T Campbell's Blog

This article (registration required) *should* inspire me to be thinking about audio and comics, since audio's what the iPod does, but instead I find myself thinking about smell and comics. The piece says that while hearing can most effectively change your mood, your existing mood is usually more influenced by smell. And I'll buy that...

The first issue of Faans arrived on my doorstep when I was living in a ramshackle rooming house in Savannah, Georgia. Over 1,000 personal copies, not counting the ones that went straight to the direct market... I was ambitious. I opened up a box, pulled out the book, read it and SMELLED that newly-printed ink on the pages.

The rush of accomplishment mixed with the rush of discovery-- I had never smelled comics like that before! Everything was so fresh, sharp, NEW! The aroma filled the room. The characters seemed to harden and widen on the page, as if I could reach out and touch them.

I don't do drugs, but that morning, I was high.

(Of course the first convention I attended with those comics in tow brought me back down to Earth nicely, but that's another story.)

But the relationship between comics is more of a series of casual flings-- it's hard to place any constraints upon it. You can hardly count on being able to sell a comic "hot off the press" when you write one. Smell isn't an easy sense even to influence: if you wanted to do a smell-based comic you'd either have to perfume the pages a la Cosmopolitan, do a "scratch-and-sniff" children's book or control the environment in which the comics are read (not an option for most comics, but an interesting possibility for the Cartoon Art Museum, eh?)

There are always environmental factors at play in the enjoyment of art, and not all of them are within the artist's control. Bill Watterson had no idea that my girlfriend was going to give me The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book on a riverboat cruise, the salt and mud (and her perfume) wafting into my face as I opened it, making me feel outdoorsy, manly, and elevating Watterson's celebration of immaturity to the status of something that a man would read. Mixing with her validation and making me feel as though I could pick and mix the best parts of childhood and adulthood.

Watterson couldn't have planned that. But it's worth thinking about this for podcartoonists as well as comic-book artists, since iPods and comic books can go almost anywhere now. Where would you like to be read? What would you like your readers to be doing as they read?

What would you like them to be putting up their noses?