Remediation processes and reading protocols: A genealogy of digital comics

Abstract

This article attempts to unpack the complexity of digital comics by quickly reconstructing their salient evolutionary lines, contextualizing them within the broader media landscape and discussing the directions they are prominently developing. It begins by tracing the many remediations that have marked the history of comics, foregrounding some tensions underlying the comics form: seriality and its implications; the dialectic between popular form and artwork; and the influence of orality, most evident in their early days and again, many years later, after the digital turn. In particular, we will highlight the close relationship between cinema and comics and, after the advent of digital, between the latter and video games. In underlining affinities and divergences between diverse media forms, the article focuses on two particularly significant examples: Lorenzo Ghetti and Carlo Trimarchi’s To Be Continued, a webcomic capable of experimenting with and enlivening many of the possibilities of digital comics; and Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck, probably the most successful compromise between the complexity of plot, storyworld breadth and formal features on the one hand, and expansive, participatory transmediality on the other. In doing so, this article aims to achieve a quick yet compelling overview of digital comics from the perspective of media archaeology, situating them both diachronically throughout their history, and synchronically, in relation to the other media that feed them and are in turn fed by them, cyclically, across media boundaries.