Evolutions, for better or worse. Motion comics stray from their artistic roots, while a new trailer suggests Jason Reitman is growing as a filmmaker.

We here at Under Culture are all in favor of new technology. We’re on the Twitter. We dig the DVR. We play online games. Have you heard our podcast? New media is fun. It expands on what’s possible, and for art, that’s a good thing.

Someone still needs to explain the idea of motion comics though, mostly because it doesn’t seem to create new possibilities for art as much as it does for commerce. Sure, it’s one more place to sell a book — I can hear the marketing department now, saying, “We gotta get ‘em on the iPhone! The iTunes! The HuluTube!” — but in all honesty, how does this serve anyone but their accountants?

I mention this because one of my favorite series of the past few years, Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men, is getting the motion comic treatment next month. And I have to say I’m less than thrilled.

Not that they don’t have the right to put their stories in new places, but one has to question the benefit.  Putting movies and TV shows on an iPod makes sense: though it’s not an ideal viewing situation, it can be handy in an airplane or waiting room. Audiobooks make sense: now you can read a book in a situation where your hands aren’t free, like in the car or even at the gym. E-comics at least make some sense: Why waste the paper or the postage? Not as fun to collect but at least it’s a logical progression.

But comics as a medium are unique for their mix of graphics and text. As Scott McCloud said in Understanding Comics, a lot of the art in comics is what happens between the panels on a page. With motion comics, all ‘readers’ gain are some middling voice overs, minimal animation, and a sound and music track — questionable additions to begin with. At that point, they’re taking the story out of its intended form and changing the storytelling method. Creators may as well be making a fully-animated adaptation if they really wanted to make something new and different, but they’re not. In fact, most of them are taken from existing comics; it’s solely repackaging.

So in a sense, you’re losing the value of a comic and getting nothing of artistic value in exchange. It’s not as if motion comics finally overcome the age-old problem of allowing people to enjoy comics while jogging. And it’s nothing like the visceral experience of seeing X-Men come to life on a giant movie screen. Essentially, you’d still have to sit with your laptop or mobile device to consume the motion comic, at which point, you may as well read the comic. And since it’s making a trade-off that’s not worth making, by disrupting the inherent vocabulary of comic art, the only possible justification is that people are so lazy they don’t even want to bother reading a comic book.

If that’s the case, God help us all. Enjoy the below trailer for the upcoming “Gifted” motion comic, now with 100% less of the arduous ‘word-decoding’ required by those damn dialogue bubbles.

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Jason Reitman is on a roll. Sure, Juno may have suffered a small post-hype backlash — probably more for the unreality of Diablo Cody’s hyper-articulate teenagers than anything else. But both that film and Thank You For Smoking were sharp comedies with strong enough emotional cores to make them feel substantial.

The trailer for his next film, Up in the Air, debuted this week, among a flurry of festival buzz suggesting he may continue his hot streak. So much so that they’ve decided to move up the release date by a few weeks to capitalize.

Judging only by the clip here, that’s good news. Not just because Reitman’s smart comic sense should match well with Clooney’s ability to play a suave charmer (as in his excellent performances in O Brother Where Art Thou? or Ocean’s 11), but also because this trailer gives the sense of a maturing filmmaker reaching a little higher each time, trying to tackle bigger issues as his skills develop. Some accused Judd Apatow of biting off more than he could chew with this summer’s Funny People, but part of the risk he took was in dealing with life and death issues with a stable of comic standbys like Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler (no offense to any of them, I enjoyed that movie quite a bit).

However, landing someone as talented as Clooney, who can go so easily from witty to weighty, should make the transition from comedy to dramedy much easier. Including some comic actors like Jason Bateman or JK Simmons, who he’s done such good work with previously, also helps cut off the suspicion that this is simply his ’serious’ film. With the right balance the end product can deliver on both without impairing either.

If you’re looking forward to this as much as I am, it arrives in limited release November 13th before going wider in time for Thanksgiving.

One other note: more trailers like this please. From one clip of dialogue and a smattering of shots from throughout the movie, you get a perfect sense of the tone and subject of the film without giving away any major plot points or even the central conflict of the film. It’s almost impossible to be pleasantly surprised by a film when the marketing gives away all the surprises, and so please, studios, take a lesson from District 9 and Up in the Air and stop showing me Shutter Island trailers that give away everything but the last ten minutes.