W I D E   A W A K E

The Yurkovich ADVENTURES INTO DIGITAL COMICS Interview

January 27, 2005

Top Two Three Films is a Los Angeles-based film production company created by Sébastien Dumesnil and Robert Nichols in 2000 that produces fiction pieces and documentary films and offers various services from the pre-production process (eg, Script Breakdowns and Script Formatting) through the post-production process (eg, DVD Authoring, Bonus Features and Packaging), the final steps of distribution (eg, Electronic Press Kits, and Subtitling) to promotion (eg, Website Translation and Posters.)

Top Two Three uses its Web site as both a marketing tool toward distributing our films and as a way to update its audience on its projects, and to offer different multimedia concepts to re-experiment its films whatever their current status may be.

Current projects include Adventures Into Digital Comics (currently in post-production), and Eva (currently in pre-production).

Adventures Into Digital Comics is a documentary film written and directed by Sébastien Dumesnil. The film analyzes what some consider as the collapse of the U.S. print comic book industry in the mid-90s, and the subsequent potential rebirth of the comic book as a completely digital art form on the Internet. Are the Web comics a reality, and a new comic market in its infancy? Was the boom in the early 90s a reality? Should the business be reinvented? Do we really need to reinvent comics on the Web? What do they look like?

The film features interviews with more than a dozen comics creators. In conjunction with the documentary film Adventures Into Digital Comics, Top Two Three Films has assembled and made available online a substantial collection of interviews with contemporary comic book artists who discuss the various topics that will end up in the movie. Among them, print artists and writers from various generations, digital artists and writers... also from various generations.

A while back I offered my two pennies worth, answering Sébastien's questions about the collapse of the industry in the 1990s and the Web comic's state-of-the-art to the best of my ability and in a frank and open manner. As a rabid fan of print comics, my comments regarding digital products may likely contrast with those of many fans and pros in the industry. But as The Dude noted in The Big Lebowski, "That's just, like, your opinion, man." And so it is. The complete INTERVIEW is quite detailed as Sébastien's queries were well constructed and to the point. I'm not sure of the film's release date, but am looking forward to it. It seems to have been a labor of love for its creators.