"Enhanced Webcomics": An Analysis of the Merging of Comics and New Media

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University of Amsterdam Spring Semester 2015 Department of Media Studies

New Media and Digital Culture

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 josip.batinic@hotmail.it 06 264 633 34 26 June 2015

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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,

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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”

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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 media-specific 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

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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).

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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

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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 trans-material, 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

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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

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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

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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-network-blog/2012/mar/19/attention-span-internet-consumer>.)

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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

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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 _CSS _effects _applied _to _a _link _see

http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_link.asp.

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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.

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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 meta-discursive 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/.

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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

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(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

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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 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

Figure 1 Typical example of the Principle of Closure. The missing outlines of the triangles are mentally constructed.

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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

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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. Re-reading 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.

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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