As first post in our blog, we would like to spend a couple of words to give you a better idea about The Path of the Seven Millennia project.

The introduction of new mobile devices like the iPhone and the iPad gives new opportunities to deliver content in new and exciting ways. Comic books are not an exception. Unfortunately, for now, we see producers that just digitalize their existing products and deliver them on these devices as they were on paper.

This, in our opinion, is a flawed approach. These new devices are different from paper, where there are some rules to be followed. These rules completely change when changing the medium.

Take the design of a comic book page, for example. The placement of the panels on the page is not casual. It might follow different styles, but the main point in laying out a page is directing the flow of the story like in a movie. People are usually not aware of this, but the dimension of the panels on a page, as well as the details in the drawings, dictate the speed these panels are consumed by the reader: if you want a scene to go fast, like a fight scene for example, you design smaller panels and draw inside of them less details. This makes the reader’s eye stop on them for a shorter time span. Conversely, if you need a slower paced flow, as when you display a big landscape that conveys a sense of majesty, you use bigger and more detailed panels, to the point of using a “splash page”, which is a page completely occupied by a single big panel with lots of details, or even a “double splash page”.

This, in a small device as the iPhone, is of course not possible. On that small screen you can only display one panel at a time, so you somewhat lose the chance to give pace to your story. You can work on details, but the panel will always fit the screen, so you lose the ability to change it’s size, which is really important. Even on a bigger device as the IPad, the bigger screen might not be enough to fit a whole page in a readable way.

On the other hand, you also gain something. Your comic book is not statically printed on a piece of paper anymore, so you gain new tools like transitions, animations, visual effects, sounds and music.

This is what we want to do with The Path of the Seven Millennia: explore these new tools to change the way comic books are experienced on these new media. This first project is just a first step in this direction and we believe that this could be the starting point to explore this new and exciting way to tell a story. We hope you will find it exciting as we do.