I can't remember where the term ‘Motion Comic' first originated, but history will no doubt find someone to punish for that particular crime eventually. What I do remember is that the idea of an ‘animated comic' has been around with us longer than the terminology has.

From the 1960s Marvel cartoons, (mostly comprised of static shots with animated mouths and camera pans masquerading as animation) to the late 1990s Shockwave-based Marvel Online Comics on AOL, to the motion comics of today, people have been obsessed with making comics more dynamic by injecting some movement. And if we've learnt nothing from these attempts, it's that they simply don't work.

Sure, the 60s ‘cartoons' got away with it, just, and the AOL-based comics were so niche and rudimentary that barely anyone remembers them anyway, but these days, the cat's out of the bag. Watchmen had an ‘animated' release on DVD, while the Spider-Woman motion comic topped the iTunes chart for its category mere weeks ago. Someone, somewhere clearly thinks this idea still has merit.

So, let me try to convince you why it doesn't.

Now, for a start, let us remember that comics and animation are different mediums. You cannot translate from one to another without losing something. In the case of comics, you gain some simple animation and a voiceover, but equally, you lose the ability to do the animation and voices in your mind. And at the same time, the freedom to study and digest each panel is taken from you.

Although letterers add subtle effects to speech and captions in comics to denote cadence and emphasis, the reader's brain still does much of the work. Although Rorschach says the same thing no matter who's reading Watchmen, the way he sounds and speaks differs, depending on who's reading the text - and if the recent Monkey Island talkie has taught us anything, it's that an actor's line reading, no matter how good it is, can't compete with the one you come up with in your head - because you've already chosen the best way to interpret the text in such a way that you find it the funniest, or the scariest, or the happiest or saddest.

The same is true of comics. Having an actor read a caption from a comic is like collapsing a quantum waveform, as many possibilities suddenly converge into one.

But what of the artwork? If anything, that comes across worse. As good as Dave Gibbons' artwork is, it simply wasn't designed to be animated. In comics, the movements are implicit, not explicit, and that means grander gestures, unfamiliar angles and composition the likes of which TV and films would balk at. ‘Animating' Nite-Owl walking towards the reader by poorly scaling the figure on top of the background makes a mockery of panel and page. You can no more turn individual comic panels into animated images than you can take stills from a movie and turn them into comic panels while retaining the essence of the movie. It just isn't possible.

Of course, these problems are largely with comics that have simply been adapted to the ‘motion comics' format. Spider-Woman, we are to believe, was developed for both simultaneously - so in theory, it should be better. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to have broken the mould. Rather than create a true ‘motion comic', the creators have simply followed the example set by previous attempts at the format - and to be fair, no-one has really figured out how a ‘motion comic' truly differs from a cartoon.

There are, after all, areas where the motion comics have their strengths. Ambient noise, works fantastically. Subtle movements - a trail of smoke, a body of water or a flashing cursor - can be easily depicted to create simple but effective atmosphere. The question, really, is how to take the idea of reading a page, at your own pace and in your own voice, then translate that into an animated form without losing those two things. Then we'd truly have an animated comic - but personally I'm not so sure it can be done.

And just so we're clear, my problem isn't with ‘motion comics' as a marketing tool, as an initiative to reach out to new readers. It's purely with the way that the majority of ‘motion comics' display a staggering misunderstanding, if not outright disrespect, for both the art and craft of the comics medium. The ‘motion comics' format can undoubtedly work technically and creatively, instead of merely practically - it just hasn't managed to do so yet.

James writes Alternate Cover every Monday at Den Of Geek. His previous column can be found here.