University of Amsterdam
Department of Media Studies
New Media and Digital Culture
Spring Semester 2015
Supervisor: Dr. Erin La Cour
Second reader: Dr. Dan Hassler-Forest
MA Thesis
“Enhanced Webcomics”: An Analysis of the Merging of
Comics and New Media
Josip Batinić
10848398
Grote Bickersstraat 62 f-1
1013 KS Amsterdam
[email protected]
06 264 633 34
26 June 2015
Table of Contents
1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1
2. Defining Comics, Webcomics, and Enhanced comics ....................................................... 6
3. Literary Basis ...................................................................................................................... 11
4. Analysis ................................................................................................................................ 27
4.1 Infinite Canvas ................................................................................................................................. 27
4.2. Moving Image and Sound ............................................................................................................... 37
4.3 Co-Authorship and Reader-Driven Webcomics............................................................................... 43
4.4 Interactivity ...................................................................................................................................... 49
5. Epilogue: A new frontier for comics ................................................................................. 55
6. References............................................................................................................................ 61
1. Introduction
This dissertation will focus on examining the medium of comics in the realm of digital
media. Generally termed webcomics, these digital comics find their habitat and
distribution on computer-based technologies and on the Internet. Like similar other
new means of artistic expression (videogames, for instance), they have generally been
subjected to a lot of skepticism from scholars and the public alike as a “less serious”
form of literature or art, mostly due to the predominant presence of the superhero
genre, which is commonly associated with immature audience, that is, children (Hight
181). Their analogue counterpart, i.e. printed comics, have had a similar past and are
still living in the shadow of traditional literary forms, such as prose and poetry, and
have found strong competitors in moving and animated image. As Meskin observes,
“Comics have not been taken seriously as art throughout most of the last 150 years,
and those interested in the medium seem to feel need to provide an apology for their
interest” (374). Over the past century, however, comics have managed to produce
some notable works of art and literature, which have enabled them to come one step
closer to the standards of prose fiction and film. The satirical and socially critical
Underground Comix movement, for example, that took place during the 1960s and the
1970s, managed to dispel the idea of comics as a “childish” and “trivial pastime” by
providing adult and complex content. Likewise, the advent of the term graphic novel,
epitomised in works such as Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978), Art
Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991), and Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986), showed that
comics can measure up to conventional literary works in terms of seriousness of
content and meticulous structural and aesthetic arrangements1. There have also been
cases of comics scholars, who have attempted to theorise and analyse the principles,
the characteristics, and the formal elements of comic books. Theorists such as Will
Eisner (1985; 1996), Scott McCloud (1993; 2000), and Thierry Groensteen (1999)
have provided elaborate texts on the ways comics and other sequential art can be read
and interpreted, and where they can be situated in the contemporary cultural
production.
This study will make ample reference to the theories and the scholarly discourse
in the field of comics studies. However, its main point of interest will not be comic
books per se, but rather their digital version. Comics, like other contemporary media,
1
The term has been contested by various scholars for reducing comics to merely a genre of literature.
1
was able to find its way onto computer screens once the digital revolution took over in
the second part of 20th century. Comics appeared as webcomics, still resembling their
initial printed form in that they preserved the layout dimensions they had in print and
merely reproduced them on the computer screen. However, as time passed and
computer technology became more advanced and offered more creative possibilities,
they started to evolve and branch out into different directions. One can differentiate
between two basic categories of webcomics: those which that are intended to be
printed, and which that use digital distribution as a support and promotion of the
printed comic; and those which that are intended for digital viewing, and use the
Internet and computer-based technologies as their main host and distribution platform.
What is crucial in their difference is the intention of the webcomic creator, and their
engagement with the medium. The present study is interested in analysing the second
category of webcomics, those which were intended for the digital medium, which
engage with the specificities of new technology on which they are found, and which
use these characteristics of digital media to create narrative and aesthetic effects not
possible in print. There are numerous ways in which webcomics can move beyond
print and exploit the features of the new medium; HTML mark-up language, for
example, can change how an image is displayed if hovered over with the mouse, and
sound effects can be embedded within the code of the webcomic and played in the
background. Comics can contaminate and be contaminated by other media
agglomerated onto the computer technologies, which sometimes leads to ambiguous
and uncertain blend of different media. Due to the myriad of different possibilities
available to exploit on digital media, these webcomics have been termed with several
different names since their origin (Saenz and Gillis 1988). Throughout this
dissertation, I will use the term enhanced webcomics to refer to all of those different
varieties of webcomics which are “enhanced” by the use of digital properties, tools,
and effects and as a part of their form, and which thus attempt to “enhance” user
experience. I will return to the matter of definition and characterisation of comics and
enhanced comics in more detail in the second chapter.
Much like print comics in their early period, webcomics have not yet been
subject to extensive scholarly discussion. Some scholars of traditional print comics
have undertaken the task of defining and characterising webcomics, but mainly in
relation to their paper ancestors. McCloud (2000), for example, has tried to provide an
initial manifesto for comics in the digital age with his somewhat naive and overly
enthusiastic Reinventing Comics, in which he attempts to illustrate the “revolutions”
2
that occurred in the field of comics in last two decades of the 20th century; he
suggests that the ones related to online and computational technologies represent the
future of comics. Several other comics scholars and theorists have acknowledged the
unavoidable transition of comics onto computer screens (Groensteen n.d.; 1999;
Meskin 2007; Hicks 2009), and some have proposed theoretical frameworks and have
even invented their own examples of webcomics (McCloud 2000b, 2003; Goodbrey
2014). The general feeling towards webcomics is that of scepticism, as one could have
expected, since it is an emerging media form. Enhanced webcomics in particular are
relatively obscure and their boundaries are not clearly defined. Yet, I maintain they
hold a great deal of potential, as they consist of numerous different media objects that
are combined on the screen into a final object. This flow of various different media
towards one (in this case the transition of comics, literature, film, television and other
analogue media onto the digital screen) was defined by Henry Jenkins (2001) as
“media convergence”:
Media convergence is an ongoing process, occurring at various intersections of media
technologies, industries, content and audiences; it’s not an end state. There will never be one
black box controlling all media. Rather, thanks to the proliferation of channels and the
increasingly ubiquitous nature of computing and communications, we are entering an era
where media will be everywhere, and we will use all kinds of media in relation to one another.
We will develop new skills for managing information, new structures for transmitting
information across channels, and new creative genres that exploit the potentials of those
emerging information structures. (par. 2)
According to Jenkins, current computer-based technology is able to hold several
different media at once, although it does not have a monopoly over them. These media
technologies interact with each other and are constantly communicating and creating
new paradigms of communication. This study posits that this phenomenon is at the
basis of enhanced webcomics, as it involves a wide array of technologies and
assemblages that come together to create unique, and, in many cases, new mediaspecific forms of communication. The essential question that arises then is whether
these new media-specific forms of communication (here: enhanced webcomics) can
still be considered to be unequivocally related to the “old” medium (comics), or
whether they cross into another one due to the great level of inter-contamination
among different media.
Therefore, it is important to study webcomics, and enhanced webcomics in
particular, as they can lend insight into the current state of media communications and
the various platforms, softwares, narrative techniques, author-audience interactions,
and other configurations associated with them. The phenomenon of webcomics is a
very recent occurrence, but it may hold the key to understanding the nature of many
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different components of the digital realm that are emerging at the moment. The state
of the comics industry is probably the most evident of these, as was already pointed
out by McCloud in Reinventing Comics (2000), but it does not necessarily stop there.
Comics are also closely related to fine art and literature, and with the appearance of
enhanced comics to the scene, they become even more hybrid in nature. As Andrews
et al. (2012) have pointed out, digital comics also present “examples of visual
narratives that incorporate characteristics of other media including animations and
games, thus contributing to the blurring of distinctions between digital intertexts”
(1705). If comics are to be understood as "a hybrid form descended from
printmaking” (Cook and Meskin 2015), then enhanced webcomics are a hybrid
generated from other hybrids, as they are born from a union of already compound
media forms. Studying enhanced webcomics will allow one to better understand their
hybrid nature, and at the same time develop a deeper understanding of the media and
techniques which stand in relation to them. Web technologies, animation and cinema,
audio and videogame design, interactivity and the materiality of the textual and
graphic creations are some of the areas in which enhanced comics can reach out and
find their niche, and as such will be explored in sufficient detail in this dissertation.
In 2012, Jakob Dittmar wrote an article in which he explores the current state of
“digital comics.” In his paper, which mainly concerned with “download comics”
(comics that are downloaded and read on a screen) and “web comics” (readily
available comics found online, which do not need to be downloaded), he speculates
over the future of digital comics:
Some will be comics with long juxtaposed or meandering sequences as suggested by
McCloud, others will form new kinds of a pictorial medium that may contain comics as one of
their narrative elements, and some will present truly multimedial storytelling demanding
different forms of activity and participation by the readers, blending prose texts, poems, film
and game-elements into the comic. These will be very different from the stories we refer to as
digital comics now. (90)
It is these sorts of techniques identified by Dittmar that will be the investigated in the
present study. My aim is to give a comprehensible overview of some of the most
common instances of enhanced webcomics and the various techniques they use in
order to distantiate themselves from “ordinary” webcomics, whose only definable
digital trait is their existence on a website. I conceive enhanced webcomics as
belonging to the category of digital- or web-comics, but which have “something
more,” which are “enhanced” through some recourse to approaches possible in the
digital realm. Thus, the comics under analysis will be those that would not be
representable in a verisimilar or complete way in print, as they would lose a crucial
part of their new media specificity. Having that in mind, this study will concern itself
4
with answering the questions: What are the typical techniques used in the creation of
enhanced webcomics, and how do they contribute, both formally and semantically, to
the overall value of this digital creation? and To what extent can enhanced webcomics
be considered to be a continuation of the medium of comics as their characteristic
new media form, separate from other digital media, such as videogames and
animation?
I will start my analysis by first providing the reader with sufficient information
regarding the various definitions of comics and especially webcomics in Chapter 2.
Defining Comics, Webcomics and Enhanced Webcomics. As there are several
different, and sometimes even conflicting, ways in which one can read and understand
the concept of comics, I will dedicate the first part of my study to providing a clear
overview of them, and clarify my own standpoint. In order to answer the above
questions, I will make use of the already established theoretical and formal
interpretations of print comics, as well as some recent propositions in the subcategory
of webcomics and other media theories. Chapter 3. Literary Basis will present the
theoretical frame that will be used for a close analysis of the specific enhanced
webcomics forms further in the paper. The main body will consist of four subchapters,
each dealing with a different topic and case studies related to the enhanced
webcomics. First, I will look at how webcomics can make use of the “infinite canvas,”
as first identified by McCloud (2000), to create a specific effect (Chapter 4.1 Infinite
Canvas). Then, I will explore the cross-influence and blend of webcomics and moving
image and sound (Chapter 4.2 Moving Image and Sound). Next, I will look at
crowdsourced or reader-driven enhanced webcomics, which testify to the participatory
culture of digital media (Chapter 4.3 Co-authorship and reader-driven webcomics).
Last, but not least, I will turn to the field of computer interactivity and game studies to
examine how these can be combined with webcomics (Chapter 4.4 Interactive
Webcomics).
5
2. Defining Comics, Webcomics, and Enhanced comics
The term “comics” is still very much connected to the idea of printed book-form
serialised issues containing colourful images and speech bubbles, in which
superheroes fight and usually defeat the “bad guys.” While the superhero genre has
been admittedly the most prolific one, at least in the United States, and has helped to
popularise the medium of comics, it has, at the same time, misrepresented it to the
point that the medium has been confused and conflated with genre. Similarly, comics
scholars have also pointed out that the medium of comics has mistakingly been
identified as a genre of literature, and even a genre of film (Boyd 2011; “Comics - A
Medium not a Genre” 2009). This has been brought to public attention by claiming
that “while we can argue the value of certain stories told and the telling thereof, to
simply compare a piece of comics work to a literary work in literary terms, is quite
frankly doing comics a disservice” (“Comics - A Medium not a Genre” par. 9).
Comics scholars need to find a way to stop defining the medium in relation to other
more so-called prestigious media if they want it to achieve the level of authority of
literature and cinema in popular culture and academia alike. What follows is an
exposition and assessment of the various definitions of comics proposed by scholars
of comics. It is crucial to understand the implications of the various definitions of
comics, as the concept has evolved and expanded over time, and to understand the
difficulty in finding a single definition which can faithfully represent all the different
varieties of comics. I will start by presenting the different takes on the concept of
“comics,” starting from the print form, and will proceed consequentially by
elaborating on the concepts in an attempt to find a satisfactory one on which I can
build my understanding of “webcomics,” and more specifically “enhanced
webcomics.”
In his pioneering work Comics and Sequential Art (1985), Will Eisner proposed
a fairly broad definition of “Sequential Art” and “graphic storytelling,” which he
applied mainly to comics. He starts his book by observing that he considers
“Sequential Art as a means of creative expression, a distinct discipline, an art and
literary form that deals with the arrangement of pictures or images and words to
narrate a story or dramatize an idea” (Eisner 5). Although he does not specifically talk
about comics, he mentions immediately afterwards that this “sequential art” is
“universally employed” in comic books and strips, which are the subject of his book
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(Eisner 5). What is interesting in this definition is that Eisner considers such creations
both “an art” and a “literary form.” His understanding of comics, and sequential art in
general, seems to be closely connected to the field of literature, and seems to consider
comics merely as a subcategory and a form, instead of a medium on its own right.
This is the reason why his definition, although a good starting point, has been
generally criticised by later scholars of comics, such as McCloud (1993), Meskin
(2007), and Groensteen (1999), as lacking in detail and being too traditional. As
mentioned earlier, relating comics to other media entails taking a step back in
establishing comics as an important means of communication. While comics does
share several features with literature and other visual media, it would be
counterproductive to talk about it strictly in those terms.
David Kunzle (1973) talks instead of “comic strips,” which he characterises as
being a “sequence of separate images,” which have “a preponderance of image over
text” containing “a story which is both moral and topical,” and is meant to be
distributed in “a mass medium” (2). Kunzle’s definition is problematic in that it is
restricted to comics that appear in “mass media,” that is, predominantly in
newspapers. His “sequence of separate images” corresponds to Eisner’s “sequential
art,” and he recognises that comics are principally visual rather than textual. He
thereby also excludes from the definition the comics that contain only one image or
panel. His definition is further limited by the specification that they contain a “moral
and topical” story. This, together with the observation that they are intended to appear
in “mass media,” undermines comics’ importance as self-standing medium and is
evocative of the prejudice that they are “children’s literature,” which further makes
them appear unimportant. Indeed, Kunzle’s definition completely ignores the presence
of comics as independent publications, and is only useful for understanding the early
instances of newspaper comic strips.
The Underground Comix movement and press of the 1960s and 1970s saw a
more radical change in the tone and subject of comics. Robert Crumb, one of the main
exponents of the movement, stated that:
There are many different approaches to comics, but it doesn't do what literature can do.
Comics are different, and when cartoonists try to “elevate” the form, so to speak, it’s in
danger of becoming pretentious. Comics have always lent themselves to the lurid and
sensational, starting as far back as penny prints of the martyrdom of the saints or battle
scenes in the 1500s. The pictures have to be strong. You can get very personal with comics,
but to imbue comics with serious literary subtlety seems absurd to me. There’s something
rough and working class about comics. If you get too far away from that, well, it can turn
silly on you (247).
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Crumbs seems to see comics as necessarily less authoritative and prestigious than
literature, precisely because it was not supposed to serve the same purpose. Being
“lurid and sensational” and “rough and working class” enables it to act as a sort of
revolutionary and rebellious medium. Although it might seem that he is “betraying”
his own art, Crumb nevertheless recognises literature as separate from comics, to
which comics does not need to aspire. His idea of comics being “working class” and
sort of ordinary in comparison to literature is particularly significant if one considers
the later production of webcomics on the internet, which too, are generally regarded as
layman’s form of expression, available to anyone who has a computer and access to
the Internet.
Scott McCloud’s seminal work Understanding Comics (1993) contains a careful
examination of the medium of comics. He offers a historical reading of graphical
narratives, and proposes the following definition of comics: “Juxtaposed pictorial and
other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce
an aesthetic response in the viewer” (1993, 9). McCloud’s definition is unlike any
previous one in that he talks neutrally about comics without appealing to other media,
such as literature, for support. He does not even mention the term “narrative,” like the
other theorists; instead, he uses the terms “information” and “aesthetic response,” and
in so doing manages to encompass a greater range of comics-like works. McCloud’s
definition seems to be more precise and extensive, but to some extent too broad, as his
historical explanation is still concerned with legitimising comics by situating them as
a continuation of some of the monumental exemplars of human communication and
cultural production (Egyptian wall illustrations and the Bayeux tapestry, for example).
Meskin (2007), however, still questions whether all comics “must […] be spatially
juxtaposed? What about comics with hyperlinked frames?” (375). Although to a
certain extent he has a point, it is clear that McCloud was referring mainly to printed
comics in his analysis. A more detailed and accurate definition of comics with
“hyperlinked frames” falls into the category of digital webcomics, which are a recent
development and which require a slightly different framework, as they exist on
another material level.
I would like to mention one last and quite recent definition of comics, before I
move to other more specific kinds of comics. Ernesto Priego in The Comic Book in the
Age of Digital Reproduction (2010) dedicates vast space to discuss the definition of
comics and, lastly arrives at a very detailed and complex definition:
A medium that conveys narratives or other types of information through a layout of still
images often in combination with written words, in various techniques and on different
8
analogue, hybrid and/or digital platforms, arranged in one or more sequences on a delimited
physical space, and separated from one another by the outlined or implied frames of panels,
also commonly distinguished from each other by the “gutter,” which is a blank space between
them. (61)
While very wordy and quite elaborate, Priego’s take on comics is probably the most
accurate and the least discriminatory of the ones presented in this chapter. He
mentions both narrative and other information, does not discard single-panel comics,
includes comics which do not contain words, mentions “the gutter” in-between the
image panels, and embraces “analogue, hybrid and/or digital” forms of the comics
medium. His definition will prove most useful once I turn to investigate the more
hybrid examples of webcomics in the digital domain.
But before I turn to webcomics, I will first dedicate a few lines to examining the
elusive essence of the medium of comics. It is important to notice that the term
“comics” will be used conceptually to refer to the medium that generally uses
graphical and textual means of communication in conjunction, and which is best
known in the form of printed comic books. Priego acknowledges this difference and
makes a reference to Cuddon’s (1977) differentiation of “form” and “format,” form
being “a work’s shape, structure and the manner in which it is made,” and format
being “the physical make-up of a book” (Cuddon 351-352). These definitions suggest
that the medium of comics is not restricted to the print form, much less to its physical
format, but rather that it can exist in various shapes and forms, as long as it follows
the basic conceptual rules by which it is defined. The materiality of the medium has
become less important in defining what it is. Priego observes that
it can be said that until the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web "comics" and
"comic books" were traditionally thought to be the same thing; while the textual evidence
suggests this can no longer be true, and there is therefore a need for a new term to define that
which takes place on the screens of computers and mobile gadgets around the world. (262)
Priego alludes to the form of webcomics, or comics that are found on the Internet and
other digital technologies. While it may sound like a logical and straightforward
distinction, comics that have entered in contact with the digital have some slight but
significant differences that need to be addressed.
My understanding of webcomics and other digital-related comics is similar to
Priego's categories of “Digitized Comics,” “Digital Comics,” “Webcomics,” and
“Mobile Comics” (2010, 227-230), although it has some small differences in
reasoning. I understand the concept of “the medium of comics” as having transmaterial, essentialist qualities. What I mean by this is that the medium, at the highest
hierarchical level (°1), can be represented in various forms (°2), which in their turn
can take on different formats (°3). The medium is an all-encompassing term, while the
9
form refers to the structural organisation of its essential qualities, and the format is
concerned with the materiality in which it is presented (concretely). Digitised comics,
then, would belong to the medium of comics; their form, or “organisational principle”
(Campbell 2007), would be that of their original print version, as that is where they
originated; and their format, or “physical presentation” (Campbell 2007), would be a
set of digital code or bits of information displayed on a computer screen. Digital
comics or webcomics, on the other hand, would differ in form, as they would be
structurally adapted to the computer screen or other host interface used to read it, and
not to a paper page. First evident reason for this is that the printed comic book usually
uses portrait-oriented pages, while the equivalent of the page on the computer
(monitor window) is landscape-oriented. As can be seen from this distinction, form is
heavily dependent on the limitations of format. Webcomics, as I understand them, are
the digital equivalent of the print form comics. While webcomics cover a wide range
of comics existing in the digital domain, the special subcategory of comics that this
dissertation is interested in exploring are enhanced webcomics, that is, webcomics that
go beyond the mere reorganisation of layout to fit the screen. Indeed, for while many
webcomics can be faithfully rendered in print with no or very little meaningful
repercussions, enhanced webcomics are a hybrid form that contain elements specific
to digital media and cannot be represented in print format without losing features
crucial to their specificity. In short, while all enhanced webcomics are also
webcomics, not all webcomics are “enhanced.” To exemplify, a webcomic organised
in panels and with no other special features can be translated into a print format
without losing much of its specificity; due to the limitations of standard page sizes,
some panels might be placed on different pages, but meaning and effect would stay
almost entirely unaltered. Enhanced webcomic that contains interactive elements, on
the other hand, would have much more trouble being separated from their digital host,
as the interactive digital specificity would be, possibly entirely, lost. The idea of
enhanced webcomics will be exemplified and analysed in detail in Chapter 4.
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3. Literary Basis
Finding an appropriate and precise definition of comics has been an exhausting but
productive endeavor in the academic discourse surrounding comics. Comics scholars
have yet to agree on one single definition that could satisfyingly outline the range of
works comics encompass. To start, the origins of comics are still a matter of dispute.
Some scholars (McCloud 1993) consider the early combinations of visual and verbal
signs already to be comics or comic-like graphical narratives, while others (Sabin
2000; Magnussen 2000) point out that such a reading is anachronistic and rather
ineffective for establishing comics as a self-sufficient medium. The problem of
definition is complicated further by questions such as: are comics necessarily
sequential or can there also be single panel comics?; does there necessarily need to be
a combination of text and images, and can a series of “silent” images still be
considered an instance of comics?; are comics exclusively drawn, or can one also use
a series of photographic images?; how is time expressed in comics, and what is its
relation with space? As comics enter the 21st century, this issue becomes even more
intricate due to the migration of comics (and other media as well) into the digital
realm. Christiansen and Magnussen (2000) acknowledge this phenomenon in their
introduction to the anthology based on the 1998 conference entitled Comics and
Culture, in which they observe that
it seems somewhat strange that the definition of the actual phenomenon studied within the
field of comics research is a recurring matter of dispute, embracing rather different, and
sometimes incompatible, definitions. On the other hand, it is an obvious, and necessary,
question to consider and it is becoming even more relevant with the emergence of new,
interactive media. (10)
However repetitive and spiraling it may seem, continuous updating and revisiting of
the object of study is necessary for a deeper and more intimate understanding of the
medium. The digital media offer a new and fruitful take on the phenomenon of
comics, as they distantiate the medium from its original print format. The medium of
comics can thus be perceived more easily as a manifestation of graphic and textual
cultural productions in their pure states, rather than being a solely print-centric
artefact.
A single medium of comics can take on various shapes, but it is important to
keep them separate one from another when analyzing their specific features and the
way in which they carry on the medium. An analysis of webcomics should have as the
11
background the discussion and the theoretical framework surrounding its predecessor
in print comics; however, it would be counterproductive to examine them using the
same principles. Rather, a separate medium-specific analysis (Hayles 2004) would
prove more useful, as it would point out the most perceptible modes of the medium,
and those specific to the form in which the comics appear. Such an approach was used
by the literary scholars in the anthology New Media Poetics, in which the contributors
examined electronic literary forms in detail, with the intention of “[extending] the
work of understanding the computer as an expressive medium by adding new media
poetry to the study of […] digital art forms” (Morris 5). In the introductory chapter,
Morris refers to the discipline of cybernetics and information theory established by
Norbert Wiener in the 1940s as the beginning point of the discourse surrounding new
media. The scholars of cybernetics studied the systems and the information exchange
that were made possible by new technologies, which would ultimately result in the
modern-day computer. The latter eventually became an important medium on its own,
which allowed for new ways of artistic expression. Literary and other analogue works
started to explore the newly found medium and use its particularities for their artistic
purposes. However, it soon became apparent that the native new media creations could
not be satisfactorily analysed using the conceptual and critical frameworks of the old
media. To make her point about the specificity of new media poetics and poetry,
Morris refers to a parallel issue regarding the narratology vs. ludology debate.
Ludology, being a study of play and (video)games, was initially approached from the
narratological perspective, but this method was soon deemed incompatible, as it
diminishes the importance of play and games in their own right, and considers it only
in relation to narratology. Likewise, Morris notes, new media poetry and poetics
should be emancipated from the fetters of the old media. Indeed, the medium that
hosts the artistic work has an impact on it, and always adds something of its own to it,
as McLuhan famously observed (1964). The same can be said about comics and the
emergence of enhanced webcomics. While the former is surely still connected and
relevant for the analysis of enhanced webcomics, it would not be productive to recycle
the verbatim print-specific interpretations to the comics in the digital medium. The
differences between the two media need to be kept in mind, as confusing them is “a
surefire way to miss the newness of new media” (Morris 5).
It is, however, easy to fall into the trap of studying these digital works according
to the standards of print media. Having been in circulation as the main means of
distribution of both texts and artwork for quite a while, print media established
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themselves as the norm, and evolved with an extensive set of rules and conventions.
Notably, print achieved the status of authority, and thus legitimised the content of the
printed works. The art of literature became closely associated with the materiality of
print, to the point that the two became almost indistinguishable. Even visual works
were bound to it with the invention of etching and, later on, lithography printing.
These restrictions were mainly connected to the physical limitations of the material on
which they were printed, and they thus dictated the formal and aesthetic values of the
works of art. With the transition of verbal and graphic art onto the computer screens,
these print-specific limitations were made more evident, due to the disappearance of
the physical dimension in the digital realm. Katherine Hayles talks about this issue in
her article entitled “Translating Media: Why We Should rethink Textuality” from
2003. The progress of print media onto the Web resulted in both gains and losses
regarding reading and writing (Hayles 2003, 263), which highlight how
our notions of textuality are shot through with assumptions specific to print, although they
have not been generally recognized as such. The advent of electronic textuality presents us
with an unparalleled opportunity to re-formulate fundamental ideas about texts and, in the
process, to see print as well as electronic texts with fresh eyes. (Hayles 263)
Although she talks about text and textuality, and not specifically about graphical
works of art such as comics, Hayles’ point could be easily applied to the field of
comics and their apparition as webcomics on the Web. In that case, one could also
look at the “graphicality”, or the visual language used in comics, and compare and
contrast it across the different media formats in which it appeared. The use and the
arrangement of panels and other comics modes in the print format does not necessarily
need to dictate the way they appear on the computer screen. Admittedly, comics first
appeared on the printed page (excluding the obscure examples such as prehistoric cave
paintings, Egyptian murals and sequential religious illustration of the lives of saints);
however, that does not restrict the panel or the speech bubble to print. In fact, it offers
a new opportunity to explore this and other characteristics of comics with more liberty,
in ways that were impossible or problematic on the old medium.
Hayles returns to the idea of media specificity in her 2004 essay (“Print Is Flat,
Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis”), in which she analyses
M. D. Coverley’s web novel The Book of Going Forth by Day. The electronic text
deals with Egyptian myths and legends, and uses different media and digital-specific
techniques, adorned with hieroglyphic and other Egyptian symbols and illustration, in
order to immerse the reader more fully into the world of the text. Considering the
content of the text and the way it is presented digitally, Hayles notes that
13
art did not so much imitate life as it imitated and was imitated by writing. […] Transported into
an electronic environment, these correlations take the form of complex relations between
multimedia components and navigational functionalities in which meaning emerges from their
interrelations rather than from the verbal narrative alone. (2004, 83)
The meaning expressed in the web novel is closely linked to the possibilities of the
medium that is used to tell the story. The multimedia, the illustrations, and the intricate
hyperlink structure are crucial for understanding and appreciating the text. A print
version of this novel would only preserve the displayed text and the static images,
while the other significant components would be entirely lost. This does not
necessarily mean that digital is superior to print, but rather that they have different
ways of conveying meaning, and that they use the possibilities they have to their
maximum potential. Since the average reader’s attention span on digital media is
generally known as being lower2 than that of an analogue book, a digital novel may
choose to display a small amount of text at a time and use a soundtrack to engage with
the reader. A print text, on the other hand, can divulge longer into meticulous
descriptions, use the physicality of the book to transmit extra information on the front
and back covers, on the spine of the book, in the publisher’s note, or in other print
publication-related sections.
These properties contribute to the overall idea and meaning of a particular
instance of cultural production, and they are used by the different media in their own
particular way. Some of these are shared among media who appear in the same format,
as the materiality in which they appear is important in determining what a certain
medium can and cannot do. Noël Carroll (2008) uses the term medium specificity to
describe this idea, which Henry John Pratt elaborates as
the view that the media associated with a given art form (both its material components and the
processes by which they are exploited) (1) entail specific possibilities for and constraints on
representation and expression, and (2) this provides a normative framework for what artists
working in that art form ought to attempt. (98)
As Pratt notes, it applies to both the physical and structural possibilities of the
medium. The comics medium in the book format has to abide by the constraints of the
printed page and the conventions that are used to create a representative instance of it.
Like a print novel, comics has at its disposal the opportunity to use the paper pages
2
“The current generation of internet consumers live in a world of ‘instant gratification and quick
fixes’ which leads to a ‘loss of patience and a lack of deep thinking.’ […] Studies have shown that
32% of consumers will start abandoning slow sites between one and five seconds.” (Weatherhead,
Rob. “Say it quick, say it well – the attention span of a modern internet consumer.” The Guardian. 28
February 2014. 18 June 2015. <http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-networkblog/2012/mar/19/attention-span-internet-consumer>.)
14
and their materiality to imbue extra meaning. Thus, the sense of touch of a paper sheet,
and the flipping of the pages, as well as the ink used to print the content, can, for
example give an impression of roughness, smoothness, totality of the content, or even
the commercial prestige of the comic. A thick textured matte-coated paper and the
heavy use of coloured ink transfers the sense of value and preciousness of the comic
from the level of material art creation to that of the abstract and content related level.
The possibility of having two pages open and absorbed at the same time both limits
and enables comic book creators to play with the structural arrangement of the panels
and text. Such tangible experience is very limited in the case of digital comics. While
it can still be experienced if one reads a comic on a touch screen device, the results
remain much less varied and not as intimate as that of the paper page. Comics on new
media, however, enjoy a myriad of other functionalities, which rival the print media in
terms of usefulness. Askehave and Nielsen (2005) rightly distinguish that “one of the
most significant characteristics of the web medium is its use of hypertext, [which
relates] web texts to each other; thus enabling a non-linear transmission of
information” (3). The hypertext, or more generally the (hyper)link, allows for a more
intricate and flexible navigation of the content on the internet and digital media in
general. In contrast with print media, where searching, proceeding and receding is
accomplished manually and can sometimes result in being tiresome, digital media’s
hyperlink is able to lead the reader seamlessly and instantly to the specified virtual
location. Medium specificity, in short, dictates how a certain content of the medium is
to be experienced and presented, and is important when analysing a medium such as
comics, which has extended its forms onto other media that are able to contain it.
These specific features of the digital media, and the “multimedia components”
and “navigational functionalities” Hayles mentions, however, need specific skills to be
interpreted and used beneficially. Just as the reader of a print novel needs to be
acquainted with the reading conventions of printed text in order to make sense of its
contents, so does the reader (or user) of the Internet and digital media need to be
familiar with the dynamics of the digital world. The print reader needs to know that a
small superscripted number after a text unit is a footnote that refers to the bottom of
the page or the end of the section, and contains additional, and sometimes crucial,
information on the footnoted text. Likewise, the digital reader needs to be able to
recognise a hypertext and know that interacting with it will redirect them to another
webpage or position on that page. In relation to this, Aarseth (1997) notes that one
needs to be able to distinguish between hypertexted objects (textons) and the simple
15
displayed text that has no underlying code (scriptons) in order to traverse a digital text
(Aarseth’s cybertext) with ease. The knowledge of this and other practices required on
digital media has been termed electracy (Ulmer 2003), and Morris uses it to
characterise new media dwellers as “agile operators, willy-nilly, of computer
keyboards, ATMs, cell phones, PDAs, Gameboys, iPods, and the other devices of our
digital epoch” who are “in an unreflective fashion and in various degrees, at ease with
digitality” (6). In Morris’ case, being accustomed to electracy is essential for reading
new media poems, while in the case to the present study it is useful for reading and
understanding enhanced webcomics. To this could be added the knowledge of other
non-textual objects that appear on the computer screen. The basic functions and
operations of images, reproducible media (video and audio), interactive elements,
buttons, menu items and the cursor shape all need to be understood in order to feel at
ease and in control on digital media. As will be illustrated further on, in the case of
enhanced webcomics, the most important knowledge is that related to the spatial
positioning of digital objects, and recognising the interactive elements on the screen.
A lot of information can be stored into one single digital object. Being at the
same time a displayed icon on the screen and a piece of code allows the object to have
meaning on multiple levels. Coming back to the example of the hyperlink, one can
observe that it has multiple properties. Using the HTML and CCS markup languages
for modern browsers, one can make the hyperlink appear as text or image, have it
change colour if already clicked before, etc. Instead of spelling the complete URL, it is
often preferred to mask it with a more pleasant and readable anchor text, which is the
visible text that appears as clickable. Additionally, its colour and the displayed text on
hover can be freely selected by modifying its CSS properties.3 For example, if one
accesses the English Wikipedia’s article on “Comics” 4 on a web browser, the
hypertext fumetti found in the fifth sentence displays the word “fumetti” as the anchor
text; on hover, it shows the title of the webpage the link leads to (“Photonovel"), as
well
as
the
full
URL
address
on
the
bottom
of
the
screen
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonovel), and it is coloured in blue in order to
distinguish it from the rest of the non-linked words (the colour changes to a darker
shade of blue if the link is already clicked). In addition to being “merely” a plain word,
3
For
further
examples
of
possible
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_link.asp.
4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics.
16
CSS
effects
applied
to
a
link
see
this hypertext reveals also that “fumetto” is also a synonym of “photonovel”, that
clicking it leads to another wikipedia entry, and its colour shows whether it has
already been visited. All of these, together with some other additional functions, can
be used in creative ways in order to provide the reader with more context and
information. In the case of enhanced comics, images and multimedia can be used in a
similar fashion to create an even more diverse and rich narrative. As mentioned above,
electracy, or the knowledge of these possibilities of new media objects is required in
order to absorb all the information supplied. This may in some cases become a
complicated endeavour, as the readers might be overwhelmed by the numerous options
with which they are confronted. Askehave and Nielsen, in their analysis of digital
genres, indicate that “the hypertext system tend to place certain constraints on the
reading pattern, which result in a new kind of reading referred to as hyper-reading”
(3). The trouble with hyper-reading (a concept introduced by Sosnoski (1999)), is
most easily exemplified by alluding to the non-linearity of a hyperlinked digital
artistic work. Having many choices (links) pointing to other webpages may cause the
readers to get lost by attempting to explore and follow them all. The case of Wikipedia
offers a good example of how dense a digital narrative form can be. It is a complex
network of links and other new media objects, which, as it is commonly observed, can
lead the reader from one topic to a completely unrelated one, simply by clicking on the
links and exploring the content of the Wikipedia articles.
Electracy and the typical, almost hectic, nature of surfing and engaging with the
Internet and new media in general is perhaps most visible from the point of view of
computer-native media, such as videogames. Jenny Weight in her article “Cyborg
Dreams: From Ergodics to Electracy” (2004) makes a point about intractable media
requiring a level of elecracy (36) for a successful experience in engaging with them,
and cites Macedonia’s (2001) list of skills that video games encourage. Some of these
include the “ability to perform several tasks […] concurrently,” “fast context
switching,” and “information navigation changes that define literacy not only as text,
but also as images and multimedia” (Macedonia 158). While video games might be a
more extreme example of intractable media, these characterisations are nevertheless
useful to keep in mind for the present study, as enhanced webcomics all range from
being intractable in a minimal way (by simply using hyperlinks to navigate the page,
for example) to being a hybrid outcome resulting from a merging of video games and
comics.
17
These digital reading skills are only one of the necessary competences that are
required for a successful interpretation of enhanced webcomics. The other approach
involves a more traditional familiarity with the medium of comics. Comics, being in
most cases composed of both verbal and pictorial signs, demand a proficiency in
decoding both. This may sometimes involve reading the text and visualising the
images separately, and sometimes performing both of the actions synchronously. In
her analysis of the first page of Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003), Uchmanowicz (2009)
claims that
the eye that seemingly both "sees" and "reads" the adjacent printed word provides metadiscursive instructions, alerting decoders to the necessity of para-literacy, that is, the ability to
parse juxtaposed words and images in relation to each other, a skill that extends to interpreting
ancillary or additive texts embedded in a central narrative. (368)
This para-literacy Uchmanowicz talks about can be regarded as the comics equivalent
of the literary media literacy and the new media electracy. 5 While literacy is
concerned primarily with words, and electracy with new media objects, para-literacy is
concerned with both words and images and the relations and interactions between
them. In comics, rather than being two separate processes independent from each
other, text and images usually complement each other and work together in order to
convey meaning and construct a narrative. It is an operation in which reading and
visualising constantly refer back one to another, and in a way, seek approval and
further elaboration. For an in-depth understanding of enhanced webcomics, one needs
to be multiliterate, experienced in both para-literacy and electracy, as they are comics
in a digital format, and use features and modes specific to both the medium of comics
and that of new media.
The modes are crucial for identifying a medium as established and authentic,
independent from the other similar ones. Enhanced webcomics are unique in that they
draw upon the characteristic modes of comic books and new media, making them a
multimodal, and also intermedial phenomenon. In Multimodal Discourse, Kress and
van Leeuwen (2001) explain the concept of multimodality as “the use of several
semantic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event” (20). These would be for
example graphic icons, images, and words that print comics use as constitutive
elements. However, if one takes the idea of a mode to imply larger essential
5
One can also talk about visual literacy, which would correspond to literacy and other concepts here
presented, but for images and similar visual signs. For a more elaborate definition of visual literacy
see http://ivla.org/new/what-is-visual-literacy-2/.
18
components, then those of comics would be panels, word balloons, text boxes, and
onomatopoeic graphics. Those of the electronic media, as previously mentioned,
would be hypertexts, buttons, and input text fields, to name a few. These all come
together to form enhanced webcomics, which might use them separately, but can also
merge (not mix) the modes from the different media, creating thus a unique hybrid
intermedial instance. Spielmann explains the difference between several of these
concepts quite efficiently by stating that
intermedia differs then from multimedia, which correlates different media that are presented
together synchronously yet remain distinct. Second, intermedia goes beyond mixed media,
which incorporates elements of one medium in another (e.g. photography in film, painting in
photography.) What is essential to intermedia, and intertextuality as well, is the category of
transformation. ( 57)
Kukkonen further clarifies multimodality as a notion referring “to combinations of
different modes in particular media; intermediality,” on the other hand, “to the
interaction between different historically established media or media texts” (35-36).
Intermediality, then, becomes quite a possible occurrence in enhanced webcomics.
Making a part of the panel interactive, or having a word ballon appear at the click of a
button are both examples of how this intermedial transformation can occur. This
hybrid nature of enhanced comics raises the question of whether they are still able to
be considered a part of the comics medium, or whether they trespass into another one,
due to an overuse of modes of another medium.
With his groundbreaking book Understanding Comics from 1993, Scott
McCloud proposed a thorough way of reading and understanding comics. His
intention was to bring the medium of (print) comics to greater public attention, and
incite scholars and readers of comics in general to start regarding comics as a
“serious” form of art, having its own set of rules and aesthetic principles, and not only
as a mere source of unimportant diversion. The book, which is a comic book itself,
begins by attempting to consolidate an initial point of reference for defining comics as
“juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey
information and/or aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud 1993, 9). As
mentioned earlier, McCloud justifies this understanding of comics by tying them to
authoritative graphical art forms found throughout the history of human
communication, which appears as a rather desperate attempt at validating comics.
Comics, as most of the people know them, are usually printed on paper, contain
images and text organised in panels and speech balloons, and are often drawn in a
simpler caricatural style. These characteristics are essential, which is why Smolderen
19
(2014) attributes the origins of comics to William Hogarth’s engravings from the 18th
and Rodolphe Töppfer’s picture stories from the first half of the 19th century. These
politically-charged and satirical parody caricature drawings popularised the form and
gave rise to illustrated novels, political caricatures, and ultimately the comic strip.
Comics in the McCloudian sense are comprised of icons, or “image[s] used to
represent a person, place, thing or idea” as he defines them (McCloud 1993, 27).
These can range from being words on paper (abstract representations) to very detailed
drawings representing their real-life counterparts in extreme directness. As such, icons
demand different degrees of perception to be understood. McCloud terms these
“received information,” which would apply to pictorial icons, and “perceived
information,” which is more characteristic of abstract, alphabetical icons (1993, 49).
Pictures and images are “received” instantly and do not require any sort of pre-learned
knowledge to be understood and digested. Words and other forms of abstract writing
require the reader to be already familiar with the system of symbols and the message
they stand for. While in the case of traditional print comics this description
encompasses the whole realm of comics production, in the case of enhanced
webcomics, there are more factors to take into consideration, as the latter do not have
to resort to written language exclusively to show the thoughts and utterances of
characters. They have access to digital-specific material such as sound files and
animations, which can reproduce parts of the print comic using other sensory
channels.
Since traditional comics are made of images and other icons (usually presented
in panels) in a sequential order, as explained above, if comics artists want to make
sense of those elements, they need to arrange them in such a way so as to produce a
logical connection between them. McCloud talks extensively about the effect
produced in-between panels, and calls it “closure,” borrowing the term from Gestalt
psychology. In Gestalt psychology, the Principle of Closure states that “objects
grouped together are seen as a whole, such that things are grouped together to
complete a whole that might not exist” (Stevenson par. 10). What this means is that
human brain is accustomed to seeing shapes even where there are none, or where they
are fragmented. In Figure 2, we see drawings of three black circle segments and three
acute angles, grouped in a particular way. There are no clear outlines that would
clearly delineate any triangular shapes in the picture; however, our brains fill in the
“missing” information of order to create the image of a familiar shape. In McCloud’s
20
words,
closure
is
a
“phenomenon
of
observing the parts but perceiving the whole”
(63), and it happens in the blank space
between panels, which is commonly called
“the
gutter”
(McCloud
1993,
64-67).
McCloud brings to attention that, while in
film and television, the gutter, and thus the
closure, is unnoticeable and allows for a fluid
reception, in comics it is clearly demarcated
by borders and panel boxes. This forces the
reader to pay attention to the narrative, and to
follow the logical rule of panel progression
from left to right, top to bottom. Proceeding
Figure 1 Typical example of the Principle of Closure.
The missing outlines of the triangles are mentally
constructed.
to the next panel may not always be as easy
as it appears in theory, and the authors may choose to place them in a counterintuitive
order to produce a specific effect. The readers thus need to be observant of what is
happening on the page in order to actively co-construct the story. At times this might
also mean that they have to make an independent decision about which piece of
information to consider first, and how to put it in relation to the others on the page.
While McCloud’s analysis of closure is concerned only with panels adjacent to
each other, Groensteen’s meticulous structuralist study (The System of Comics 2007)
suggests a more complicated relationship among panels, pages and other comic book
elements. According to him, “every panel exists, potentially if not actually, in relation
with each of the others” (Groensteen 2007: 146). Groensteen talks about a system or a
language of comics, which can be broken down into small meaningful pieces, and
describes his approach as “neo-semiotic” (2007: 2). The image is one of these smallest
meaningful units, and they are the dominant narrative mode in comics. Together with
words, they stand in relation to all the other units in a comic, and they engage in a
play of “conjunction, of repetition, of linking together” (2007: 22). Groensteen calls
these set of relations arthrology, and the effort of creating them braiding (2007: 22).
While being closely similar to McCloud’s closure, Groensteen’s arthrology remains a
very abstract concept. Despite being slightly anecdotal, McCloud concretely
illustrates, and even subdivides, the processs of closure into several different
methodologies, which makes it a more comprehensible and veritable phenomenon.
Groensteen, on the other hand, remains much more detached from a hands-on
21
analysis, and opts for a more theoretical and broader discussion of the spatial and
compositional arrangements in the medium of comics (which he calls spatio-topia).
In the world of enhanced webcomics, the gutter and the concept of closure still
play a role. However, since enhanced comics are able to use tools such as animation,
film, and other properties of digital media, the importance of the gutter may vary
depending on the means used to communicate with the readers. For one, this may be
because digital comics have the capabilities of spreading their constitutive elements
on a potentially infinite canvas (McCloud 2000). In this case, the panels, images and
word bubbles can be organised in a myriad of different ways. The space is no longer a
restraining obstacle that has to be worked around. The strength of internet connection
and the quality of the computer display can still play a role in determining the
feasibility of enhanced webcomics, however, in theory, there is no limit as to how big
a certain digital canvas can be (McCloud 2000). The gutter may be one millimetre or
one kilometre in size, and it would not present an issue for the medium. Having a
sizeable gap between two panels may emphasise the length of time that has elapsed
in-between, or increase the feeling of suspense. If the webcomic is built using
hyperlinks to navigate it, and has only one panel per webpage, the gutter, in its spatial
sense, may even be avoided. The gutter would not be perceived as a spatial distance
between panels on a two-dimensional plane, but rather as a temporal and metaphysical
“space” that occurs after clicking on the link leading to the next page. This can be
compared to turning the page in a comic book that uses two adjacent pages as one
panel. The loading time of the next page would be the equivalent of the gutter, whose
dimensions may vary, depending on the internet connection and other technical
properties. I will return to this point later in this dissertation, when discussing the
issue of spatial organisation in webcomics.
There is one last issue that I would like to discuss with recourse to McCloud’s
Understanding Comics, and that is the perception of time. Traditional comics that are
printed on paper are forced to make a creative use of words and images and their
organisation on the page to convey a sense of time. McCloud goes as far as to say that
in comics “time and space are one and the same” (1993, 100). What he means by this
is that the progression of the story in comics has to be indicated in some way using
graphic clues. The relation between the images, mainly delineated by transitions to
other panels, give the reader the idea that time has changed since the previous panel.
In contrast to other visual media which use moving image, in print comics the actual
22
time readers spend reading and visualising one panel, or unit of images and text, does
not necessarily correspond to the exact time that has elapsed within the diegetic reality
of the same panel. A reader/viewer may decide to spend more or less time on one unit
of information, or go back to the previous ones to examine them in more detail.
At this point in his book, McCloud notes that the present in comics is indicated
by the panel that is viewed at a particular moment. The “now” is always only reserved
for the panel that is viewed at that moment, while the others before it represent the
past, and the ones after the future (McCloud 1993, 104-106). Once the viewer’s eye
moves to the next panel, that panel becomes the object of the present and the one
before of the past. Likewise, moving back ten panels in the comic and reading on from
there suddenly becomes “the present.” This explanation is problematic and simplistic,
as he does not go into much further detail to explain this notion. It is true that the time
of viewing and reading a panel is always in the present, as it equates to a “real-life”
perception of the present. That, however, is true for any kind of reading and viewing,
as the act of reading words on paper, for example, is always carried out in the present
and follows a linear logic, and is connected to reader’s ontological presence. Rereading passages then would imply that the “present” of the story is happening again
in real time as if it were new and unknown. Yet, the story and the content of the
panels would be the same and would belong to the past. If one stops reading a comic
book somewhere in its middle and decides to go back and re-read from the beginning,
the point in the story where one stopped would represent the present, together with all
the information the reader has gathered. This does not mean that the same moment has
to correspond to the diegetic present point in the story (it could also be a flashback, for
example), but rather a present point in the reader’s linear progression of the story. In
short, the time of the narration should not be confounded with the real-time and act of
reading.
That said, in analysing time in comics, McCloud arrives at an important
conclusion. He observes that it is represented in two different ways: using sound and
motion (McCloud 1993, 116). The latter can be used either within or in-between the
panels. When it is used inside a single panel, it is possible to represent it using lines or
blurred effects that indicate a movement of an object. If an artist wants to show a
person running in a single panel, he or she may opt to draw several straight lines
behind the running subject, which would suggest that the person is moving at high
speed, unable to be captured by a single frame or instance depicted in the panel.
23
Motion in-between two sequential panels would involve, for instance, showing the
same subject in different positions in relation to his or her surroundings. The concept
of closure is required to make sense of this last effect, as it entails an amount of active
interpretative skills from the reader (McCloud 1993, 116). Sound, on the other hand,
is in most cases restricted to indicating the duration of a single panel, and it is divided
into word-bubbles or sound effects (McCloud 1993, 116). These techniques and
principles that McCloud points out are crucial for the understanding of comics. Print
comics have developed a myriad of ways to exploit the advantages they have of being
a union of text and static visual art, and at the same time to overcome the limitations
of their medium. Enhanced webcomics, likewise have encountered some obstacles,
but also many assets by being innately digital. They share some difficulties with their
print counterparts, but have developed new and creative ways of dealing with some of
them.
Having explored various different ways comics can be read, McCloud ends his
first book on a hopeful note, emphasising the unlimited possibilities that are available
through comics, and the bright prospect for the medium in the upcoming future. His
follow-up book, Reinventing Comics (2000), has a much more concerned tone to it.
The comics industry in the second part of the 1990s suffered a harsh decline. What in
the early 1990s seemed to be the beginning of a golden age of comics, was, according
to McCloud, actually revealed to be its peak (McCloud 2000, 9), as many comics
creators and distributors went out of business. Reinventing Comics is, thus, an attempt
to bring comics back to its formal status, and also an attempt to push further and
“grow outward” in order to evolve (McCLoud 2000, 22). Almost half of the book is
dedicated to defending the idea that comics are a subject worthy of people’s attention.
The author lists 12 revolutions or goals to which comics can and should strive in order
to become more appreciated. These are: (1) Comics as literature, (2) Comics as art, (3)
Creators’ rights, (4) Industry innovation, (5) Public perception, (6) Institutional
scrutiny, (7) Gender balance, (8) Minority representation, (9) Diversity of genre; and
the three new ones: (10) Digital production, (11) Digital delivery, and (12) Digital
comics (McCloud 2000, 22). The original nine ideas can be grouped in the following
way: ideas concerned with the reputation of comics (1, 2, 5, and 6), ideas concerned
with the economical and financial side of comics (3 and 4), and ideas concerned with
the variety of content of comics and its audience (8 and 9). As can be observed,
McCloud dedicates a lot of attention to discussing comics as an art in itself that is
worthy and comparable to already established art forms, such as literature and
24
painting. McCloud’s states that comics needs to find a way to stop being
overshadowed by its “big brothers,” and finally rid itself of the misconception that
comics are a non-serious medium, mostly reserved for children.
McCloud dedicates the entire second part of his book to the last three
revolutions in comics, concerning their existence and potential in the digital realm. He
seems to advocate for the idea that the internet and the digital media are the new
frontier, which comics can and should explore. Although his discussion on the tools
and effects that can be used online to comics’ benefits may appear very dated at times
(the book was published in 2000), he nevertheless covers a wide range of possible
routes that digital comics can take in the future. McCloud reasonably observes that
one should meditate on whether an effect created by the digital tools can produce an
interesting “narrative effect” and “how comics might put it to use” (2000, 146). He
mentions, for example, the use of blur and the possibility of designing a character in a
3D environment as possible next steps. What is of more interest to this study is his
discussion on the materiality comics and its forms. Departing from the idea of print
comics discussed in his previous book, McCloud acknowledges that comics on paper
is only one of the forms this medium can take (2000, 202). Print comics are
admittedly the most known ones, but their essence is not limited to print. The critical
concept he uses here is the technological convergence of media that largely took place
with the introduction of digital technologies. Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture:
Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) defines it as “the flow of content across
multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the
migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the
kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (2). In convergence culture, the content
became separated from its main container, or medium, and was allowed free transition
in its “pure” form onto another medium. McCloud’s important observation is that, in
the transition into digital media, the content is separated conceptually from its “shell,”
as he calls it. Moving image was released from film and television, still image from
drawing and painting, and sound from radio and recording devices (McCloud 2000,
204). To this, he adds the concept of interactivity with the medium, which he
discusses as the one particular to digital media and computer technology. These four
sensory concepts are now possible for digital comics to exploit. Only one of them—
image—was already available to print comics, whereas the other three are new and
can offer a whole new experience of reading and creating comics.
25
The interactive element of digital media seems to be one of the most exciting to
explore in the creation of enhanced comics. While moving image and sound have
existed in fruitful conjunction with the visual for quite a long time, interactivity and
the visual still image have only started to do so with the introduction of computer
technology. This union was mainly explored in video games, which represent another
artistic mode of expression native to the digital realm. Daniel Goodbrey has been
experimenting with the merging of comics and video games, and has pioneered
creating hybrid forms of the two. Goodbrey talks about the initial prototypes of this
form as hypercomics, which he defines as “comic[s] with a multicursal narrative
structure” (291). Just like other examples of hyperfiction, these comics are “ergodic,”
Goodbrey notes, in the sense that they require “nontrivial effort […] to traverse the
text” (Aarseth 1). He even goes a step further and terms his hybrid form “game
comics,” which “exhibit the key characteristics of both a game and a comic”
(Goodbrey 7). His undertaking in the field of new media is very specific, and is a
testimony to how the different media forms McCloud talks about can effortlessly
converge and create new artistic expressions in the digital world. He created several
game comics to showcase his vision. One of these is called A Duck Has an Adventure
(Goodbrey 2012), and it is composed of comic-styled square panels that have to be
interacted with to progress in the story. At some points in the game comic, the reader
is presented with branching options and has to choose which path to take. This leads
to several different endings, and the reader is incited to discover all by considering
them as “collectables” (Goodbrey 2015, 9). These sort of comics are closely related to
the idea of enhanced webcomics explored in this dissertation. Although the latter
comprise a broader spectrum of interactivity and use of multimedia, Goodbrey’s game
comics and his extensive analysis of them will prove a solid starting point for
interpreting and describing the interactive side of enhanced webcomics.
26
4. Analysis
4.1 Infinite Canvas
The concept of the infinite canvas was first introduced and popularised by Scott
McCloud in Reinventing Comics (2000), a follow-up book to his Understanding
Comics (1993). He observes that, once comics artists start to exploit the virtual
advantages of the computer, they will be free from the layout constraints of the printed
page. McCloud argues that one needs to start “treating the screen as a window rather
than a page” (McCloud 2009):
In a digital environment, there’s no reason a 500 panel story can’t be told vertically — or
horizontally like a great graphic storyline. We could indulge our left-to-right and up-to-down
habits from beginning to end in a giant descending staircase — or pack it all into a slowly
revolving cube. (McCloud 2000, 223)
Here, it is clear that McCloud envisioned the infinite canvas as a liberating and
empowering mechanism of the digital technology that has the potential to reveal a
myriad of options for comics creators. The concept of space is crucial in comics, and
McCloud recalls it constantly to explain many of his theories and interpretations, both
in Understanding Comics and in Reinventing Comics. One of the most controversial
examples of this is his claim that “in the world of comics, time and space are one and
the same” (1993, 100). The position, the shape, the space, and the place occupied by
panels must be used strategically in order to convey the desired idea to the reader.
Some panels and moments of the story must sometimes be left out or organised
differently so that the layout of the page can remain clear and constant in its
presentation. With McCloud’s infinite canvas, these difficulties could be avoided, and
there would be more “space” for creativity and free, unrestricted artistic expression.
While the concept of the infinite canvas sounds exciting in theory, its
application has not been very popular in the world of digital comics, or at least not as
popular and “revolutionary” as McCloud had envisioned. The biggest problems
encountered were related to the impracticality of the infinite canvas strategy, the time
required for internet browsers to load the data, its tediousness in general, and the
difficulty of using it correctly to achieve the desired effect. Scrolling proved to be a
dull and unappealing way to navigate the computer screen, especially when these
features occurred both vertically and horizontally. The danger of losing oneself on a
webpage of large proportions is real, and requires careful guidance on the part of the
author, and a lot of patience on the part of the reader. Long vertical scrolling comes
27
across
as
more
natural
than
either
horizontal
or
omnidirectional, but it, nevertheless, still delays the internet
user reaching “the goal,” that is, the end of the page.
Horizontal scrolling is more counterintuitive, but it may lead
to interesting results, similar to those invoked by the Bayeux
Tapestry that McCloud mentions. The infinite canvas, in any
of its styles, seems to conflict with the behaviour of the
person living in the “information age;” contemporary culture
requires information to be accessed and processed quickly,
especially on the digital medium, where a delay or the
duration of a second can be perceived as very long.
Although the infinite canvas might not yield the
revolutionary
changes
in
webcomics
that
McCloud
anticipated, it still stands as a relatively fresh option, which
creators of comics online can use to explore the possibilities
of digital media. It has become a fairly well-known idea in the
domain of webcomics and some authors have found ways of
putting it to good use. In the 37th instalment of Flying Man &
Friends, the author Ian Marquis use of the infinite canvas to
depict a scene where Flying Man and Mr. Stinky, two of the
main characters, are falling down a hole in the ground. The
comic strip is one long vertical panel, and the viewer is
encouraged to scroll down to follow the action and discover
where the hole leads. The strip appears longer than usual, and
it is clear that the author used the infinite canvas in order to
spatially emphasise the duration of the fall. The same comic
strip is entitled “The Infinite Canvas,” and the concept is even
referenced by the character in the webcomic itself, as he
exclaims near the end: “Mr. Stinky, what do you mean the
canvas is infinite? You know fully well we cannot
conceptualize infinity!”6 Here, it becomes clear that the author
is well-aware of the concept of infinite canvas, and he even
explains it in the caption below the comic. It has been put to
6
http://www.flyingmanandfriends.com/?p=242
28
Figure 2.1 Marquis, Ian. "The Infinite
Canvas." Flying Man & Friends. The
differently coloured Earth layers act as
panels in this long vertical strip. The
image is shrinked considerably in order
to fit on two pages. Continued on the
next page.
effective use, I would argue, as it is long enough to intrigue
the reader to scroll further down, but not too long, which
would risk being perceived as annoying and tedious. Even
though the comic is made of only one panel, it seems to be
segmented thematically, so that the readers’ display always
shows an object or an action no matter at which point of the
“fall” they find themselves. Also, the different layers of
earth’s surface, through which the characters are falling, are
coloured in distinct shades of brown and grey, which act
provisionally as a thematic, panel-like divisions.
A similar use of the concept can be found in several
numbers of the xkcd7 webcomic. Claiming to be “a webcomic
of romance, sarcasm, math, and language” (Munroe), xkcd
often experiments with elaborated strategies and ideas to
present a unique enhanced webcomic experience. In the strip
entitled “Height,”8 Munroe draws a single panel of quite a
large vertical size, at least in comparison to his other
“regular” strips. The comic shows “the observable universe,
from top to bottom - on a log scale” (Munroe), and one has to
spend quite some time to scroll and observe all the
information he has put in. Using the infinite canvas, Munroe,
quite appropriately, attempts to illustrate the entire universe
known to man (up to 46 billion light-years of distance from
Earth), incorporating the Eiffel tower, the moon, the stars and
the galaxies. Like in the previous case, 8the use of infinite
canvas is not chosen arbitrarily, but rather purposefully to
emphasise the spatial distance covered within the comic.
Scrolling through the comic gives the reader the impression of
quite literally travelling through space on the webpage. A
similar, more immersive project, called “The Scale of the
Universe,” was realised by Cary & Michael Huang (2012).
While not exactly a webcomic, the flash browser application
7
8
https://xkcd.com/
https://xkcd.com/482/
29
Figure 2.2 (continued from the previous
page)
let the user zoom in as close as to reach the smallest matter known to man, and zoom
out up until the borders of the observable universe. The infinite canvas, in this case,
stays spatially within the frames of the computer monitor; however, it is explored on
the depth axis of the cartesian system, that is, in third dimension.
As it has already been established, the “infinity” of the infinite canvas is a
recurrent theme in the enhanced comics that make use of it. The implications of its
vast dimensions and the sensations they provoke also seem to be the among the main
topics tackled. Such is the case of “‘Pup’ Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe”9 by
Drew Weing, in which Pup, the main character of the webcomics series, loses himself
in his thoughts and embarks on a transcendental journey away from Earth’s surface.
He finds himself floating in space, observing the Earth being swallowed by the Sun,
and moving ever deeper into the void of space. The comic starts with an arrow that
leads the reader to the first panel and indicates the direction in which to scroll
forward. The first set of panels are rectangular-shaped, but they become progressively
bigger as Pup moves away from the Earth, and become larger than a 15’’ screen
monitor once he finds himself in space. The sheer size of the single panels suggests
the vastness of outer space, as well as the power of the imagination of the human (or
anthropomorphic dog’s) mind. The gutters between the panels progressively disappear
as Pup becomes surrounded by the background of the star-lit universe. Eventually the
the borders of the panels and the gutter disappear, as the complete darkness of the
Figure 3 A screenshot from “‘Pup’ Ponders the Heat Death of the Universe” showing the gradual increase
of the size of panels. In the case of the right-most image, the box outline disappear and the whole monitor
screen is treated as a stretchable panel.
9
http://www.drewweing.com/puppages/13pup.html
30
universe spreads from the panels onto the whole webpage. As he regains awareness,
Pup is finally transported back into the reality of smaller, closed-in rectangular panels,
where he interacts with his two friends. The story is told with almost only images as
the narrative tool. The conversation in word bubbles appears in the last 5 panels,
which are used to give a comical and light-hearted twist to the story. The title sets the
mood and summarises the plot quite effectively, letting the reader thereby explore the
canvas and interpret it accordingly.
The concepts of “arthrology” (Groensteen 1999) and “multimodality” (Kress
and Leeuwen 2001; Jacobs’s 2014) describe the connections and meanings made on a
local and global scale when facing a comics work. Groensteen affirms that
comics is not only an art of fragments, of scattering, of distribution; it is also an art of
conjunction, of repetition, of linking together. Within the spatio-topical operation […] one can
distinguish two degrees in the relations between the images. The elementary relations, of the
linear type, compose what we will call the restricted arthrology. […] The other relations,
translinear or distant, emerge from general arthrology and decline all of the modalities of
braiding. (22)
In other words, relational and semantic meaning in comics is produced by drawing
connections and inferences among the images and panels on the single pages, and
among all the pages in the work, thus creating a network of intricate interdependences.
The concept is similar to that of closure put forward by McCloud, and both were
originally conceived to be used for analysing comic books. In the case of enhanced
webcomics that use the infinite canvas, multiple pages and even multiple panels are
optional, which complicates the application of these concepts; in having only one
webpage or panel, enhanced webcomics might conflict with the conventional
understanding of comics as linear and sequential arrangement of semiotic units.
However, these conventions and definitions were formulated under spatial constraints
of the printed page. Therefore, comics designed for an Internet webpage do not need
to bow to those standards and can explore the space of the webpage and the panel in a
more flexible way. As in the example of the Flying Man & Friends and xkcd comics,
a one-panel webcomic (understood as a box-shaped container of images and text) can
be subdivided stylistically into different areas, while still belonging to the same
image, which allows the reader to scan over it with more ease. in this way, the onepanel enhanced webcomics thus could be treated as a multi-panel page, to which the
principles of multimodality and restricted arthrology could then be applied. As
mentioned before, exceeding the standard panel size is a viable option, and drawing
the outlines might be avoided altogether, so as to emphasise the vastness of space
available with the digital technology, or to proclaim freedom from the margins and the
edges of print.
31
An enhanced webcomic that has made use of such methods is one entitled “Born
Like an Artist,”10 by the artist known as Jellyvampire. She uses the possibilities of the
infinite canvas to create a vertically scrollable comic in which the idea of becoming
and evolving as an artist is explored. Initially, the images are contained within small
square-shaped panels, but eventually, the two main characters literally step outside of
the borders of the panels, and the subsequent drawings are drawn on the whole page,
regardless of the borders. The square panels still continue to appear in sequence, but
are left empty. Later on, the protagonist of the comic climbs on the back of the fox,
the “anthropomorphic personification of [her] artistic soul,” who flies “high above”
the drawn sequence of panels and shows her that “there are no borders”
(Jellyvampire). The infinite canvas is used here to underline the unlimited possibilities
an artist has in expressing herself creatively, especially with the aid of the digital
technologies. The same effect would be much harder to express in the traditional print
format as the physical bounds of the panels and pages would force the comic to be
broken in pieces, thus compromising the linearity and the overall sense of freedom.
From the point of view of Groensteen’s restricted arthrology, this assemblage works
well to show how the comic creates strong semantic meaning if understood as a
“whole” comprised of small interrelated units. Granted, using the infinite canvas and
large images prevents one from receiving several images at the same time, as one
could on two adjacent pages of a book. However, this is remedied by the fact that the
flow in infinite canvas enhanced webcomics is almost never interrupted, as is the case
in print format with the zig-zag reading pattern and the turning of the pages. Since the
progression in an infinite canvas enhanced webcomic is controlled by scrolling the
page, there is no need to jump from panel to panel with eye movements. One’s focus
can simply stay in the middle of the screen and absorb the information
uninterruptedly. This allows for an even more effective way of gathering information
using peripheral vision, as one does not have to disrupt the reading flow by looking
for the next logical panel and thus continuously changing the point of focus. What is
more, there are no pages to be turned, which, in print comics, can sometimes confuse
comic book readers (as the panels are not in an immediate vicinity), and force them to
re-examine the previous page in order to put the two in a causal and logical
connection.
10
http://jellyvampire.nettserier.no/1304892000/
32
Figure 4 Screenshot from Jellyvsampire’s Born Like an Artist. The comic highlights the
disappearance of the physical boundaries of print comics on the computer.
33
Superimposing images in order to produce a sense of depth is a rare but a very
creative way of exploiting the infinite canvas. Instead of creating large image files to
be explored on a two-dimensional plane by scrolling horizontally and vertically, one
can also opt to place them one on top of the other, and allow the viewer to scroll
“through” them, creating the effect of moving deeper into the comic. Neil Gaiman’s
poem The Day the Saucers Came11 was illustrated by Jouni Koponen in order to
achieve such an effect. It was created within the internet browser as a interactive web
application using JGate,12and it allows the user to navigate through the content by
either scrolling or clicking on the arrow buttons. The Day the Saucers Came consists
Figure 5 The flying saucers appear as the background in the second panel, while the penultimate (here
third) panel has all the previous as the background
11
12
http://infinitecanvas.jgate.de/view?name=The%20Day%20the%20Saucers%20Came
http://apps.jgate.de/
34
of screen-wide rectangular panels, containing both images and text, which are
programmed to fade out and be enveloped by the following image once the user clicks
“next” (figure 3). The animated transition moves the initial image into the background
of the next image (the flying saucers are first in the foreground, but appear in the
background once one proceeds to the next panel), thus creating the impression of
virtually moving backwards through the depth of the computer monitor. This process
is applied to each following panel (except the last one), so that the penultimate one
contains traces of each of the previous ones in the background. The method of taking
advantage of the infinite canvas in this example is the inverse of the one McCloud
hinted at in Reinventing Comics: “Navigating through a series of panels embedded in
each previous panel may create a sense of diving deeper into a story” (2000, 227), and
the same one he used to create The Right Number. 13 The multimodal nature of
webcomics can here be fully expressed with only one panel, as it, quite literally
contains all the previous ones. The sense of space and distance is also clearly
expressed, as the transition gives the illusion of moving further away from the initial
image.
The use of programming languages and other code-based structures as a means
to enhance the presentation and the functionality of online content is something that
has become a common practice. The HTML and CSS languages offer already a
myriad of customisable options regarding how the content of the webpage is to be
displayed on the screen. Advanced use of these programming languages allow for a
greater control, and more flexibility. In the previous example, these have been used to
create transitions in-between the panels, but that is only scratching the surface. Stevan
Živadinović’s Hobo Lobo of Hamelin14 is an example of an enhanced webcomic that
uses a complex combination of back-end code manipulation in order to create
impressive visual results on the front-end. Hobo Lobo is a story about a small village
of Hamelin and its inhabitants, which uses a “Parallexer framework” on an
McCloudian infinite canvas to create the illusion of motion in a three-dimensional
space. The author admits to being inspired by Andrew Hussie’s MS Paint Adventures,
and he realised that “in this day and age, there is little justification in keeping comics
within the constraints of early 20th century offset printing” (Živadinović 2011). As
the reader scrolls horizontally through the webcomic, the different objects built onto
13
14
http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/trn-intro/index.html
http://hobolobo.net/
35
the webpage start to move across the screen and react differently to the scrolling. The
background layer, for example, is placed “behind” the front layers, which are closer to
the point-of-view, and it moves across the screen slower than the layers in the
foreground. On the one hand, this creates a feeling of being in a three-dimensional
space, even though the layers are all “flat” planes. The text, as well as some other
objects and characters, appear gradually on the screen, prompted by reaching a certain
point on the page while scrolling. Živadinović’s enhanced webcomic uses the infinite
canvas, and several other features of web technologies, in a very dynamic way to
create an appealing story, which could not be accurately represented in the classic
comic book format without losing its defining peculiarities.
Živadinović’s choice to use the infinite canvas on the horizontal axis works well
for his comic, as a lot of the action happens within the same environment, and the
moving superimposed panels manage to convey a sense of ambience and progression
in the story. The use of vertical scrolling in enhanced comics, and on the internet in
general, seems to be the preferred option, since users are used to reading from pages
set up in portrait layout, and due to the natural inclination to treat the top as the
starting and the bottom as the ending point. However, the horizontal sequence of
images offers interesting ways of connecting the panels, and can help depict wider
scenes in clearer and more expressive ways. Cody Coltharp’s The Pale15 (figure 4)
likewise scrolls horizontally in the browser, but, unlike Hobo Lobo of Hamelin, it does
not separate pages or chapters onto different webpages. This story of a doctor and his
endeavours to help a young girl overcome her dream terrors is told on a single
webpage, in a single continuous horizontal scrolling strip. There are no clear-cut
demarcations of panel edges; instead the author uses diegetical elements within the
story to separate the single situations. The gutter, thus, sometime appears as a lamp
post, or any other vertical line that splits the strip in two, and divides one area of
action from the next one. There are no clear contour lines in the comic, and all the
brush strokes seem washed out and blurry. This works surprisingly well, as the author
is able to transition seamlessly between two very different settings, simply by
blending the colours together. As a result, it becomes easy to glide through the comic,
and the panels “bleed” into each other, encouraging the reader to scroll on. The sense
of the canvas being infinite is very much perceivable in The Pale, as there are no
breaks in between the chapters, nor a way to bookmark a place in the story and revisit
15
http://www.thepale.net/
36
it again at a later point. Unless one reads the story from beginning to end in one take,
there is a great risk of losing oneself in this immense horizontal strip. It resembles a
film reel, and to some extent, it shares resemblances with film. As a temporal
Figure 6 Example of the blurred gutter in Coltharp’s The Pale
medium, film does not allow the viewer to move back in the story and re-watch past
events (unless it is stopped and manipulated using a technological device). It naturally
moves forward, and just like in The Pale, going backwards is strongly discouraged. In
contrast to traditional comics books, where one can quickly flip through the pages and
get an overview by glancing at the pages and page numbers, in long horizontal
scrolling enhanced webcomics like The Pale, regressing to a specific point in the
narrative is much harder. The only indicator of spatial progress in The Pale is the
horizontal scroll bar that sits at the bottom of the browser window. This choice might
have been a stylistic one, in order to immerse readers into the story and push them to
read further. However, it is also an example of how the use of the virtually infinite
digital space may backfire in terms of clear overview of the content.
4.2. Moving Image and Sound
Moving image and audio playback are phenomena that have been introduced with the
technological revolutions of the 19th and 20th century. Being novel, dynamic, and
more attractive than static images and words, these media quickly caught on and
became a big part of popular culture. The appeal of animations and films resided in
the efficiency in making their content understandable and easy to digest. What I mean
by this is that, being visual media, animation and film presented the “already
37
assembled” content to the viewers, and required much less effort to make sense of the
story and connect its constitutive parts than, for example, literary works or comic
books. As aforementioned, McCloud makes the distinction between “received” and
“perceived” information: “pictures are received information. We need no formal
education to ‘get the message’. The message is instantaneous. Writing is perceived
information. It takes time and specialized knowledge to decode the abstract symbols
of language” (1993, 49). In literary works of prose, the narration is constructed using
descriptions, dialogue, paratextual elements, and other literary tools. In comics, this is
supplemented by the addition of images. The two practices ideally complement each
other and allow for more possibilities in terms of meaning-making. In contrast to
media based primarily on moving images, comics require active participation in the
shaping of the story, through connections made by moving from one panel to the
other. What is more, they also generally include a written part, which complicates and
enriches the experience. What in visual media of animation and film is already given
to the viewer, in comics it happens cognitively in readers’ minds. In McCloudian
terms, this has to do with closure, and in Groensteen’s analysis, it is connected with
arthrology. However, American cognitive scientist Neil Cohn argues against both of
the aforementioned concepts, as they are based on the idea that in comics
“space=time.” According to Cohn, the “duration” of panels in comics is problematic
and negotiable, as “images represent conceptual information” and “panels as units do
not stand for moments or durations in fictive time, but direct attention to depictions of
‘event states’ from which a sense of ‘time’ is derived” (Cohn 134; Cohn 2007). This
approach to the issue of time and space in comics puts even greater responsibility on
the reader to determine the connections between the instances of images and words,
and shapes their interpretation according to their own experiences and conceptions.
Cohn makes the example of a panel containing a dog, depicted so as to give the
impression that it is running in a circle chasing its own tail. This loop of action does
not offer any clear starting or ending point. Rather, it establishes a “durative concept
of a dog running in circles” (Cohn 2010, 133).
Having found their way onto the digital medium, comics started to explore the
different ways to achieve the sense of duration using web-based technologies and
tools. One simple method by which this was achieved involved using animated gifs
(Graphics Interchange Formats) as substitutes for static images. An animated gif is
“an image file format commonly used for images on the web and sprites in software
programs,” which “support[s] animations by allowing a stream of images to be stored
38
Figure 7 Screenshot from Thunderpaw. The top part is a static image, while the lower panel and
the blinking eyes in the background are animated gifs.
in a single file” (Techterms parr. 1-2). These animations are usually quite short and
they express a small action or movement of an object. In Thunderpaw,16gifs are used
throughout the comic in almost every panel where there is motion involved or a
change of colour. These images have a short duration, and are mainly used to create a
more atmospheric feel of the environment and the characters in the story. Thus, it is
common to see the panel flash with different colours if there is a thunderstorm
happening in the image, or, a character’s eye blink regularly. Sometimes, the artist
also includes more elaborate panels, which are wholly animated, such as in the cases
16
http://thunderpaw.co/
39
when the two main protagonists, Bruno and Ollie, are running or walking. This does
not happen often however, and is reserved for “important” situations, which might be
crucial to advancing the plot. It happens, for example on page three in the second
chapter,17 where Bruno and Ollie dig a hole and eventually end up in another location,
called “Pinemeade Heights,” where the whole chapter takes place. The background
here is a large animated gif image depicting blinking eyes of various sizes. It occupies
the whole screen, and it becomes a very engaging and eye-catching experience in
conjunction with the three out of four panels on the page being gif images as well.
These small animations do not substitute the interpretative cognitive effort that is
required in traditional print comics. There is still a gutter in-between the panels, and
the readers are asked to use the same hermeneutic process to connect the story bits as
the one they would use in comics with static images. The animated gifs are merely an
aesthetic enhancement, rather than a “cheating device” used in order to facilitate the
absorption of information.
Gifs could be even several hours long, and potentially contain a whole animated
scene or sequence in one image file. However, the format is restricted to 256 colours
for each frame of animation, which means that it has to use relatively simple colours
and shapes, as every image counts as a separate frame, and adds up to the total size of
the file (“GIF,” Wikipedia). Most, if not all web browsers are able to identify and load
gif files, which contributes to their usability, but having them in large size may defeat
their purpose. In the article “How Web Animation Works,” Tom Harris explains that
using gifs is
an excellent way of illustrating a simple concept, or just adding some eye-catching decoration
to your site; but Web designers and Web users found it to be wholly inadequate for
communicating more complex ideas or adding a real sense of motion to Web sites.
Furthermore, you can't add sound to a GIF animation. (par. 5).
Like a lot of comics and webcomics themselves, gifs appear to be somewhere inbetween two media. They are a hybrid form, being a part of both static images and
animation, but not completely belonging to either. However, being a characteristic
component of the digital age and Internet technologies, gifs fulfil their purpose in
allowing a fast and efficient way to portray movement and simple gestures. xkcd uses
them occasionally in order to create thought-provoking and cleverly enhanced
webcomic strips. The one entitled “Frequency”18 contains 50 different gif images of
flashing text, arranged on a 5x10 grid. The images read “heartbeat,” “Japan builds a
17
18
http://thunderpaw.co/comic/ch2/0203.html
http://xkcd.com/1331/
40
car,” and “someone breaks an iPhone screen,” to name a few, and the frequency at
which they flicker corresponds to the average frequency of those events occurring. In
the alt description of the images,19 the author notes that he even “wanted to include
the pitch drop experiment, but it turns out the gif format has some issues with decadelong loops” (“Frequency,” xkcd). The author of the webcomic experiments with the
loop durations of the animated gif format and discovers its limitations. A decade-long
animated loop sounds like an interesting experiment, but the impossibility of
achieving it in gif format indicates that the format was never intended to be used for
animating such long periods of time. As already noted, the gif format is best suited for
short and simple animations, and not as a fully developed film or animation. In his
analysis of online comics, Bukatman observes that
the lateral, bounded and looping animations that constitute a weakened version of the kind of
moving image […] do not take us anywhere, but only return us, repeatedly, to an initial state
(and stasis). These small, limited movements are a far cry from the real time immersion of
cinema or their close analogue, computer games, and are a far less definitive world of being.
(142)
In comparison to other webcomics that use fully developed animation, like The Art of
Pho, these modest attempts at energising the content of comics panels do not appear to
be transgressing into the medium of film or animation. Rather, they simply take
advantage of existing on websites, and use the properties thereof to provide the reader
with more detailed and engaging information, without entirely depending on them.
There are other forms of digital comics that use animation in a more absolute
way. “Motion comics,” for instance, rely substantially on animation in their
presentation. These comics are in a large part produced by prominent comic book
publishing houses, such as Marvel, DC Comics, and Dark Horse Comics, and they are
usually entirely animated, and supplemented with a soundtrack, sound effects, and
dialogue. Strictly speaking, they are videos or long flash animations, and as such they
usually come in a video format, such as mp4, avi, or flv. But unlike works that
originate as animations, motion comics appear as forcefully altered series of images,
with the only purpose being that of creating motion from a static format. While
adapting works of art to different media is a common and sometimes fruitful
endeavour, forcing such transitions can sometimes create confusing and controversial
results. In Japan, the transition from the static print form of comics (manga) onto the
screen as animated series (anime), showed great success in the 1990s and is still
19
“The alt attribute is used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify alternative text (alt text) that
is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered” (“alt attribute”,
Wikipedia, par. 1).
41
strong to this day (Mangold 2007). The manga elements and style were still very
perceivable in anime, but the medium of animation was clearly distinct from its print
counterpart. Motion comics, such as Hellboy: the Fury, still try to preserve the
essential qualities of static comic books while presenting them as animations. This,
however, results in somewhat awkward scenes, where the moving objects appear like
paper cut-outs moving across the screen. While in Hobo Lobo of Hamelin this was
intended and was at the basics of the comic, in Hellboy this seems to be a by-product
of the clash of the two media. Already in 2000, McCloud wondered: “If partial sound
and motion can help create an immersive experience — won’t full sound and motion
do the job more effectively?”, and if one adds a more detailed dimension of time
(through sound and motion), then comics’ unique “multi-image structure […]
becomes superfluous, if not a nuisance, and is not likely to endure” (210). While in
Thunderpaw the animated gifs were meant to be noticed and glanced at quickly while
reading and to give a slightly more accurate depiction of the motion happening in the
panels, in Hellboy and other motion comics the animation is an essential part of the
work and the reader is required to watch and listen to it.
There is a fundamental difference between the two, and it raises the question of
whether the second example can be considered to be a part of the comics medium at
all. As Priego states, “The absence of real sound and real-time animation reveal that
comics may do things on the screen that cannot be done on paper and vice versa, but
that synchronous animation with sound belongs to a different realm in which comics
stop being comics” (276-7). The fact that a lot of these motion comics are produced
by big comic book publishing houses and that they are usually superhero comics does
a further disfavour to the medium. Using quite elaborate and fancy animation
techniques in order to render an already successful commercial comic book even more
appealing and impressive to the target audience reveals the profit-oriented side of the
comics industry. Rather than using new media technologies in order to advance the
medium of comics, motion comics resort to sensational effects associated with the
lucrative media of animation and cinema. This behaviour points to the lack of selfworth in the medium of comics, which in the second part of the 20th century saw
comics authors attempting to legitimise their work by measuring it against the
standards of literary prose (the advent of graphic “novel”). The art style of Hellboy
and several other motion comics is undoubtedly that of comic books (more precisely
graphic novels), which can be enjoyable to watch to a certain extent. The stark
contrast within panels, the stylised brushstrokes, and the use of textures and digital
42
colouring all manage to evoke the appeal of a graphic novel. However, such partial
inclusion of “aesthetics of comics in other visual arts such as film or painting creates
the impression that comics is a genre” (Samanci and Tewari 28), and that superhero
narratives are all comics are good for. The motion comic Hellboy can then be seen as
an example of intermedia (Spielmann 2001), characterised by a transformation, that is,
a “new visible form that results from collision and exchange,” by which “different
elements are connected and merged into each other, thereby creating a new form”
(59). In the case of Hellboy, the new transformed form would be the result of
animating static images taken from the comic book, which is still strictly an
animation. The form of the comics is lost, and there remains only a decorative comics
feeling, which can be equated to genre. Enhanced webcomics have a lot of potential
and tools at their disposal to dispel this misconception and help the medium reach a
higher state of authority. However, exaggerating the cross-influence with other media
risks being a step backwards.
4.3 Co-Authorship and Reader-Driven Webcomics
The Internet, in its early stages, was primarily intended to facilitate communication
among universities and institutions, and crate a networked system for information
exchange. Yet, its potentialities were recognised soon after the first releases of the
World Wide Web and particularly personal computers. As it grew in size and in the
amount of users having access to it, the Internet became a realm on its own, and
generated its own culture that allowed anyone to participate and indulge in content
creation. Forum websites and wikis of all sorts encouraged users to contribute their
thoughts and knowledge in online communities. Wikipedia, the well-known free
online encyclopaedia, is one of the most ambitious and representative projects of the
“participatory culture,” as described by Jenkins (2006). It is emblematic of the
contemporary digital media environment, in which users act as both devourers and
producers of media content. Media and Communications scholar Christina Spurgeon
analyses the implications and the effects of co-creative media, and affirms that
“Participatory media are the keystone of digitally mediated ‘participatory culture’ and
are associated with bottom-up and lateral flows of networked communication and
information as distinct from the top-down, panoptic control architectures of broadcast
media” (2009). Media forms, such as YouTube videos in Spurgeon’s case, social
media, and webcomics in my case, shape – and are reshaped by – the participatory
culture, which is particular of the Information Age. Comics are a part of this
43
discourse, due to the huge amount of webcomics series and strips, which were created
or are strongly related to the concepts of co-creation and crowdsourcing. In contrast to
the previous three chapters, this last chapter will concentrate less on the aesthetic side
of enhanced comics, and instead consider more their formal aspects and generative
principles.
The characteristics of “rage comics”20 are an example of webcomics that are generally
not attributed to one single author or a team, but are modified freely by internet users,
and are considered to “belong” to online culture (figure 6). These comics are drawn in
a very simple, unsophisticated style, and are generally limited to four panels per
comic. The fourth panel is reserved for the punchline, generally a depiction of a
particular emotion or feeling resulting from the event that occurred in the previous
three panels. Know Your Meme, “a site that researches and documents Internet memes
and viral phenomena” (“About”), attributes the origins of rage comics to the
anonymous website 4chan, specifically to its /b/ board, which contains random posts
by anonymous contributors. The original comic received a lot of attention due to the
effectiveness of it message, and its basic layout and character expressions were reappropriated by other users. Soon, various other characters were created, particularly
after the comic received its own subreddit page on the popular community board
Reddit. The author of the first rage comic created only the first instance of it, which
then later developed uncontrollably. The 4chan community saw expressive potential
in it and carried on creating what could be considered sort of a “myth” around rage
comics by constantly adding new scenes and characters, and thus new meaning and
dimension to it. Patrick Carroll, who writes for The American Reader, described it as
“the monument of rage comics: readings build and build; comics stack up, one upon
the other; and millions of readers, set in front of screens, become passive storytellers,
each with his or her own personal constellation of past readings, which informs the
understanding of each new comic (par. 1). The readers of rage comics were at the
same time their authors. There was no specific site on the Internet where they were
collected; instead they scattered and found their habitat wherever a user felt the need
to use effective and recognisable visual art to tell a short story about their everyday
events.
20
http://ragecomics.com/
44
Fig. 6. Example of a four-panel rage comic, featuring “rageguy.” Source:
http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Pizza+rage+saw+it+on+rage+guy+comic+thought_5614e2_3444630.jpg
None of these users who created their own versions of rage comics could
genuinely call themselves the authors of rage comics. They were only authors of the
particular pieces of rage comics that they produced. This phenomenon provides a
particularly interesting example of how the relationship between authors and audience
has become obscured on the Internet. Due to the ease of accessibility and distribution
of content on the Internet, authors and readers have been assimilated into the same
category, and the line dividing them has become ever less clear. In her discussion of
comics and authorship, Christy Mag Uidhir refers to the auteur theory by explaining
that it
construes authorship as being largely a matter of a singular individual exerting sufficiently
substantial control over production of a work such that the work is seen as executing that
individual’s singular vision, being in that individual’s singular style, employing that
individual’s singular technique. (50)
Uidhir argues that this common assumption of an author need to be redefined in the
case of printed comic books, as there are usually more than one author contributing to
the final work—apart from the writer, there are also colourists, pencilers, inkers,
letterers and editors of a comic book, who are all in some part authors of the comic.
Rage comics are at even greater odds with this understanding of authorship. There is
45
no one singular author of rage comics, nor does any one of the rage comics “authors”
exert “substantial control” over their production. The vision, the style, and the
technique are generally the same in all rage comics, but they are shared, and not
“singular” to one individual. Being used by different people as a means to tell a story
or transmit a certain message may suggest that they are a genre or merely a topic (like
gaming or fantasy webcomics), and not a series or a part of a more centralised unit.
This, however, is also questionable, as they do not differ enough stylistically or
content-wise one from another. Gaming webcomics, such as Penny Arcade21 and
Ctrl+Alt+Del22 are similar thematically and appeal to a similar audience, but their art
style is different, as well as the characters and the layout. Rage comics have generally
all the same basic structure, and there are even specialised websites that allow users to
create them quickly by assembling familiar character faces onto the four-panel layout.
What differentiates them is the fact that their authorship is distributed among the
whole internet audience, making the Internet “participatory culture” the only true
author of rage comics.
Participatory nature of the digital realm can be extreme as in the case of rage
comics, but there are other forms of webcomics which express this urge in a more
controlled way. The text adventure-type of webcomics, for example, use reader
suggestions in order to involve the audience and acquire material for the plot. The best
known example of these are comics found on the MS Paint Adventures website,
created by Andrew Hussie. These comics originated on online forums, where readers
would provide suggestions in a form of a command, and the author would pick one of
them and illustrate the following panel with the outcome of the command. Initially,
they would be illustrated in a simple manner, and there would sometimes be more
than one update per day. Hussie states on his website that, in his first adventure comic
Jailbreak,23 his “policy was to always take the first suggestion no matter what, which
naturally led to a very haphazard feel to the story's progression” (“New reader?”, MS
Paint Adventures). At this stage, the user influence and participation was still quite
21
Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com/) is usually presented in a horizontal strip (having
generally three panels). The line thickness varies a lot, and there is limited use of shading. There are
two main characters (Gabe and Tycho) that are drawn with a variation of thick and thin outlines, and
they are featured in almost every issue of the webcomic.
22
The panels per comic in Ctrl+Alt+Del (http://www.cad-comic.com/) vary in number, and are
generally arranged vertically. There are three main characters (Ethan, Lilah, and Lucas), who are
featured often, but can also be substituted by other one-time-only characters. The comic frequently
uses photographic images as backgrounds or parts of the panel. The images are quite simply drawn but
are enhanced with additional graphical effects.
23
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=1
46
high, as the limitation of selecting only the first suggestion submitted led the story in
unexpected directions, and the “author” did not in fact have much freedom regarding
the progression and long-term planning. In his later works, Problem Sleuth24 and
Homestuck,25, Hussie asserted authority over the creation of the comic, and decided to
choose among the suggestions in Problem Sleuth, and consequently stop taking
suggestions altogether in Homestuck. In the first part of Problem Sleuth, for example,
one could still see the struggle for authorship between the illustrator/author and
reader/suggester. The suggestion box command in the second panel of the story said
“Retrieve your gun, there are dames to be rescued!”, which resulted in the third
illustrated panel to read “You are quite positive there has never been a gun in your
office, and never will be. Frankly, the notion strikes you as reckless and foolhardy.”26
Several other suggestion box commands were issued in the direction of making the
character Problem Sleuth exit his office room, but Hussie would always find an
alternative solution that would keep the character trapped in his office, implying a
certain feud between Hussie and the readers (figure 7). The result would usually be
comical and ridiculous, but it served as a very creative way to advance the plot. In this
regard, Rob Cover mentions in his paper on interactivity and audience in new media
texts that
the digital environment promoting interactivity has fostered a greater capacity and a greater
interest by audiences to change, alter and manipulate a text or a textual narrative, to seek coparticipation in authorship, and to thus redefine the traditional author-text-audience relationship
(140).
The webcomic thus becomes, in a certain sense, the locus of a contest between the
original author (the initiator) and the empowered audience for the dominion over the
progression of the story and its authorship. The digital environment provided the
necessary conditions for this to happen, which would not be as easy to suggest in
analogue format. Enhanced webcomics, such as Problem Sleuth and Homestuck
become hybrid both on the level of media used and on the level of authorship.
24
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=4
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6
26
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=4&p=000221.
25
47
Fig. 7. A panel from Problem Sleuth. The illustration is the result of the command on the top. The
hyperlinked command on the bottom takes the reader to the next page, where the outcome of it will
be illustrated.
Homestuck is an interesting case of a webcomic that allows the readers to
participate in the cration of the narrative. Just like Problem Sleuth, it often actively
disobeys reader suggestion, and provides frustratingly counterintuitive solutions. The
seemingly democratic system of suggestions promises a high degree in user influence,
yet Hussie often breaks this promise, with the intention of reacquiring control and
agency as the author of the webcomic. In the description section of the MS Paint
Adventure webpage, Hussie claims that his webcomics are “largely ‘reader-driven’ in
the sense that most of the text commands were supplied by readers through a
suggestion box. [Hussie] would select a command from the list, and then illustrate the
result of the command” (Hussie “New Reader?”). Admittedly, the author followed
these guidelines in creating Jailbreak, Bardquest and to some extent Problem Sleuth,
however, he abandoned this approach after the first year of Homestuck (“Suggestion
boxes are locked until further notice”), and proceeded adding content devised by him
48
only. While his audience was moderately small, receiving and reading through all of
the suggestions was still feasible and sensible, but once it grew into a fandom of
enormous proportions, the amount of interactions and suggestions became too
overwhelming. Hussie noted that, occasionally, he would still glance at the
suggestions for extra stimulus, in case he was uncertain how to embellish the story.
Once he disabled the suggestion boxes, he set out to develop the narrative with a clear
plan in mind. Although the progression was not as hectic and unpredictable as it was
with the commands supplied by the readers, Hussie admitted that a certain level of
absurdity was necessary in order to keep the story interesting and funny. He declared
that he managed to achieve the same effect by “reducing the reader’s role in guiding
the story;” this “made [storytelling] easier and more interesting. Reader commands are
fun for a while, but boring over the long haul, and detrimental to bringing a story to a
conclusion” (Meeks parr. 20-22). The principle on which the whole concept of MS
Paint Adventures was initially built was in the end suppressed by the same original
author. Hussie was supposed to be merely the illustrator, and the readers collectively,
the author. As a hypertexted text-adventure-game-style comics, Homestuck uses
hypertext as the basic structural element, which, according to Landow, “embodies
assumptions of the necessity for non-hierarchical, open-ended forms of politics and
government” (182). Yet, in Homestuck, the idea of a open-ended democratic
relationship between the reader and the author is only an illusion. In fact, as Owen
claims, interactive and “ludic elements are provided only in order that they can be
subverted, [and they give] rise to the illusory nature of democratisation in […] texts
(197). While it does not prove to be a wholly democratic and participatory comic in
the long run, Homestuck showed that such ambition is possible to achieve in an
enhanced webcomic, even if only in its early stages.
4.4 Interactivity
Once they found their way onto the computer screen, comics did not wait long to start
abusing the various qualities that come with digital existence. As a set of code that
exists in a digital format, comics had the opportunity to expose themselves to other
entities that share the same space. Videogames, for instance, were revealed to be a
highly influential medium, with user interactivity being their main asset. Interactive
creations rely on user feedback and input in order to function properly, and as such
promise a higher degree of engagement, and to some extent, intimacy in the userobject relationship. However, as Rafaeli and Sudweeks note, “Interactivity is a
process-related, variable characteristic of communication settings […] [it] is not a
49
characteristic of the medium. It is the extent to which messages in a sequence relate to
each other, and especially the extent to which later messages recount the relatedness
of earlier messages” (par. 9). Interactivity, thus, is not exclusive to one medium, and,
although it might seem so initially, it is not strictly related to computers and digital
technology. In the case of comics, interactivity was already experimented with in
print, and “since the 1980s comic book writers and artists have explored the
challenges of writing interactive narratives” (par. 1). These “choose your own
adventure”-style stories offered different narrative paths and endings, based on the
reader’s choice. They did not have much success in the long run, and soon they went
out of fashion, re-emerging subsequently, however, in the form of hypertext fiction.
Hypertext fiction texts operated on the principle of hypertext links, which would lead
the reader to the next desired page. Works such as Michael Joyce’s acclaimed
Afternoon, a Story (1987) or Hussie’s Homestuck (2009-) use hypertext links and
other choice-based commands to direct the flow of the story. In comparison to its print
counterpart, the digital interactive fiction offers a solution to the issue of space and
storage, and allows the reader to effortlessly navigate through a multitude of pages
with only a click of a button.
Interactivity on the digital medium is, however, not limited to hyperlinks. The
internet and computer technology allow for a wide range of customisation when it
comes to the presentation of content online. Internet browsers alone hold enough
power and complexity to be able to host visual and audible media, and have several
unique tools at their disposal. Flash animations and games embedded into the browser
can be used in combination with the medium of comics to create immersive visual
narratives. Daniel Goodbrey, a pioneer in interactive webcomics, has dedicated
himself to experimenting with the different ways comics and video games can come
into contact with each other. His starting point are “hypercomics,” a union of
“hypertext” and “comics,” which he considers comics “with a multicursal narrative
structure” (Goodbrey 2013). He goes further and proposes his original “game comics”
as an even newer hybrid form, which contain elements of both comics and games,
beyond the mere use of hypertext. His game comic Icarus Needs27 stars the polygonalshaped character Icarus, who is trapped in a dream, and finds himself in a maze-like
world that he needs to find a way out of. The user immediately assumes control of
Icarus and is prompted to explore the world and solve puzzles in order to progress
27
http://www.kongregate.com/games/stillmerlin/icarus-needs
50
further. By using the directional buttons on the keyboard, the user is able to move
Icarus to the next panel, collect items found on the way, and interact with various
characters and object that he encounters. By finding the key and entering the panel
with the figure guarding a door, Icarus, and also the user, is able to proceed further.
The panels in this enhanced comic are all of equal shape and size, arranged evenly on
the screen in a 3x3 grid, with the centre one always being where the action happens.
Figure 8. A screenshot from Goodbrey’s Icarus Needs. The user is prompted to explore the panels and find
a crown to proceed further. The list on the left shows the objectives that need to completed.
The shift to the next panel that occurs at the press of a directional button appears as
animated motion, even though the images are all static. The transitions also trigger
speech bubbles, usually when Icarus finds an item, or when he meets another
character. All of the panels are retraceable, meaning that one can always go back and
revisit the previous environments at least once, but Icarus’s thoughts and interactions
are one-time-only.
This emphasis on discovery seems to be the main point where comics and
games meet in Goodbrey’s game comics. In fact, Andrews et al. observe that “this
makes comics comparable to games in the sense that games, too, encourage non-linear
progression via their interaction and, whilst they may have a preferred reading, by
their very nature encourage the exploration or creation of narratives” (1703). On a
printed page the exploration occurs simply by glancing from one panel to another and
mentally creating connections between them (what McCloud called closure and
Groensteen braiding). In Icarus Needs, this happens more directly and in a much
51
clearer way, as the transitions help to give a sense of movement. These, in conjunction
with the “needs” that remain written on the left side of the screen, constitute a
“‘constructionist’ approach [, which] views the reader as engaging in a ‘search after
meaning’ which involves developing a set of goals to guide the reading (primarily in
terms of the goals assigned to the characters in the story, but also to the role that the
reader opts to take)” (Andrews at al. 1704). Goodbrey’s Icarus Needs is structurally
and aesthetically a true hybrid of comics and games, so much so that one has trouble
even finding an appropriate term to refer to the recipients of this enhanced comic (are
they readers? viewers? players? users?). While it does have a lot of comics elements,
Icarus Needs seems to be characterised by even more rules and features related to
games, and could thus be called, perhaps more appropriately, a comicstrip game,
rather than a game comic.
Icarus Needs requires one to use the keyboard to move the character and interact
with the environment. While this is certainly one way of engaging the reader with this
digital creation, there are still some others which employ more subtle measures.
Hovering and clicking with the mouse cursor, for example, is one of these. It is used
very frequently in enhanced webcomics, such as The Art of Pho28 by Julian Hanshaw,
and Murat29 by Šeda and Novák, to solve simple puzzles and reveal more information.
Though it originated in print, online The Art of Pho is an “interactive graphic novel
[with] the dimensions of sound, music, animation and interactivity” (Hanshaw,
“About Art of Pho”). It tells the story of Little Blue and his quest of making the
perfect dish of Pho in the city of Saigon. The comic consists of animated comics
panels, which regularly have an object or area surrounded in bright blue halo, which
catches readers’ attention, and suggests that the highlighted area is clickable. Already
in the first panel of the webcomic the reader is given the agency of participating in the
unfolding of the narrative. The mouse cursor turns into a car key as one hovers over
the panel, and upon inserting the key into the ignition, the car turns on and starts the
animated sequence. Other interactive moments involve clicking and holding on the
gas pedal to move the car icon on the screen, clicking on images of doors to walk in,
or moving Little Blues’ hand to collect the falling ingredients into a bowl. It is
possible to avoid interaction and move forward in the narrative by clicking on the
timeline below the main window, but doing so would mean excluding relevant and
28
29
http://artofpho.submarinechannel.com/
http://nonstopbar.com/
52
rich information acquired by completing the aforementioned small tasks. Šeda and
Novák’s Murat is built on a similar principle. Each page consists of several panels,
some of which are already animated loops, while others necessitate a click in order to
start the loop. This black and white interactive comic is also supported by a
background tune, but unlike The Art of Pho, it does not contain word bubbles. The
third screen is particularly interesting, as it shows several panels stacked randomly on
the screen, which the user-reader is expected to drag and drop in the appropriate
position marked by dotted lines. Once this step is completed, the now correctly
arranged panels animate, and a flashing button appears in the top panel. Pressing it
activates the machine assembled in the panels, and it produces a bottle. The next few
clicks are indicated by a spinning arrow icon, and once they are executed, the reader is
allowed to proceed to the next page. The creation of meaning, and to some extent,
even the arrangement and the content of the panels are up to the readers to decide how
they want to perceive them. They can choose to let them be, and skip to the next part,
or they can interact and absorb all the information the enhanced comic offers them. In
the case of Murat, interactivity is inescapable if one wants to continue “reading.” It
encourages the reader to look for the hidden cues and attempt to investigate even the
static objects which were not meant to be inter-actable.
As shown, some enhanced webcomics can contain various interactive features.
Comics such as Murat or Icarus Needs can contain so many of them that it might be
confusing, and even disappointing, when a certain element on the screen is not
interact-able. Hussie’s Homestuck resembles these in that it often offers the readers
the chance to interact, and on several different levels. The first instance of this is
through the use of interactive flash media files embedded within the webpage, and the
second through the suggestion box, as explained in chapter 4.3. using the example of
Problem Sleuth. The latter level of interactivity is only achievable at the point of the
creation of the panel, and not at any other point. As a mock text-adventure game,
Homestuck used reader suggestions in order to proceed with the story, or was at least
inspired by them. This sort of author-reader interactivity only existed for the most
recent entries, as once the reader decides to experience the story from the beginning,
the selected commands would already be there, and there would be no more
possibility to suggest alternative command options. As a result, to a new reader,
Homestuck might seem as an interactive fiction game at first glance, but after a closer
examination, it is revealed that there is choice of interaction. A good example of this
appears already in the first few panels. Upon viewing the first page, the reader is
53
prompted to enter a name for the character depicted.30 The command appears as a
hyperlink and it is even preceded by a “>” sign, which was commonly used in early
text-adventure games to signal a command. Clicking on the link leads to the next
panel, which contains a text input area and a blinking cursor. Presumably, the natural
reader response would be to start typing desired name for the character, as it seems
that this interactive comic is allowing that to happen. However, the panel is revealed
to be a gif image, which automatically spells “ZOOSMELL POOPLORD,” and soon
after “TRY AGAIN SMARTASS.” By clicking the “Try again” command on the
bottom, it is expected of the game/comic (one is not sure anymore) to allow for
another try. Once again, it results in another gif that disregards completely the reader’s
keyboard input. These commands thus appear as if they are giving the reader to have a
say in the shaping of the story. The reader’s possibilities are, however, almost always
restricted to navigating to the next page using the already written hyperlinks below the
panels. This false sense of involvement in the progression of the narrative is unique to
this genre of webcomics. The commands that serve as hyperlinks indicated that the
comic was interactive at some point in time, but that the same kind of interaction at
that particular point in the story is not possible anymore.
30
http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6
54
5. Epilogue: A New Frontier for Comics
In the previous chapter, I have presented in detail several examples of enhanced
webcomics that use the particularities of new media (some more extensively than
others) with the intention of creating an engaging narrative or developing a comics
work in a more experimental way. I will now draw some final, more general,
conclusions regarding the nature of those webcomics, and the implications they have
for the medium of comics. Proceeding in a logical order, I will comment on the
different styles and techniques discovered, their classification, the form in which they
appear, and the issue of transgressing the boundaries of the comics medium.
The use of infinite canvas in enhanced comics appears to be one of the most
logical routes traditional comics take when transferred onto the digital medium.
Having been enclosed by the borders of the printed page since their popularisation,
comics exhibited a natural need to free themselves from the imposed format once the
opportunity presented itself. The main advantage that comics on new media platforms
have is, needless to say, that of the virtually unlimited space. Taking advantage of this
space is carried out in two different ways in the case of enhanced webcomics: one is
related to the possibility of storing an enormous amount of information using the
materiality of the digital code (virtual space), and the other involves having a twodimensional plane canvas (browser window) of potentially infinite dimensions. The
first one is shared among all the instances of digital comics and even digitised comics.
The second (infinite canvas) can be regarded, instead, as a structural technique used in
order to underline the aesthetics and the message of the comic. Unless the infinite
canvas enhanced webcomic is using another way to “enhance” its presentation, it does
not seem to distantiate itself too far from the traditional print comics. The only major
difference between the two forms concerns the layout and the arrangement of the
various comics-specific modes, which generally remain the same. Therefore,
enhanced comics characterised by the use of infinite canvas can still be considered a
continuation of the comics medium.
Enhanced comics that incorporate various effects relating to the art of moving
image and sound are much more ambiguous and difficult to assess. They can use a
variety of animation and sound-enhancing techniques, which can range from being
simple aesthetic embellishments to being a functionality principle at the core of the
comic. Enhanced comics containing quick animated transitions, sound effects, or
55
simple and short animated gifs do not bring the issue of the comics medium into
question. As a matter of fact, using them cautiously can contribute considerably to the
appeal of the comic and even reinforce some of the characteristic comics modes. The
message and the functioning of such comics are not too dependent on these small
elements, as they only provide additional information. They normally do not carry the
plot, as the dialogue and action is usually too complicated to be expressed in a short
gif or a sound effect. It is crucial that these elements keep their supplementary
function if one wants to preserve the medium of comics. In fact, the point where
enhanced comics start to transition into the medium of moving image is when they
start to use animated sequences and voice-over in order for the story to progress.
Depending too much on these elements in a self-proclaimed webcomic beats the
purpose of using comic-like structure and modes, as the “comicness” becomes merely
a stylistic trait. In those cases, the narration or the means of communicating
information (medium) are no longer panels, speech balloons, and graphic sound
effects, but rather animated sequences and sound files, which belong to another
medium.
An even more problematic classification concerns the comics that use
interactive elements as a part of their structure. Out of the four types of enhanced
webcomics, these digital creations are the most connected to the web and the digital
world, as they use many features unique to the digital medium on which they are
hosted. Hyperlinks and digital mark-up languages, such as HTML and CSS, are the
basic functions enhanced comics can use to build a narrative and present their content
in an interesting and engaging way. Just as in the case of digital comics using the
techniques of moving image and sound, interactive digital comics can incorporate user
interactivity in a sparing or exaggerated way. Using hyperlinks to guide the reader
through the narrative or provide supplementary information can result in an efficient
and rich presentation. Likewise, any other function that uses the back-end dimension
(the code) of the new media in a creative way to display content can add to the reading
experience of the comic and enhance the comics modes further. Hovering the mouse
to zoom into the details of a panel, using hypertext for easy navigation across the
comic contents, or clicking on a certain part of the panel to have it reveal more
information or start a short animation are some of the examples that come to mind.
However, when the use of these possibilities becomes excessive, they compromise the
identification of such a digital creation as a part of the comics medium. Comic-like
digital works that require an excessive amount of user interaction tend to cross into
56
the field of video games.. If the story is told by solving puzzles or performing more
complicated digital tasks, the comics elements risk acquiring a secondary status, and
appear to be used for decoration. In such cases, the roles of the two combined
mediums are switched: one cannot speak anymore of a comic enhanced by means of
interactive and game elements, but rather of a game enhanced by means of comics
elements.
Another type of interaction perceivable in comics on digital media is that
regarding the relationship between the author, the reader and the text. While in the
previous case, the interaction with the enhanced comic was performed by “reconstructing” the content (reader-text interaction), in the case of co-authored and
reader-driven webcomics the interaction happens by “co-constructing” the content
(reader-author interaction). The advent of digital media allowed for an easier access to
information and facilitated communication among people, which lead to a formation
of hubs and forums on the Internet, where co-created, reader-driven comics find their
origins. Rather than being enhanced in the presentation of their content, reader-driven
webcomics are enhanced on a more extra-narrative level. They do not present a
deviation from a comics convention as a result of a fusion with another medium, but
rather, they offer a new way of creating comics on the Internet. These comics make
use of the fast-paced dynamics of new media in order to produce a large amount of
content. Granted, since this community of collaborators does not necessarily need to
be professionally adapt at creating comics, the results usually appear amateurish, both
visually and verbally. However, they can very well be considered a new narrative
form, which uses the modes and the properties characteristic of the comics medium.
They tend to be very viral, which confirms how the comics medium can be used in an
effective way to tell a story or a gag on new media as well. However, most of these
webcomics are very informal and chaotic, since there are usually no restrictions as to
who can participate in creating them. This aspect might not be doing the medium of
comics a favour, as the latter is struggling already to free itself from the prejudice of
being non-serious and unable to yield great works of art.
Having said that, what are some general remarks that can be deduced from this
analysis of enhanced webcomics? In the first place, one can observe that there is more
than just one way in which they can be enhanced. Since they exist digitally alongside
other media forms, digital comics can find many ways of influencing and being
influenced by them. The format in which they appear is much more flexible and
welcoming than the print format of comic books, which allows comics artists to
57
experiment with it in various ways. Comics, film, music, visual art, literature, etc. can
now be expressed and created using the same basic constitutive material known as the
digital code. It is important to notice that this convergence of media onto one single
medium container caused a coming together of the spatial and the temporal media.
Print media, such as comic books, are a spatial medium, in the sense that their basic
units of meaning are arranged spatially on the page, which the readers interpret and
absorb at their own pace. The sense of duration of an action or utterance is implied
and inferred by the comic, and it is mentally constructed by the readers themselves.
There is no way of completely grasping the idea of passing time in print media, as it is
still not possible to embed a temporal format (video or sound file, for example) into
that of a paper page. However, this obstacle is surpassed by using new media.
Temporal media, such as film and animation, are able to reproduce the exact duration
of an action, as they transfer information by arranging units of meaning in a timeline.
Since these two kinds of media used different formats for their distribution, they were
not able to interact with each other in an intimate way. Digital media enabled this, and
gave rise to hybrid forms of media, one of which is the form of enhanced webcomics.
Since they fall under the encompassing term of comics, one might be tempted to
treat enhanced comics as a genre. This mix-up is intensified due to the fact that a lot
of webcomics use the topic of video games as their main source of inspiration, as the
gaming community is one of the most active and productive in the online world. Like
comic books were misconceived to be appropriate only for stories in superhero genre,
enhanced webcomics might soon face the risk of being reduced to gaming comics. It
does not help either that the latter are often also structured using interactive elements.
This may lead to confusion and conflation of the two. However, to clarify, one is a
theme or a genre (gaming comics), while the other is a form in which a digital comic
can appear (interactive enhanced webcomic). The gaming genre consists of references
to the medium of video games, while the interactive form makes use of it and some of
its formal characteristics. It is nevertheless a misunderstanding that can be expected to
happen, as humans often tend to look for patterns and classify objects accordingly.
With enhanced webcomics, the pattern that groups them together is not content-based,
but rather is based on their structural difference from “ordinary” webcomics. It can
thus be said that what groups them together is not a similarity but a difference, or
rather a supplement, which makes them “something more than” just webcomics.
Enhanced webcomics is a category of works, which may cover various subjects and
art styles, as they have various tools and techniques at their disposal; just like
58
alternative comics, enhanced webcomics are classified on the basis of their
heterogeneous nature: they are composed of a multitude of works, which are not
necessarily similar to each other. Referring to enhanced webcomics as a genre would
thus be akin to calling graphic novels a genre of comics or short stories a genre of
literature. Such terms undermine the importance of the form of the work of art, and
particularly the choices the author has made in order to characterise their work
according to a specific aesthetic principle. These structural choices are, in fact, often
taken in order to work “with” the theme of the comic. Employing these techniques is
usually not the ultimate goal of the enhanced comic (unless it is purely experimental),
but rather a way of saying something more effectively.
What then do enhanced webcomics say about the medium of comics? Does their
appearance on the scene benefit the medium or does it do it harm in any way? In order
to answer these questions it is necessary to detach the notion of comics from the
notion of comic books. The former is a medium, and the latter a form, or rather, a
format in which the medium appears. The conceptualisation of comics as tied to the
comic book is understandable, since the medium was born and popularised in print,
and some of its main characteristics, such as the speech ballon, the motion lines, and
the graphic sound effects, emerged precisely because of the limitations of print. But
now that the medium has managed to become integrated on the digital realm, would it
not be wise to take advantage of the temporal properties of the latter, and substitute
the original traits of comics with the more realistic and natural ones offered by the
digital media? Most comics scholars would probably vote against this procedure, as
the “shortcomings” of print represent the characteristic appeal and form of classic
comics. Yet, it might prove to be a fruitful endeavour to experiment with the ways to
incorporate more realistic and innovative representations of space and time, and still
preserve the original feeling of comics-specific elements. Of course, for the sake of
developing the medium of comics, one would have to be careful not to venture too far
away from its borders. Comics has already been chastised for attempting to find
confirmation and approval in history and literature, by being treated narrowly as
merely a genre, or by being generalised broadly to the point of losing a lot its
specificity. However, with enhanced webcomics, comics authors and scholars have
the opportunity to learn from previous mishaps and look for that golden middle, which
could further the medium in terms of its authoritativeness as an art form.
As enhanced webcomics represent the meeting point of the medium of
comics with other media that are able to take on the digital format, the main issue
59
surrounding them is that regarding their hybridity. The interplay of the different media
on computer screens raises the question of whether there is even a need to devise a set
of criteria to use in order to classify a certain new media product as belonging to one
particular media. Does it even make sense to divulge into meticulous deconstruction
of the different aspects of a work, in which one can notice more than one medium in
action? Would it make more sense to simply identify those works as a bizarre mashup of formal and aesthetic principles, and attribute them to new impromptu medium,
labeled as “uncategorised” or “other”? The answer, I think, varies depending on the
starting point from which one sets out to analyse those works. Coming from a
discipline of cinema or literary studies, having those hybrid creations put under the
“uncategorised” label, or claiming them as belonging to their own media would not
matter much in the end. Literature and film are already established and well defined,
and would suffer little from being contaminated by other media. They hold a high
level of authority, and run little risk of having to reassess their basic principles and
core features. Comics, on the other hand, has to be much more careful in choosing
how it defines itself—and in relation to what. The medium is still suffering from
identity crisis, as it has become clear with scholars’ continuing struggle to find an
appropriate definition of what comics actually is. It has tried to lean on the visual arts,
as well as literature, for support, to allow it to gain legitimacy as a form. However,
this has caused even more confusion and disagreements among scholars regarding the
origin, nature, and purpose of comics. Appropriating blindly any hybrid form
containing comics elements as belonging to the medium of comics, then, would only
complicate the matter further. With that in mind, this dissertation undertook the
endeavour of clarifying the current situation of comics on digital media. Using a
combination of theoretical approaches from both comics studies and media theory, I
analysed the four most significant manifestations of comics in digital format,
assessing the degree to which they can still be attributed to the medium of comics.
The results varied from case to case, but they showed nevertheless that enhanced
webcomics are not merely internet doodles, but that they are to be taken seriously, as
they are able to advance the medium of comics in new and creative ways on the
emerging digital media.
60
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I hereby allow the Amsterdam University Library to archive this digital thesis in a repository and
publicise and make it available for consultation upon request.
Amsterdam, 26 June 2015.
Josip Batinic
67