for them. This has led to some interesting choices, including both main and very minor characters being given the transmedia treatment.

The next stage is for the writer to give me a brief overview of their idea. Once I’m on board they will work up a full pitch, including any suggestions I may have made, before moving onto the scripting stage. At the same time the artist begins work on the main character sketches.

In my goal to create stand-alone routes into the novel I am involved in every stage of the process. I approve each story pitch, comic or audio script, character design and every line of dialogue spoken by a voice actor.

There are currently around forty writers, artists, letterers, colourists, graphic designers and voice actors working within the Unseen Shadows team. Their talent and experience are as diverse as their backgrounds and locale. Members can be found in the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, South Africa and the US.

Overseeing a team spread across the world is definitely a challenge. I quickly found that email, cloud storage and social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype were the greatest weapons in my communication arsenal.

All the past and future Unseen Shadows projects are stored using cloud storage. The projects are divided into folders with each one containing scripts, artwork, sound files and more, with access provided for relevant team members. This helps avoid any time zone issues as folders can be accessed 24/7.

I created an Unseen Shadows Facebook group where team members could share developments, discuss ideas, welcome new members and anything else they wanted to use it for. I also use the group to feedback on the progress of future novels or anything else of importance.

One of the main issues a writer working in collaborative fiction must face is the time demands. Projects have to be managed, timescales set and monitored. In some cases I have been the main reason that progress on a project has stalled. This can be because a team is waiting for me to read a script, approve a character or respond to an urgent email before they can continue.

A significant amount of my own writing time is spent overseeing the transmedia and collaborative elements of Unseen Shadows and that can be hard. However knowing the amount of work the team members are putting into their projects and seeing the end results spurs me on to manage my time better, which can only be a good thing for my writing in the long run.

Working within these different mediums has meant that to effectively manage the teams I had to develop, at least, a basic understanding of the terminology within each medium be it comics, audio or more recently film. It also pays to know some of the advantages and disadvantages of working within in each one. I have been lucky to find a lot of people along the way willing to offer me help and advice on that front.

The positives with working on collaborative fiction are many but overall it is the feeling of never being alone. In the dark days when the fear of a blank screen comes calling, a piece of art, a new script or question is not far behind. The light never goes off in the world of Unseen Shadows and knowing there is always someone at work is a great motivator.

These extremely talented people work on these projects not for the money, as all profits go back into the development of new projects, but because they love the source material. They constantly challenge me with their ideas, questions and suggestions for new ways to expand this world they have had a hand in developing.

I have found over the years that these new stories and characters have influenced me in unexpected ways. I have already referenced several of the events and characters created in the comics and audio drama in the second novel.

Working with the teams has taught me how to express to a writer why a particular line of dialogue does not work or to an artist why a character sketch does not feel right. This has helped me with my own self editing when I write.

The last two years has been a great training ground for learning when to step in and when to step back and trust these talented people with my world. The collaboration aspects of the various projects have given me a deeper understanding of my own characters as I watch them written, drawn and spoken by others.

10 tips for collaborative fiction

• Your story may be at the heart of everything but in the realm of collaborative fiction you need the creative lifeblood of your team to keep that heart beating. Respect them and their opinions.
• Ensure your team has a clear idea of what you expect of them before they join the project. I have a statement of intent document, which every member of the team receives, which must be read and its terms agreed to before they can join the project.
• Never dismiss ideas out of hand.
• Used wisely, social media can be a great aid to team communication. Used poorly it can a massive time drain.
• No one knows your world better than you but always be prepared to back up your decisions with reasons that don’t start with ‘It’s my book so…’
• Never be scared to get your hands dirty in another medium yourself. (I had never seen an audio script before Unseen Shadows much less co-written one.)
• Try to gain an understanding of the terminology used within the mediums you will be working in.
• Collaborative fiction can be a huge time commitment. Keep that in mind when deciding which projects to undertake.
• Keep yourself included in every stage of the project.
• Communication is the key. Keep your teams up to date and ensure they do the same. So many problems can be avoided with regular communication.