No Borders, No Limits:
The Infinite Canvas as a Storytelling Tool in Online Comics
and
Hyper/Comics/Con/Text:  Institutional Contexts and Interface Design in Online Educational Hypercomics


highlighted notes under cut



No Borders, No Limits:
The Infinite Canvas as a Storytelling Tool in Online Comics

The World Wide Web provides a viable publishing medium for amateur comics creators,
without censorship or pressure to make one’s work fit a particular market. The flexibility of a
digital presentation allows comics creators to tell stories more effectively through the “infinite
canvas” technique. In my own work, I have used the results of other creators’ experiments to
tell my own unique story in a way that would be difficult or impossible to replicate in print. The
medium of HTML still limits how a web-based comic can be presented, but recent experiments
with Flash and Java programming are beginning to break down those barriers.
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The Web breaks down the various barriers inherent in print publishing, and allows comics creators to connect directly with their readers and push the medium to its limits and beyond. However, few current webcomics creators are taking advantage of the possibilities afforded by the flexibility of an alldigital presentation. Most online comics follow the conventions of their printed counterparts,
sometimes to the detriment of the story or art. The media of HTML, Flash, Java, and other web
technologies have the potential to expand the storytelling capacities of sequential art. In the
following pages, I will show how a small minority of artists have made use of the web’s unique
properties in their comics, and how my own webcomic, Work in Progress, builds upon that
foundation.
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This is an example of what McCloud calls gradualism—slowly
gaining information by slowly scrolling through an image or sequence of images (ICST #4).
McCloud first uses gradualism in Zot! Online #3, with a six-foot-tall panel showing the central
characters falling from several hundred feet in the air (Fig. 6). The huge, blank panel conveys
a sense of the length (in both space and time) of their fall, and thereby raises the stakes in the
viewer’s mind. Demian5 uses gradualism many times in When I Am King, to convey both the
physical space of the setting and the metaphorical “space” of the character’s dreams (Fig. 7). In
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These abrupt directional shifts (which are all but impossible in a printed comic) prevent one from seeing the new panel right away, and thus serve to “keep the reader off-guard, never knowing
what to expect around the next corner” (McCloud, Reinventing 227). Dramatic or suspenseful events in a story are often referred to as “plot twists,” “pivotal moments,” or “unexpected turns”; in an infinite canvas comic, we can turn this metaphor into a literal change in direction.
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Not all directional changes indicate a plot twist, however. When Dave is explaining the technology of Yumeji to Lynn, the panels are staggered in a zig-zag pattern (Fig. 10). This back-and-forth motion suggests an exchange of dialogue or ideas, and comes to an end when the explanation ceases and Lynn is forced to make a decision.
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Hyper/Comics/Con/Text:  Institutional Contexts and Interface Design in Online Educational Hypercomics

By placing the onus of informational sequencing, choice, and navigation on the computer rather than the user, students were 'led by the nose through every subject' (2003, 310-11). Nelson instead proposed 'hyper-media', including 'hyper-comics', as forms of 'branching or performing presentations,' that grant students autonomy to explore concepts based on their own choices and interests (2003, 313). It was within the context of this broader critique of educational institutions that
Nelson established 'the fundamentals of hypercomics', describing 'a screen-based, digital
medium' featuring 'a comic that branches into different pathways based on reader's choice'
(Goodbrey 2012, 2).

Since Nelson's early conceptualization of hypercomics, Internet technologies have occasioned
multiple examples of comics created to take advantage of the specific affordances of digital
distribution and display. Nelson's early focus on reader interaction with branching or otherwise
malleable digital objects proved prescient in identifying design issues for hypercomics creators
(see, e.g. McCloud 2000; Bigerel 2009; Goodbrey 2013). But although digital interface design
issues have been addressed by practitioners and scholars, it has been primarily in terms of
aesthetics and narrative construction. The original context of hypercomics design as digital
pedagogy has received far less attention


In the theory of multimodality, the term 'mode' describes '[...] a socially shaped and culturally
given semiotic resource for making meaning' (Kress 2010, 79). 'Multimodal phenomena' are
created via:
[...] choices from semiotic resources (e.g. language, images, music, mathematical
symbolism, gesture and movement) [...] to construct meaning in the context of their
instantiation (O'Halloran and Fei 2009, 140).
This emphasis on understanding communication as a network of interrelated multiple modes
whose meaning is necessarily contingent upon sociocultural context makes multimodality an


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especially appropriate research framework for comics for two reasons. First, the comics form is
characterized by conspicuous multimodality, via its interrelation of visual, textual, and spatial
elements; what Stuart Moulthrop describes as the 'interstitial' nature that situates comics in the
'unmapped spaces' between the literary and the cinematic (1999, 200). Second, comics is best
defined as a 'social object', whose meaning proceeds from 'an unspecified number of
recognition codes' that are 'constantly developing and changing' (Delany 1999, 239). The
meaning of comics is contingent upon this shifting combination of style, form, and social
context, what Charles Hatfield terms the medium's characteristic 'unfixability' (2005, xiii).


Dale Jacobs describes the density of information on a comics page as requiring and teaching
'complex multimodal literacy' (2007, 21). The comics form requires a nuanced understanding
of hybridized visual and verbal semiotics, of multiple points of view, which in turn
complements a pedagogy that teaches students to be self-reflexive and self-critical readers
(Schwartz et al. 2006).
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Like educational comics, comics on the Internet, sometimes generalized as 'webcomics', are
best understood as widespread, diverse, often more connected to various other subcultures, as
opposed to a comics-specific subculture akin to the fandom associated with the print comic
book industry. There are actually 'many webcomic subcultures, or rather, subcultures in which
webcomics are made public (such as gaming or arts and craft)' (Kogel 2013, 9).


I use the term in this sense: 'hypercomics' as comics that incorporate the affordances of digital media to the extent that the comic cannot be reproduced in print without 'portions being resequenced or
removed' (Keeper and McDevitt 2012). This rejection of the basic modes of (re)production and
distribution at the heart of comics as a popular cultural institution, combined with the
preexisting marginality of educational comics, places educational hypercomics at the fringes of
comics form and content.

Comics understood as 'an artistic form that historically developed with technologies belonging
to print culture' has that history 'both reflected and challenged' in digital spaces (Priego 2012).
Because educational hypercomics employ a variety of new media via digital delivery, these
works inexorably raise questions as to what qualifies something as a comic as opposed to, for
example, animation or illustrated prose. With their respective heterogeneous incorporations of
digital interactivity and time-based media (e.g. audio and video), the comics analyzed below
compete with and problematize historically prototypical characteristics of their print
predecessors, calling into question the extent to which comics theory is applicable in
contextualizing and analyzing such online texts. In other words, why call such works comics at
all?

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The design of Secret in the Cellar elides the characteristics of static images in juxtapositional
sequence underpinning Factoring[...]. Instead, with a few exceptions, Secret in the Cellar
displays one panel at a time within a dedicated browser window, a 'reductive' version of the
'panel delivery' format, in that it does not take advantage of compositional meanings available
through multiple panels juxtaposed in sequence (Goodbrey 2013, 191).

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