By Marisa Pjerrou
Cointel (co standing for anything such as comic-, cooperative-, counter-,
and intel for intelligence), or the Church of Cointel (http://www.cointel.de/)
is an enigmatic comic web site with a decidedly non-commercial feel
to it; other than the name "Hannes Niepold" revealed at
the end of a comic strip, no information is given about the site's
owner, his work, or his reasons for creating Cointel. Nevertheless,
it's a great web site where you can do one of two entertaining activities:
you can view Niepold's highly engaging non-linear and non-text based
comics, or you can view/participate in a unique interactive non-linear
comic strip collaboration with supposedly 600 people from 24 countries
around the world - a feature which Cointel describes as being the
one and only of its kind on the web.
I was initially confused by Niepold's comics and did not fully explore
them until several return visits to Cointel. When I finally figured
out how to navigate my way through the comics, "reading "
the wordless, interwoven stories became a very enjoyable process.
Niepold utilizes several techniques to exploit the digital comic environment,
such as in the use of thematic music for specific story sequences
(somewhat reminiscent of a theme in a film score for certain characters
or plot lines), and non-linear story paths connected by "hot
spots" that aren't all presented in the traditional left-to-right
reading scan (some were right-to-left, some needed to be viewed with
your head turned sideways). Niepold still uses same-sized rectangular
boxes of juxtaposed images, as in a paper comic books (perhaps in
an homage to the traditional format?), and sticks to fairly simple
black and white line illustrations; but multiple story lines converge
and then lead the reader into different directions. I counted at least
15 separate and unique story paths in Niepold's surreal, immersive
world of subjects such as: a giant people-eating whale that cries,
a male slob who lives in a fly-infested house and can watch what the
whale does on a screen in his basement, or a man sitting on a plane
recalling a memory (dream? hallucination?) of a sliced-up bleeding
dog during a hike in the mountains. Another interesting mention is
Niepold's purely illustration-based stories that have no text whatsoever;
the very few drawings that did have speech balloons in them seemed
to be intentionally left blank.
The interactive comic strip collaboration is a great feature that
allows any visitor to Cointel to take part in the creation of an online
comic strip. Cointel's very democratic outlook on web-based comic
art seems to be that of encouraging a shared, participatory experience
in comic strip-making, rather than allowing the vision of one artist
to dominate (could this be the reason why Niepold's background and
work are de-emphasized?). A standard beginning set of illustrations
seem to start off each comic strip collaboration; if you want to add
on the next illustration panel, you can use the drawing tools provided
to create a simple black and white picture. Your illustration and
the previous panel are then voted on by Cointel's visitors to determine
which picture should be used next in the comic strip. If the votes
are close enough, both illustrations are kept and two separate story
paths are created. In theory, collaboration is a wonderful idea that
exploits the web's capabilities for digital comic environments, but
the actual comic strip collaborations seem to mostly end up being
a confusing bunch of illustrated non-sequiturs, often with different
languages being used by the various contributors (one illustration,
for example had an alien in a spaceship saying something about marijuana
in German, while other panels had text in English).
Cointel still preserves what Scott McCloud describes in Reinventing
Comics as the comic strip's "silent, static nature"
but at the same time exploits other capabilities of the digital medium,
such as in the use of ambient music and multiple narrative paths (in
Niepold's cartoons), or in on line collaborative processes (as in
the cartoon strip-making feature). It's an unusual site that's a little
confusing to first navigate through; the clickable buttons on the
tree illustration of the home page have titles that make no sense.
But admittedly, part of the fun was getting lost in the site and discovering
all these neat, hidden pathways. (By the way, if you visit the site,
please vote for my silly non sequitur of an illustration in one of
the collaborative comics - it is a drawing of a 4-legged animal stepping
on a teddy bear.)