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 [email protected] 06 264 633 34 26 June 2015 Table of Contents 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1 2. Defining Comics, Webcomics, and Enhanced comics ....................................................... 6 3. Literary Basis ...................................................................................................................... 11 4. Analysis ................................................................................................................................ 27 4.1 Infinite Canvas ................................................................................................................................. 27 4.2. Moving Image and Sound ............................................................................................................... 37 4.3 Co-Authorship and Reader-Driven Webcomics ............................................................................... 43 4.4 Interactivity ...................................................................................................................................... 49 5. Epilogue: A new frontier for comics ................................................................................. 55 6. References ............................................................................................................................ 61 1. Introduction This dissertation will focus on examining the medium of comics in the realm of digital media. Generally termed webcomics, these digital comics find their habitat and distribution on computer-based technologies and on the Internet. Like similar other new means of artistic expression (videogames, for instance), they have generally been subjected to a lot of skepticism from scholars and the public alike as a “less serious” form of literature or art, mostly due to the predominant presence of the superhero genre, which is commonly associated with immature audience, that is, children (Hight 181). Their analogue counterpart, i.e. printed comics, have had a similar past and are still living in the shadow of traditional literary forms, such as prose and poetry, and have found strong competitors in moving and animated image. As Meskin observes, “Comics have not been taken seriously as art throughout most of the last 150 years, and those interested in the medium seem to feel need to provide an apology for their interest” (374). Over the past century, however, comics have managed to produce some notable works of art and literature, which have enabled them to come one step closer to the standards of prose fiction and film. The satirical and socially critical Underground Comix movement, for example, that took place during the 1960s and the 1970s, managed to dispel the idea of comics as a “childish” and “trivial pastime” by providing adult and complex content. Likewise, the advent of the term graphic novel, epitomised in works such as Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978), Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991), and Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986), showed that comics can measure up to conventional literary works in terms of seriousness of content and meticulous structural and aesthetic arrangements1. There have also been cases of comics scholars, who have attempted to theorise and analyse the principles, the characteristics, and the formal elements of comic books. Theorists such as Will Eisner (1985; 1996), Scott McCloud (1993; 2000), and Thierry Groensteen (1999) have provided elaborate texts on the ways comics and other sequential art can be read and interpreted, and where they can be situated in the contemporary cultural production. This study will make ample reference to the theories and the scholarly discourse in the field of comics studies. However, its main point of interest will not be comic books per se, but rather their digital version. Comics, like other contemporary media, 1 The term has been contested by various scholars for reducing comics to merely a genre of literature. 1 was able to find its way onto computer screens once the digital revolution took over in the second part of 20th century. Comics appeared as webcomics, still resembling their initial printed form in that they preserved the layout dimensions they had in print and merely reproduced them on the computer screen. However, as time passed and computer technology became more advanced and offered more creative possibilities, they started to evolve and branch out into different directions. One can differentiate between two basic categories of webcomics: those which that are intended to be printed, and which that use digital distribution as a support and promotion of the printed comic; and those which that are intended for digital viewing, and use the Internet and computer-based technologies as their main host and distribution platform. What is crucial in their difference is the intention of the webcomic creator, and their engagement with the medium. The present study is interested in analysing the second category of webcomics, those which were intended for the digital medium, which engage with the specificities of new technology on which they are found, and which use these characteristics of digital media to create narrative and aesthetic effects not possible in print. There are numerous ways in which webcomics can move beyond print and exploit the features of the new medium; HTML mark-up language, for example, can change how an image is displayed if hovered over with the mouse, and sound effects can be embedded within the code of the webcomic and played in the background. Comics can contaminate and be contaminated by other media agglomerated onto the computer technologies, which sometimes leads to ambiguous and uncertain blend of different media. Due to the myriad of different possibilities available to exploit on digital media, these webcomics have been termed with several different names since their origin (Saenz and Gillis 1988). Throughout this dissertation, I will use the term enhanced webcomics to refer to all of those different varieties of webcomics which are “enhanced” by the use of digital properties, tools, and effects and as a part of their form, and which thus attempt to “enhance” user experience. I will return to the matter of definition and characterisation of comics and enhanced comics in more detail in the second chapter. Much like print comics in their early period, webcomics have not yet been subject to extensive scholarly discussion. Some scholars of traditional print comics have undertaken the task of defining and characterising webcomics, but mainly in relation to their paper ancestors. McCloud (2000), for example, has tried to provide an initial manifesto for comics in the digital age with his somewhat naive and overly enthusiastic Reinventing Comics, in which he attempts to illustrate the “revolutions” 2 that occurred in the field of comics in last two decades of the 20th century; he suggests that the ones related to online and computational technologies represent the future of comics. Several other comics scholars and theorists have acknowledged the unavoidable transition of comics onto computer screens (Groensteen n.d.; 1999; Meskin 2007; Hicks 2009), and some have proposed theoretical frameworks and have even invented their own examples of webcomics (McCloud 2000b, 2003; Goodbrey 2014). The general feeling towards webcomics is that of scepticism, as one could have expected, since it is an emerging media form. Enhanced webcomics in particular are relatively obscure and their boundaries are not clearly defined. Yet, I maintain they hold a great deal of potential, as they consist of numerous different media objects that are combined on the screen into a final object. This flow of various different media towards one (in this case the transition of comics, literature, film, television and other analogue media onto the digital screen) was defined by Henry Jenkins (2001) as “media convergence”: Media convergence is an ongoing process, occurring at various intersections of media technologies, industries, content and audiences; it’s not an end state. There will never be one black box controlling all media. Rather, thanks to the proliferation of channels and the increasingly ubiquitous nature of computing and communications, we are entering an era where media will be everywhere, and we will use all kinds of media in relation to one another. We will develop new skills for managing information, new structures for transmitting information across channels, and new creative genres that exploit the potentials of those emerging information structures. (par. 2) According to Jenkins, current computer-based technology is able to hold several different media at once, although it does not have a monopoly over them. These media technologies interact with each other and are constantly communicating and creating new paradigms of communication. This study posits that this phenomenon is at the basis of enhanced webcomics, as it involves a wide array of technologies and assemblages that come together to create unique, and, in many cases, new media- specific forms of communication. The essential question that arises