What are digital comics? The answers to this question are diverse and often contradictory. Since digital comics were first published in the 1990s, it has not always been possible to gather them under a common denominator, apart from what already defines (with difficulty) printed comics. Many digital comics frequently resort to skeuomorphism, a digital reproduction of printed comics’ most salient aspects. This shows a deference of digital comics to print: some scholars see in digital comics only a technological variation of pre-existent means of distribution.
Should digital comics move away from print to earn their own place? Are digital comics lacking a masterpiece that could establish their legitimacy? Should they exploit the potentialities of digital art and offer interactivity, moving images, new formats to gain their independence? This article argues that asking these questions is to try to reconcile the disparities of digital comics and see how scholars, cartoonists and publishers all try to give digital comics a specific status, for different reasons, but sharing a common goal.
I started my research for this article with what is, for me, scientifically obvious: a scholar must question the blind spots of his discipline, even (and perhaps specifically) when those uncertain areas resist all serious investigation. The field of digital comics is the uncertain area I will deal with here; the difficulty begins right before one enters it since its very name proves problematic. Indeed, it seems naïve to pretend to be able to precisely define what digital comics are, even though this definition is needed as a basis for exploration. One can start with Anthony Rageul’s observation, in
There is no ‘official’ terminology to talk about the medium which is our subject here. Conventionally, a series of terms are often used. Édouard Lussan calls his Opération Teddy Bear an interactive comic. Laurène Steiff uses the term e-BD, by analogy with the e-mail. Online comics are either called as such or webcomic[s] (incidentally, the website
Confronted with this obstacle, Rageul was more straightforward in
To write, in 2017, that digital comics constitute a multiple and shifting form is self-evident and in agreement with the observations of many scholars about digital literature in general. Digital works can be read on a computer screen, on a tablet or a Smartphone, each device changing our way of reading them: Nolwenn Tréhondart notes that they are available as digitized books in PDF format (what is called the ‘homothetic form’), as EPUB files, as a form augmented by the addition of different medias, as downloadable applications or as websites in which paratext is more or less diegetic (
However, there is one constant in all these forms: no matter if they are adaptations, transpositions or creations, because they are designated as ‘digital comics’ these works cannot completely be separated from the printed medium which preceded them and which, in many cases still, locks ontological questions in a fake duality between print and digital. It is this duality I will first examine; I will analyze the skeuomorphic presence of the printed book in digital creation and show how digital comics today are still mostly conceived
Most of our digital reading practices, including reading digital comics, borrow from the skeuomorphic image of the book. This term comes from the Greek ‘skeuos’ (costume, ornament, decoration) and ‘morphos’ (form, external appearance); in the design field, skeuomorphism is used to describe ‘a visual element whose form is not directly related to its function, but which reproduces in an ornamental way an element that was necessary in the original object; for instance interface elements reproducing physical objects’ (
The form of the printed book is in fact reproduced both in the digital book’s appearance, and its navigation. It is significant that digital and printed comics are distinguished only by adding an adjective to the former (the latter is often designated without any adjectives, since it is considered the standard). As Anaïs Guilet writes about digital literature, ‘whether we call them
Even when such artificial devices are not present, the link with the strip and the page, as they conventionally appear in printed comic books, is still strong: many contemporary works, whatever their form (from webcomics to apps), continue to imitate formats unsuitable for a computer screen, which is a horizontal rectangle whereas the page is most often a vertical one (‘landscape’ formats being the exception). Thierry Groensteen summarizes the problem quite clearly:
The ‘landscape’ aspect ratio of the computer screen allows for the display of a double comics page; the comic can also be navigated half a page at a time, with a format that appears enlarged in comparison to its print version. The cell phone screen, in contrast, which is much smaller, can only display one panel at a time. But not all pages can be so easily divided across the middle into two equal halves, and not all panels necessarily fit into a rectangular format that approximately corresponds to the shape of the cell phone screen. The web publishing of a comic originally intended to be read on the printed page can, then, prove to be inadequate and damaging to the format of the work by forcing it to fit into a frame of arbitrary size and shape that bears no relation to its original proportions (
Since the arthrology of the printed page is so central to Groensteen’s work, it is no surprise that for him, digital comics (especially when they are displayed panel by panel) harm ‘the principle of the page’ and ‘all the relationships of juxtaposition, organization, and mutual adjustment that it entails, and all the effects of dialogue, braiding, and seriality among panels’ which allow comics to ‘still [be] displayed within its own spatio-topical system’ (
One might ask, then, why formats unsuited for the new means of distribution and navigation continue to be used. It is perhaps through habit, both from the creators and the readers, since ‘reading at the limits of our habits’, as Bertrand Gervais writes, is often a difficult thing (
If there is one formal constant in comics distributed in the 2000s, it is their heavy debt to the narrative and graphic norms of printed comics. […] Up to 2009, digital comics in their entirety are formally conceptualized in relation to printed comics. Of course, there are adaptations: the strip sometimes becomes vertical to be more suited to a scrolling navigation. But the codes that the authors have in mind are definitely those of printed comics (
It is also necessary to consider the editorial advantage of a stable format. Anthony Rageul notes that ‘original creation […] often consists of pages or strips which are simply adapted to the format of the screen and to vertical scrolling, easily publishable in books if need be’ (
There are exceptions in navigation systems to this type of digital comics which are conceived
Marietta Ren, “Phallaina”. © Marietta Ren and France Télévisions, 2016.
These two types of navigation distance themselves from the canonical form of printed comics but don’t really innovate: there are many printed comics with only one drawing or panel per page, such as cartoons collections (which explains why a printed version of these digital creations is so easy) and horizontal-scrolling comics like
In spite of this slightly provocative title, digital comics, even when they are innovative, are not necessarily positioned
This is in part the problem of turbomedia, a form of comics close to the slide show, developed by Balak in 2009 (Figure
Malec, “Turbo Media”. © Malec, 2009.
Malec, one of its fiercest supporters, clearly opposes printed and digital comics through the use of turbomedia: ‘Turbomedia allows me to mix comics and animation. It’s totally different from printed comics, there is no printed version of turbomedia. But if I was asked tomorrow to make a [printed] comic book, I would!’ (quoted in
What is at stake for turbomedia is therefore the possibility to position itself as a specific medium, which, according to Anthony Rageul, is feasible thanks to the inherent interactivity of the technique: ‘It must remain something you read. Slide shows don’t scroll automatically. We are not waiting the end of a “show” (sound, video sequences, long animations). The reader remains in control of her/his reading rhythm. However, it is possible to include very short and cyclical, or inter-page-screen, animated sequences’ (
It is obvious that the slide show, in all its variants and particularly in its turbomedia guise, has, ever since its creation, become a new possible standard format. As Anthony Rageul observes: ‘Formerly only constraints, recommendations have become rules, conventions; and the turbomedia has become one of the standard formats of digital comics, which has even been exported since Marvel uses it for its digital catalog, under the name of “Infinite Comics”’ (
There are currently three ‘schools’ of Turbomedia:
The first defends narrative sequencing as the basis of turbo[media] and thinks limiting animations and sounds allows for a more comfortable reading experience. The screen remains divided into panels and they appear every time you click/tap. The comics reader wants to read, not to watch a cartoon (see for instance […] Pax Arena, MediaEntity, le Mal-Aimé, everything Marvel Comics currently does in this area, etc.). The second argues that, on the contrary, the use of animation should be maximized, even if it means replacing panel sequencing by a Flash-animated sequences. There is often only one picture—animated or not—on the screen with each click/tap (see […] the BlogaMalec, Azuria, etc.). The last one is a global stance: since we are in front of a screen (a computer, a tablet or a Smartphone), we might as well exploit all possibilities of the medium: turbomedia will come with sound, animated effects of all kinds and may even include video-only sequences (this particular type of turbomedia can be associated with what the Americans do with MadeFire) (
There are, therefore, different gradations in the relation between turbomedia and printed comics, from the first school which remains close to conventional navigation within the medium to the third one which attempts to distance itself from the opposition between fixed and animated picture (an opposition which could be defined as comparing comics and cinema) by embracing multimediality.
The addition of sound in particular is interesting because it is not inherent to turbomedia and can be found in other types of digital comics, and also because the emulation of sound has remained a constant of comics since their creation. The use of sounds in digital comics is, even more than for animated images, considered as a duality: either sound lessens the reading experience, or enhances it. This is, in any case, how Thierry Groensteen presents things in
Are digital comics transformed into something else if sound is added to them? I think that answering this question would necessarily imply a subjective opinion as well as reading preferences, or a conflict of definitions which goes beyond the scope of this article. I will simply point out that printed comics themselves evolved from other mediums, like caricature drawing, before they became their own means of expression. Therefore, it is not surprising that digital comics use the devices that preceded them, and Anthony Rageul says the same in the introduction to his PhD dissertation:
Comics are nowadays making their way on digital platforms just like they made their way, before that, on various printed platforms, without changing its nature. More precisely, their ‘codes’, their system are not radically transformed: transformations happen in the margins or consist in inverting tendencies (like the page format for the album instead of the strip format in a newspaper) but they do not challenge what it means to tell a story through comics’ (
This quote could be read as an admission of powerlessness: because digital comics cannot distance themselves from the printed page, whether they are thought of in its continuity or its opposition, they cannot claim to be part of a fully-fledged medium. To reach this status, it is probably necessary to determine what is specific to digital comics.
In 2002, Scott McCloud, in
The way digital comics want to add multimedia devices presents a serious problem: it adds new perceptive dimensions to a medium which doesn’t need them to tell a story. Sounds, movement, cut scenes or playability run the risk of turning comics into something they’re not: a cartoon, a clip or a video game. A corrective use of multimedia to alleviate a supposed deficiency of the reading experience can turn out to be playful, but doesn’t have a lot of narrative interest, and will have trouble avoiding awkward integrations from an aesthetic point of view (
Of course, those are only problems if one considers comics to be mainly narrative, which is another discussion entirely. Moreover, the risks Caboche evokes are maybe less important for comics which are, after all, a hybrid medium by definition, than for literature which doesn’t usually involves pictures. If a story in pictures can make do with the intrusion of text, why couldn’t it handle the inclusion of sound or movement?
To move away from these questions and try to reach a point
The infinite canvas was theorized by Scott McCloud in
XKCD, “Click and Drag”. © Randall Munroe, 2012.
In the strip entitled ‘Click and Drag’, the reader first thinks she is reading a perfectly conventional strip until the title entices her to try and drag the last panel. Only then does she realize the digital strip doesn’t exactly obey the same codes as the printed strip, since its last panel measures roughly 43 relative meters by 21; but the humongous image remains circumscribed in a panel too small for it, which underlines how important frames (and framing) are in comics. It is also interesting to note with this example that the infinite canvas, though theoretically a limitless space, is in fact necessarily limited by the amount of content a cartoonist will choose to put in it (
The appearance devices described by Groensteen also use the very nature of the digital screen. More precisely, Groensteen distinguishes appearance (of a new detail, of a panel…) from variation, a distinction he describes as follows: ‘Thus, the reader could choose to see the same panel in colors or black and white, or as a sketch. The work of the cartoonist can be further documented if a click gives access to the photo or archive document it could be inspired by. We have here a glimpse of a possible critical edition hidden underneath the work itself’ (
One doesn’t navigate
In the end, what are digital comics? The question may remain unanswered because the potential answers, like the media they refer to, constantly mutate. What seems more tangible, however, are its links with printed comics, an ancestor difficult to ignore, with which it keeps struggling. Anthony Rageul reminds us that the printed medium was never completely stable and that it is therefore unsurprising that the same instability is at the heart of the digital paradigm:
Historically, all transitions from one printed medium to another have had their share of consequences on the forms, the narration and even the content; among other things, because every different printed medium implies a different editorial paradigm, which influences the comics medium. The newspaper only has space for a strip, daily or weekly. Because of the periodicity and pagination of the comics magazine, short stories stand alongside ‘to be continued’ serials. Comics conceived for a book can do without the chaptering necessary to the serial. Different mediums mean different stories told in a different way. But the transition to the digital implies more radical changes which turn the medium into something more experimental (
Those practices, which end up deconstructing the ‘principle of the page’ dear to Groensteen (
I’m not sure, however, if this specificity is yet to be created; it is difficult to know whether somewhere in the depths of digital space, a work like this doesn’t already exist, since there are so many. What digital comics lack, in fact, are maybe not the masterpieces that could be brandished as ideal examples of its singularity, but scholars and critics able to find them. If there truly is one distinct aspect of digital comics, it is the timorousness with which, contrary to their elder, they are today considered by medias, whether they are generalist or specialized.
This article belongs to the Poetics of Digital Comics collection, edited by Benoît Crucifix, Björn-Olav Dozo, Aarnoud Rommens and Ernesto Priego. It contains research originally presented by the author in French as ‘Contre ou au-delà de l’imprimé? La bande dessinée numérique à la recherche d’un statut spécifique’ at the
The author has no competing interests to declare.