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Resource type: Web Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed BibTeX citation key: Kirchoff2013 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: Digitalization, Webcomics Creators: Kirchoff Collection: technoculture |
Views: 30/983
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Attachments | URLs http://tcjournal.o ... upal/vol3/kirchoff |
Abstract |
This article challenges digital comics to become a more interactive, immersive medium that actively strives to redefine the reader/text relationship. Extending Scott McCloud’s notion of an “infinite cavnas” (discussed in his Reinventing Comics) I draw from Espen Aarseth’s definition of Ergodic Literature and Gerard Genette’s theory of hypertextuality to suggest that digital comics can—and ultimately should—extend, expand, and amplify their print based counterpart through intentional, complex reader/text interaction. To make such an argument, I first demonstrate how most digital comics make an attempt to remediate paper-based comics and as such, try to re-create the reader/text interaction found in these “floppy” comics. Secondly, through an analysis of multimedia comics such as Nawlz and innovative hybrid comics such as Marvel’s AvX, I explore the interactive possibilities that digital tools afford comic book creators and readers alike. Ultimately, I argue that digital comics should take advantage of their unique material affordances and subsequent infinite number of possibilities to re-define how a reader and a text interact and, in turn, avoid becoming a “retro” technology.
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