Distinguishing Mediality: The Problem of Identifying Forms and Features of Digital Comics

Lukas R.A. Wilde,2015



identifying different modes in specifics is less relevant than how they're used and how it's important, it's complex

talks about how infinite canvas isn't 'new' - it's a way of making historial storytelling like trajan's column, cathedral ceilings, accessible. McCloud, Bukatman

print has pages by necessity, and that has created principles of pacing, rhythm and panel delivery > connected to hyperlinks, in digital this same concept has more flexibility
-and digital comics are a new reference point that allows people to think more about the theories and properties of print comics

feature common of all webcomics i: higher degree of flexibility to choose own forms and limitations - mediality is becoming more fluid

highlighted notes under cut:



Do digital comics constitute a different “medium” than print comics? Many researchers have discussed whether comics make up a medium at all. The problem seems to be, in contrast to films or video games, the absence of a defining technology. Whatever separates a given “medium” in a conventional sense from others, however, doesn’t actually lie in its technological, material or semiotic properties, but in its culturally qualifying aspects:
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Comics are considered ‘conventionally-distinct media’ within a larger ‘media convergence culture’ (cf. Jenkins 2006a; 2006b; Gardner 2012) and are compared and contrasted to other narrative media like film or videogames. Whenever other media try to emulate or “remediate” a specific comic book “look” by references to comic book aesthetics (think of Sin City or Scott Pilgrim, cf. Bolter & Grusin 2000; Thoss 2014), an established medial identity of comics is taken for granted. Understanding forms of media purely as technological arrangements or technical systems betrays a vast underestimation of their symbolic, semiotic and cultural side (cf. Ryan 2005, 15; Herzogenrath 2012). Where then does a “digital comic” fall in terms of these aspects? Does the comic, as one such “medium”, simply travel into another technological distribution context, as McCloud and many others seem to think (cf. McCloud 2000)? Or should we rather speak of a “new medium”, closer to animation or browser games where movement, sound or interactive features are involved (cf. Goodbrey 2013b)?
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Firstly we will consider a distinction of formal aspects, focusing on different ways to conceptualize new modes or features (like movement or sound) in terms of digital or analog mediality. The second formal aspect will address the Infinite Canvas and it’s “opposite”, the breakdown of narrative units through distribution on several physical pages. Both techniques have been addressed as specific for the respective “medialites” of digital and print; this article will point out the flexibility of both arguments to be turned around, depending on the observer’s respective presuppositions. Finally, we will address the influence of neighboring media (literature, film or fine art vs. websites and blogs) as points of comparisons. The aim is not to present an exhaustive survey on the complicated and disputed discussions about the mediality of comics (cf. Wilde 2014), but rather to indicate how this mediality can and should be understood also as a (changing) cultural conceptualization of what to expect of “comicness”.


A good starting point to connect both approaches in order to pin down the relations between digital and analog comics should be Elleström’s model for intermedial relations (2010). This combines a quite complex notion of “multimodality” with a nuanced
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understanding of culturally “qualifying aspects”. At first sight, a notion of multimodality seems crucial to understand comics’ specifics. In the theoretical framework developed from social semiotics, a “mode” is understood as a semiotic resource: ‘signifiers […] that have been drawn into the domain of social communication’ (van Leeuwen 2005, 4; cf. Kress 2010). To consider such modes seems essential, not only because of the alleged image/text ‘intersemioticity’ of comics (Groensteen 2014, 105) that has often been described as a multimodality between iconic and symbolic signs (cf. Rippl & Etter 2013, 193), but also because of changes in webcomics modal resources.
However, that lies outside the scope of this article. The identification of modes is at best vaguely connected to the identification of “media” in a cultural sense
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In summation, to study the mediality of digital comics it might be more useful to take a discourse analysis approach and observe the “differences that make a difference”, instead of producing new ones ourselves. These include the rhetorical effects of qualifying features and differentiating forms marked by other observers, their dependence on other media as points of comparison or distinction, and their actualization (or ignorance) of technical, institutional, cultural and semiotic potentials.


The most obvious example for a distinction not called for within print culture would be to define a difference from animation. Confronted with experimental webcomics and motion comics this is a pressing task for theorists and practitioners alike. Film and media scholar Scott Bukatman observed that the McCloud/Groth debate (see footnote 2) was centered precisely on ‘the proper “place” of movement’ (2011, 137) and on an alleged “pollution” of the conceptual purity of comics by this foreign matter. Less to argue for an essentialist approach, but rather for clarity of definition, comics scholar Jakob F. Dittmar also
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notes: ‘If these stories contain film and/or audio elements, they are no longer comics in accordance with the established definition of this class of media’(2012, 88; emphasis mine – L.W.). This establishment, however, is exactly what is at stake here. If movement and sound are clearly different “modes” – in terms of their spatiotemporal and sensorial reception, as well as in terms of semiotics – how could they be treated as comics? Since sound and movement are both time-based phenomena, they seem to contradict comics’ conception of space as representation of time – the ‘conceptual fundament of the medium’ (Bukatman 2011, 134).7 Daniel Merlin Goodbrey pursues this question with references to practitioners such as director Guilermo del Toro, webcomic artists Demian Vogler (Demian.5) and John Barber or cartoonist Yves Bigerel, who all seem to agree that ‘Comics are Control’ (2013a, 194). Barber argues that: ‘In reading, the reader controls the rate at which information is absorbed. This is inherent in comics; this is what separates comics from film’ (cf. ibid., 195; Barber 2002). If, however, not movement per se seems to be the crucial issue, but the control over movement, even highly animated webcomics like Stevan Živadinović’s Hobo Lobo of Hamelin (2011) could still be placed within comics’ mediality. After all, the reader is still able to scroll the animations back and forth ‘according to individual pacing and interests’ (Dittmar 2012, 89). The control over movement ‘repositions the moving image as a syntagm within a larger signifying structure’, Bukatman concedes (2011, 142), therefore differing greatly from the real-time immersion of cinema or videogames. With an even more refined eye for conceptual distinctions, Goodbrey even points at a “printed-page working precedent” for autonomously looping animations as can be found in Vogler’s When I Am King (2001) and Patrick Farley’s First Word (2012). He notes that:
A simple example… [in print] …might be a dog chasing its own tail. The reader sees within a single panel the same dog in multiple positions as it rotates in place (Goodbrey 2013a, 194).

Such ‘polymorphic panels’, as cognitive scientist Neil Cohn coined them (2010, 131), do show continuous movements as conceptual units – to Goodbrey as an observer, animated Gifs are therefore just an updated version of that same old principle. It is not the “modality” as such that serves as a qualifying aspect for the inclusion or exclusion of/from media boundaries, but the conception of the modality as exemplifying media-specific forms.
In the case of both Reader Control and Polymorphy, newly found (or marked) features and forms work to sharpen our understanding of “normal” comics. They also serve to render analog and digital techniques as variations of the same, more abstract principle within the same mediality. In other cases this rhetoric is turned around. The form (of analog/digital-differentiation) most often used would be McCloud’s Infinite Canvas. Dittmar argues that the ‘lack of any printed page leads to an end of conventional narrations and dramaturgical necessities,’ (2012, 84). The countless uses of the ‘unbroken reading line’ (McCloud 2000, 218) as a conceptual principle has been the object of many studies since, marking it as webcomics’ pivotal aesthetic feature. Apparently, it seems only feasible in the realm of the digital. However, if we take a look back at the term’s origins in Reinventing Comics, nothing could be further from McCloud’s intentions than to mark a watershed to “actual” comic tradition. The opposite is the case, as Bukatman saw clearly:
Citing the precedents of walls of hieroglyphs, the Bayeux Tapestry, Trajan’s Column and the Codex Nutall… [McCloud] …notes that each produced an “unbroken reading
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line” that exists in contradistinction to the later experience of reading that followed from print culture’s segmentation of information onto separate pages (2011, 139).
Although McCloud’s understanding has been criticized (cf. ibid.), what is of relevance here is the respective notion of technologically caused alterations. In McCloud’s reading, print is the technology that interrupted a tradition, rather than the other way round.8 To him the principle of the unbroken line is made accessible again by online comics.

This flexibility to be exploited as a qualifying factor for both sides for the analog/digital-divide is equally provided by the Infinite Canvas’ “opposite”: the breakdown of narrative units through distribution on several physical pages. The interruption of the continuous flow of reading and the necessity to turn a page can be understood as a technical condition brought on by print or it can be conceptualized as a design principle, which is especially salient in digital comics. Goodbrey observes the concept of the page turn in the digital compositional principle of Panel Delivery, i.e. the grouping of panels to narrative and rhythmic units, separated and connected by hyperlinks (as in the “interactive comic documentaries” of Cartoon Movement: ‘Chicago is My Kind of Town’ by Luke Radl, 2012, or ‘The International Criminal Court’ by Dan Archer, 2013). This principle builds on traditional ‘compositional tricks and tropes established by print’ (Goodbrey 2013a, 190), such as the micro-cliffhanger at the bottom of a page. Within the digital, the technique gains higher flexibility, allowing creators to set their own (sometimes surprising) pace throughout the narrative. Goodbrey elaborates that in ‘a traditional comic the pace of advancement through the story is fixed to the repetitive beat of the page turn. In contrast, advancement through a digital comic does not have to be tied to the same rhythm’ (ibid.,191). Reevaluations of the Infinite Canvas and Panel Delivery highlight how used we ar to print and the physical conditions it imposes. So much so that scholars no longer consider it as a technology and possible distinguishing part of comics’ mediality. One of digital comics’ potentials might lie in this very chance ‘to think comic theory differently’, as media theorist Ramòn Reichert put it (2011, 138). Mediality and materiality are not then, as Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl would have it, ‘two sides of the same coin’ (2010, 8).9 Rather, materiality can always become crucial to the mediality of comics, mostly as a dormant potential, offering to be marked as a resource for meaningful differences
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The huge increase of studies on comic books’ physical and corporeal properties in recent years is doubtlessly informed by digital comics’ enormous increase in popularity as a new point of comparison and distinction.

These usually don’t highlight semiotic dimensions of mediality, but rather institutional and cultural ones, resulting in studies that focus on the communicative and interactional functions of online comics (cf. Hicks 2009; Banhold/Freis 2012, 174). Again it becomes possible for scholars to conceptualize comics as a whole, both analog and digital, by these new criteria. In

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The most interesting differentiation between analog and digital comics might then not lie in new features that were made possible ‘through the affordances of the new medium’ (Jacobs 2014, 9). Instead, differentiation may come from self-imposed limitations derived from new
points of comparisons, which rely less on semiotic or material dimensions. If we look at established qualifying factors of comics again, “picture-sequentiality” has been crucial to both McCloud (1994, 7) and Will Eisner (1985, 5), yet many webcomics today don’t seem to conform to that

Although it is futile to speculate whether The Oatmeal, Doghouse Diaries or XKCD could have emerged within a print culture alone, one can certainly point to a shift in reference to other other media here. Their environments – blogs, social media or message boards – will continue to exercise significant influence on what will be seen as comics’ recognizable features and functions in the future


If there is an “actual” feature common to all kinds of digital comics, it might be their higher degree of flexibility to choose their own forms and limitations.12 As Bukatman states: ‘When I visit a website it is not clear exactly, what kind of text/image/motion nexus I will be encountering’ (2011, 136; cf. Dittmar 2012, 87). In the area of digital aesthetics, the specificity of any “medium” might not be bound to material limitations anymore (cf. Schröter 2008, 588; Murray 2012, 23), its mediality becoming ‘more “fluid,” more tentative, only valid until the next technological or institutional landslide’ (Thon 2014, 336). While such developments are of great importance, I hope to have at least hinted at the relevance of discursive shifts and dynamics as well. Our understanding of mediality is then equally informed by rhetorical effects that continue to shape our conceptual media borders, both in scholarly discourses and in popular ones. If for comics ‘digital technology and the internet have been game-changers’ as Groensteen noted (2014, 99), the discussions of what is considered prototypical to print comics, to digital comics – and to comics’ relation between technology and compositional features in general – will only become more contested in the future. Or, as McCloud put it programmatically: ‘As the technological distinctions between media fall away, their conceptual distinctions will become more important than ever’ (2000, 205). For media scholars it might be more insightful to observe and study such contests, rather than participate in them.13