Day dreaming: Comics and design are moving closer and closer together
Who wouldn’t like the world to be more simple? That’s what stories can give us. Since the dawn of time, we have been telling each other stories. Not all stories are the same. Some want to raise questions and some want to give answers. Some address the conscious mind and some address the unconscious. Some want to change you and some just want to entertain. All stories have one thing in common: They take place in our imagination. Whatever happens in a story, happens only in the story. The author controls the world of the story and there are no accidents, everything is there for a reason. Just like a mentally ill person retreats from his daily life to deal with his problems in an isolated and peaceful setting, stories pull us out of our daily lives to show us something without distractions and by their own rules. The world in which a story takes place is always very simple in comparison with the real world. All stories follow certain patterns, which is good. These dramaturgic patterns have evolved over thousands of years and mirror our own inner process of growth. To immersive yourself in a story is do immerse yourself in a simplified world that shows your soul the way it has to go. From struggle to peace, from darkness to light.
One comparatively recent form of storytelling are comics. Comics are very special, because not only is their content a simplified version of the real world, but also the way they are told and drawn. Maybe that’s why kids are so drawn towards them. The world they see in a comic could be much more relatable than the real world around them. One thing that always fascinated me as a kid were the cars they used in Donald Duck adventures. Cars are not pretty today, but back in the 90s they were even less enjoyable. I looked at the off-road vehicles of Scrooge McDuck and thought that they looked so much friendlier and well proportioned. I don’t know why, but this impression stayed with me and I can’t help but think that some car designers thought the same thing. Because in the last few years it happens more and more often that I see a car on the street that has these friendly proportions and details of a Donald Duck car.
In Japan and Korea, this is nothing special at all. The childlike style of Manga has swept over their whole culture and can be found everywhere from restaurants to car rentals, sometimes to the point where all employees wear manga like costumes. All while many live in a high pressure work environment and often have to work 12–14 hours per day. I can’t help but think that the desire to make the world look like a comic comes from an unfulfilled life. I can definitely see that trend in our western world. Grown ups play candy crush on the way to their therapist. Some people spend their disposable income to create a gaming room for themselves where they sit and play fantasy games, all while they already raise children themselves. And that amount of time we spend in comic-like artificial worlds is having an impact on the way our surroundings are designed. One trend in computer games is to display the world in a stylised way. Instead of trying to look photorealistic, an object in such a game looks more like it was drawn by a disney artist. Believe it or not, I see this style in the real world now. I’ve walked past a restaurant that had stylised torches on the wall, complete with a fake wood board and fire made out of plastic and LEDs — it looked exactly like a game asset. Now Facebook wants to build a metaverse for us, a life that happens in the matrix.
The magic of comics and fantasy games is that they are imaginary. Their purpose is to relax us, to help us to process our struggle and give us strength to overcome our hurdles. We can’t turn the real world into a comic — and even if we could it would be a very bad idea, because the real world is infinitely more fascinating than anything we can conceive of our own.
