From Pulp to Webpage: Homestuck and Postmodern Digital Narrative

Homestuck by Andrew Hussie is a work developed entirely as an experiment in using the internet as a storytelling medium. In order to analyze this drastically new form of story, born and grown on the internet, I must initially analyze the two genres it best fuses; Homestuck is published serially and episodic, and largely contains media elements of the Graphic Novel. However, Homestuck also mixes into the story areas where reader choice and interactivity, animated cut scenes, and music in a fashion that imitates a video game. I’ll be examining Homestuck as a primary text, first inspecting its form and narrative vehicle through a comparison against traditional Graphic Novels in order to establish some boundaries of digital narration. Then, I’ll examine the more advanced multimedia elements that appear throughout Homestuck, namely the longer animations and interactive game segments, in order to establish what is lost and gained through digital interactivity within a narrative. Finally, I examine the core of the mythos and meaning behind the plot of Homestuck, and its concern with breaking boundaries between what we perceive as the scope of our digital reality on our physical existence. Ultimately, Homestuck illustrates through its development and narrative a positive, yet wary, support of our ever expanding digital existence

Worlds and Readers: Augmented Reality in Modern Polaxis

This article presents a close reading of the augmented reality (AR) comic Modern Polaxis, which was created by Stuart Campbell. Possible Worlds Theory was applied to discuss how fiction, which creates its own possible worlds, integrates the additional layer(s) of AR into its storyworld. The analysis additionally sheds light on the reader’s position and how the augmented layer may affect the literary experience. We also discuss how the AR interface may contribute to digital literature more generally.publishedVersio

Gaming The Comic Book: Turning The Page on How Comics and Videogames Intersect as Interactive, Digital Experiences

Little attention has been given to how digital technologies have impacted the comic medium. Despite the astronomical impact this shift has had on all sorts of traditional media, it is common to believe that digital comics are simply electronic versions of print comics, but the implementation of audio, animation, three-dimensional effects, and interactivity with other kinds of digital comics reveal that they are hardly so simple. Analyzing and classifying them is essential for English studies, comics studies, and even game studies. Digital comics are a hybridized medium that challenge the essence and existing definitions of comics with disparate instances and inclusions of multimedia and interactivity. Digital comics also complicate how the comic medium is remediated with three remediation types (retro remediation, stylistic remediation, and adaptation) that favor or balance out desires for immediacy and hypermediacy between old and new media. Digital comics can also converge with the logic and design of videogames in the digital space, presenting opportunities to question the nature of interactivity between comics and videogames and how these two mediums can be combined with “interactive, digital comics.” This paper creates a refined genre list for digital comics by separating them in terms of how much multimedia and/or interactivity they contain with an extensive analysis of nine digital comics. Their individual incorporations (or lack thereof) of multimedia and/or interactivity unveil innovative possibilities that the digital space affords for the comic medium with new methods of spatial, sequential, and temporal storytelling. In addition, this paper explores how digital comics are socially constructed and viewed as a genre by audiences with nine interviewees that glean further insight into the current perception and future potential of not only digital comics, but also the promising genre of interactive, digital comics

Get Your Mind Outta the Gutter: Actor-Network Theory and Panel Layout in Comics

This thesis explains how the element of the panel layout in comics conveys both a linear progression of narrative and a simultaneous image for the reader. Using Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory this research asserts that the portrayal of time and space in a comic should be considered as a network. While most definitions of comics rely on the sequential juxtaposition of the form, this thesis demonstrates how panel relations operate both sequentially and nonsequentially to produce meaning for the reader and thus changing the defining feature of the medium. To demonstrate how changes in panel layout affects various networks of time and space in comics I have examined three contemporary comics, Watchmen, “A Contract with God,” and Violent Cases

Educational hypercomics: learners, institutions, and comics in e-learning interface design

Current literacy education research suggests that formal affordances of the comics medium lend themselves to critical pedagogies of new media literacy (see, e.g., Schwarz, 2006; Jacobs, 2007; Schwartz & Rubinstein-Ávila, 2006; Duffy, 2010). This research connects comics and new media because both are visually dominant, juxtapositional compositional forms that make meaning through multiple modes of communicative design. However, this research generally construes comics as a narrative form that bridges the traditions of print-based literacy with the wide array of multiliteracies required by new media. The evolution of comics as a form of digital communication within new media pedagogical texts has received far less attention. The present study addresses this lacuna in the literature through analysis of social semiotics of comics in the contexts of online learning. This is a study of multimodal pedagogical discourse in online educational comics, specifically educational hypercomics. Hypercomics can be loosely defined as comics on the World Wide Web which incorporate semiotic affordances of digital delivery such as interactivity, multiplicity of reading paths, hypertextuality, audio, video, and animation. This study is a comparative social semiotic analysis of three educational hypercomics, focused on the ways in which the comics form interacts with digital affordances in educational institutional contexts in order to construe readers as learners. The goal of this research is to explicate ways in which digital comics' formal characteristics can function not only as a vehicle for narrative expression in pedagogy, but also as a strategy for e-learning information organization and interface design

Fragmented Narratives: Exploring Storytelling approaches for Animation in Spatial Context

Animation is considered a prevalent medium in contemporary moving image culture, which increasingly appears across non-conventional surfaces and spaces. And while storytelling in animation films has been extensively theorized, narrative forms that employ physical space as part of storytelling have been less explored. This paper will examine the narrative aspect of animation works which are screened outside the traditional cinematic venues. It will look at how these animation works tell stories differently - using the full potential of the space, as a narrative device, a tool, and a stage where the narratives unfold. This paper will look at the historical perspective and the state of the art in animation installation today, exploring the relationship between the space and narrative in pre-cinematic, cinematic and post-cinematic conditions. It will examine how narrative structures in animation have changed over time, on their way from the black box of the cinema to the white cube of the gallery and even further, where they became part of any space or architecture. Through case studies of works by Tabaimo, Rose Bond, William Kentridge and other relevant artists, the interdependency of the narrative and the space where it appears will be explored, in order to identify new strategies for storytelling in animation. The aim of this paper is to emphasize the storytelling novelty that animation installations offer, which goes beyond the narrative structures that we are used to see on a single flat surface

Beyond Narrative: Exploring Narrative Liminality and Its Cultural Work

This book calls for an investigation of the 'borderlands of narrativity' - the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the 'beyond' of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of "narrative liminality," which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years

Beyond Narrative

This book calls for an investigation of the ›borderlands of narrativity‹ — the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the ›beyond‹ of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of »narrative liminality,« which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF EMERGING ONLINE BUSINESS MODELS: DEVELOPING A DIGITAL COMIC BOOK PROTOTYPE

Advancing online technologies have traditional legacy media scrambling to generate consistent revenue streams in the digital space. Even though online and mobile technologies encourage publishers to develop new content for the web there are inherent challenges to adapting tactile non digital formats into ones and zeros. Furthermore, the digital space has yet to define a specific business model applicable for all online media. Presenting current trends in digital publishing of comic books as well as traditional media, this document defines emerging online business models and case examples of consumer purchase incentives. The defined business models and literature provide a guided framework and are applied to the production of a comic book application prototype, the Choosie Book. The prototype is created as an interactive interface following conventions established in comic books and children’s picture books. The prototype’s intellectual property, Just James, was previously published in the popular anthology Reading With Pictures. The Just James narrative, graphic illustrations, and structure have been adapted from its original publication for the purposes of this prototype. It is intended as a proof of concept for digital publishers, producers, and developers