Monday, May 24, 2010
clarity in communication. a hyperlinked missional church comic book
This is what I long for …
The trick in either comics or animation is to embody your ideas rather than sugarcoat them; to make plain, through images, the patterns and concepts you see clearly in your head, secure in the knowledge that even the most byzantine, advanced, jargon-laced topic probably rests on a few fat visual metaphors almost anyone can grok with a little explanation.
Via cartoonist Scott McCloud. (Who wrote the most awesome Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
I’d love to write a missional church theology book as a comic book in order to present “a few fat visual metaphors.” But I know I can’t draw. But … I suspect that the discipline of trying would probably make my words a whole lot crisper. So maybe I could use pictures as part of the concept design?
While I’m waffling about books, I’d love to write a book which was not only a comic, but could also be hyperlinked. So that I could be talking about say a missional practice and the reader could choose whether they flipped to the theology, or the Scriptural resources, or the history of how the practice emerged, or the story of how it played out at Opawa, or the change processes that lay behind the idea.
Books are so linear.
All this by way of saying that when this semester ends, which is in only 14 days, my semester from hell is over, 75% of my entire year’s teaching being squeezed into the first half of the year, and I get a chance to write … 🙂
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