Since 2018, the RGB collection has offered comic book authors the opportunity to explore the 9th art in digital format. It is now being reissued in a new material format which takes the form of colored 45 rpm covers.
Created in 2018, the RGB collection is a Swiss publishing house entirely dedicated to digital comics that defends interactive works created for the screen, but always with reading quality as a guideline.
On the platform, each title presented has another style, another navigation, but everything is quite instinctive. The authors offer stories that play with the format. The size of the boxes can go in all directions and the navigation between them is not necessarily linear. Similarly, the artist has the possibility of going back in the sequences and suddenly a box disappears, a bubble changes, a sick character begins to flash.
Independent comic stars
It’s fun, but not only. We feel a real need among these artists to find how to train this wild horse that is digital comics and to conquer these unexplored territories, or barely, of digital sequential art.
The authors who are published by the RGB collection are among the stars of independent comics. We find, among others, Oriane Lassus, Aude Barrio, Benoît Preteseille, Antoine Marchalot and Pierre Schilling, including the digital comic “Sur la road” – a story that offers a completely crazy road trip with several crazy characters on an American road – was awarded the Töpffer Prize 2020.
Interactive comics centered on reading
Yannis La Macchia, founder of the collection, is part of this independent movement. Author (“Des Batisseurs” published by Atrabile) and comic book publisher (Hécatombe collective), he also teaches at the School of Comics and Illustration in Geneva. With this collection, he wanted to make real interactive digital comics, centered on reading, clickable and navigable, but without it becoming a video game.
For this project, he partnered with the company Net Oxygen in Geneva, for the technical part, and many authors and authors of independent comics for the artistic part.
>> To see: Didier Charlet’s column on the RGB collection in the program “Point Barre”
“Digital comics have been talked regarding for a very long time as a potential thing, but which never really existed. It made some authors want to see what it might be. I think it “That’s why all these authors wanted to follow us on this adventure. The RGB collection is a place we wanted to create for this comic book which was potential, but which has now become a reality”, explains to RTS Yannis La Macchia.
A physical format in the form of 45 rpm
Since its launch, the collection RVB published regarding ten titles in the form of small code cards. Today, this entire collection is republished in a new physical format in the form of 45 rpm covers.
Inside, a code card provides access to the digital comic on the collection site and some goodies – postcard, stickers, bookmarks. “We wanted to find a form of materiality and be able to work with booksellers,” says Yannis La Macchia. A beautiful object associated with a digital work to have the best of both worlds.
We must also salute the attention to detail brought by this collection: digital works can be resold, given or even lent between users, as one would with a physical book.
Didier Charlet/aq
