---

Richard Linklater's soon to be released movie, A Scanner Darkly, may be hailed as cutting-edge filmmaking, but its technology harks back to the infancy of cinema. In fact, go back, say, a million years — when cavemen first scrawled antelopes on stone walls — and it's clear that Linklater isn't the first to use drawings as an elemental tool for storytelling.

Scanner — Linklater's adaptation of (Blade Runner and Total Recall author) Philip K. Dick's drug-addled, sci-fi novel — is the newest example of how graphic images are flowing into the pop culture mainstream as a way to convey story lines, not just in movies and comic books but in TV advertising, high-toned magazines and even the venerable New York Times magazine.

If you've seen the recent Charles Schwab TV ads, you've already witnessed the magic of rotoscoping, the process that gives A Scanner Darkly its cartoonish imagery. The movie and the commercial are the handiwork of animator Bob Sabiston, who also lent his skills to Linklater's 2001 film, Waking Life.

The dark tone of the ads — conceived by Euro RSCG, a Manhattan-based agency that won Schwab's account in 2004 — is unusual for the investment company, which often relies on humor to attract customers. It may seem counterintuitive, but the comic-book-style commercials are resonating with serious investors.

"Schwab is very happy with the results," says Michael Lee, RSCG's creative director, who'll be creating new spots through next year. Ironically, he adds, using stylized images "makes it more real. It's the opposite of comic books to me."

So why did Linklater enter the uncommon territory of using digital rotoscoping for an entire feature film?

"The fact that I had real actors begs the question, 'Why would I paint over them?' But for the science fiction genre, this works," Linklater said in his Manhattan hotel. "The primary reason, of course, is the head space it puts the viewer in. The lead character is questioning his reality. Once you accept the (film's use of graphics), everything works."

Linklater adds that rotoscoping has come a long way since he first used it in Waking Life.

That may be in part because the appetite for stories delivered in a graphic style has taken off in pop culture. For decades, The New Yorker has been synonymous with its wry cartoon panels, most notably by Jules Feiffer.

Now the multiple-page paneled stories of famed counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb and Aline Crumb make semiregular appearances in the magazine, as do full-page Roz Chast comic features.

In recent months, comic-book-style travelogues have appeared in Conde Nast Traveler. Clive Irving, the magazine's senior consulting editor, said graphics "let you do things you can't do with a camera," he said.

"It gives it a kind of intimacy, and it's astonishing the amount of detail that can be condensed onto the page."

And of course there's the popularity of comic books — or, if you prefer the trendier term, "graphic novels."

Why the euphemism? Increasingly sombre themes — such as those in A Scanner Darkly — seemed an ill fit for "comic books" or "cartoons." When Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 — for Maus: A Survivor's Tale, his biographical Holocaust chronicle — the genre finally began earning some respect.

"When people thought of comics, they used to think of things like anime, manga, Batman," said Liz Calamari, publicity director at Pantheon Books.

Comic books or literary art?

"But Art was taken very seriously. He was the first to put graphic novels on the literary map."

As sales of graphic novels have increased, Pantheon has launched a new Web site for its graphic novel program, pantheoncomics.com. The audience skews young, but it's not exclusively male. "There are a lot of women readers out there, too," Calamari said.

"I'm sure that some people might object" to graphic novels as a crutch for people with poor reading skills, Calamari said, "but the editors I've met are very encouraging." Strong sales figures help. Spiegelman's 9/11 chronicle, In the Shadow of No Towers, sold nearly 200,000 copies, making it one of Pantheon's biggest sellers.

Other publishers are getting into the act, too. Around Sept. 11, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will release a graphic representation of The 9/11 Report.

With so many graphic novels embracing heavy topics, should publications like the Pulitzer-winning Maus get lumped on the same bookshelf as Batman and anime?

Chip Kidd, a renowned graphic designer, told Time magazine that he's offended by such categorization: "I truly believe that Spiegelman should be shelved next to Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, not next to the X-Men. Maus is a Holocaust memoir first and a comic book second."[[In-content Ad]]

---