Mike Mosher
Bill Atkinson & Sluggo: Comics Conventions on the Tiny Screen

by Mike Mosher <mosher@svsu.edu>

The interface of a PDA is not a tabula rasa. In each square inch resides much history. In order to advance its use it is time to re-examine a nearly-forgotten interface from almost a decade ago, and an archaic stalwart embodying first principles in the world of comics.

I. Magic Cap

Bill Atkinson was essentially the inventor of Apple MacPaint, a robust and inventive black and white bitmap graphics program that for several years (1984 to 1988) came bundled with the Macintosh personal computer. For a flowering of this painterly program's promise and capabilities, see Michael Green's enthusiastic 1986 book _Zen and the Art of the Macintosh_. Atkinson then went on to develop HyperCard, about which there are two theories. One school of thought says that Atkinson was deeply influenced by the theoretical writings on hypertext by Ted Nelson. Others (including Ted Nelson) say that Atkinson was given the command by his boss John Sculley to develop something memory-intensive to push the sales of Apple hard disks. Its influence on Tim Berners-Lee has not been documented but seems evident, though Nelson credits Douglas Engelbart with the first implementation of linked documents. In any case, the product introduced the building of interactive documents to a broad public, about seven years before the World Wide Web hit popular conciousness.

General Magic was formed in 1990 as Apple was feeling the shocks of declining profits and the George Bush recession. This was the days of high hopes for "personal communicators", the premature and overhyped Apple Newton project the leader of the pack, and most of General Magic (Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Marc Porat) had spun out of Apple Computer, Inc. General Magic had partnered with Sony, Motorola, Apple, AT&T, Philips and Matusushita so had high hopes of running on multiple pieces of hardware from multiple providers.

A platform called Magic Cap was developed, and a boosterish book by Barbara Knaster (wife of General Magic engineer Scott Knaster) _Presenting Magic Cap_ was published by Addison-Wesley in 1994 and leaves an interesting document of it. Telescript-based networking messaging programs made use of PersonaLink, AT&T's network service, or AOL or Compuserve as delivery choices, but the user had to know the addressee's service in advance. An infared transmitter could beam a message to FAX machine or other
properly-equipped device. Yet it is Magic Cap's graphic user interface that still seems most worthy of study.

First of all, we are given the subtley of black and white and two grays. Colors are for the unimaginative, who can't live in a world where ideas are distilled to black and white. It is as if Photoshop never existed; this screen is a forest of symbols, not photographic representations. The drawn is priveleged, which honors the limner and he--in this case, Susan Kare--pace, different from that of the camera.

We see a desktop metaphor rendered even more claustrophobically than on the Macintosh in the initial scene, but there are other scenes that include a hallway, a libary room, or a street. In some ways it was reminiscent of the interactive cartoon avatar environment Habitat, designed by Californians Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar but wildly popular in Japan after its purchase by Fujitsu. There is a netsuke-like delight in graphic details like postmarks, pushpins, a garbage truck, rubber stamp, compass key, rolodex, genie's lamp, carpetbag, library cases and metal shelves. All are tangible, sharply tactile, each could hold water if it was poured into it, drawn in a style of comics I would admirably call "sturdy", whose practitioners include Basil Wolverton, Spain Rodriguez, Virgil Partch.

Upon booting up the Magic Cap interface we are given an environmental impulse: You Are Here, in this coherent, recognizable architectural space. The desktop metaphor is extended more solidly than any manager's desk in Dilbert, more Bartleby the Scrivener's weighty oak. Metaphors are mixed cheerfully in combinations of cartoon three-dimensional space and two-dimensional iconography. Like a marvelous, meticulous dollhouse there are tiny reproductions of artwork for the walls by Picasso or Matisse, and
Knaster adds the suggestion that provision of more could be a third-party developer's opportunity. Always text windows have primacy and move to the fore, like word balloons atop the page of comic book art. There is also a Custom mode for interface customization, in some cases changing the line weight of windows' or objects' outlines. The product carries on some of the whimsical humor of Hypercard, which included in-jokes about the Royce Walthrop family and the Acme Dot Company, in Magic Cap's tiny sea serpent in the South Pacific in a map of the world.

It was odd how prominent "information services" logos appear on the interface, giving you notice of which choices your intended message recipient subscribes. This was developed moments before the Web-driven
Internet boom, before grandma had email, so this detail seemed to matter.

Paradoxically, Bill Atkinson left the company after a few years to devote himself to high-end digital reproduction of his nature photography. As if Aubrey Beardsley, tiring of ink, apprenticed himself to the atelier of Bougereau or Meissonier. The last I heard of General Magic they were exploring audio interfaces.

II. "Nancy" and the Comics

In a 1989 article in Print magazine, the comics artist/writer (_Maus_) Art Spiegelman cites the American Heritage Dictionary definition of "comic strip". The definition is illustrated with a 1" x 1" "Nancy" comic strip, in its entirety of all four panels, andSpiegelman marvels at its legibility at that significantly reduced size. He marvels "Somebody once said that it takes more effort not to read 'Nancy' than to read it. Not _that's_ instant communication." then goes on to examine the 150 year history of comics. His epiphany may be a gateway to their future.

The Zen-like reductionist design issues for miniaturization and 1- or 2-bit color are infinitely more interesting than the problems of broadband, the latter driven by people who essentially want to port and push television commercials to your computer screen. These marketers are vying for your time now spent there in productive work, investigation, email communications or fun at your pace, not there. As Brenda Laurel explored the theoretical possibilities of Computers as Theater (in her grad-thesis-derived book by that name), we should now look at the handheld communication device as narrative, which then may make PDAs serve as the funnies page. Each screen is essentially a panel, which is why the designers storyboard the interaction (a tap on THIS icon brings up THIS screen), like the conventionalized language of cinema, where a cut does not
interrupt the flow in the viewer's mind. Screen icons are comparable to the drops of exasperation sweat, puffs of smoke that add expressiveness to immobile cartoon visages. It is evident why comics-friendly Japan
proceeded seamlessly from manga to tamaguchi. The PDA forces economy and organization (is there a feng shui of the PDA screen?), unlike the boxed icons on MS Word spread all over the screen like battleship grey mah-jongg tiles. Each screen has its own personality in a concert of words, fonts, graphics, and its own response time (imagine the pause preceding a Dilbert punchline).

Designers must celebrate the moment of truncation, where people with their shoulders to the wheel push up against technological limitations. History of limited media gives confidence: the flowering of MacPaint work, the success of Pong, Spacewar, Pac-Man and the wireframed Tank Commander, the joy of teenagers beaming terse messages to each other's pagers and PDAs.

In his 1991 book _Reinventing Comics_ comics artist Scott McCloud--his very name even sounds like a 1930s rocketeering pulp hero zooming around with his personal jet-pack, doesn't it?--sees the Web as the answer to comics' multiple current stalemates, many of which rest on the economics of materiality (what Nicholas Negroponte calls "atoms vs. bits") and the distribution and audience issues that emerge from them.

PDA comics? I envision A product the size and consistency of the pink slab of hard bubblegum that came packaged with 1960s trading cards or stickers, with various comics constantly beamed in by subscription (or advertiser supported, with the kind of weird Johnson-Smith novelty company, Joe Weider bodybuilding or door-to-door seed-selling ads that used to appear in comic and leaven the otherworldly adventures), cheap enough to leave lying around the desk, dashboard or pocket of your other pants.

And the graphic narrative is as economical yet impactful as the 1" x 2" three-panel Bazooka Joe comics printed on wax paper that came with Fleer's Bazooka bubblegum. Comic-informed PDAs? They are nascent, emerging, soon to be everywhere.

Mike Mosher is Assistant Professor, Art/Communication Multimedia at Saginaw
Valley State University, University Center MI 48710. His mom used to draw
1940 women that looked like Nancy's aunt Fritzi.