A cyberpunk symphony of dystopian nightmares: Towards an archaeology of early digital comics1

Abstract

This article analyses the social and technological contexts in which the first contact between comics and digital technologies occurs. The history of digital comics begins during the 1980s through the intersection of technocultural practices and innovations that had a major impact on the comics industry. Through the analysis of Michael Saenz’s Shatter (First Comics, 1985) and Iron Man: Crash (Marvel, 1988) and Pepe Moreno’s Batman: Digital Justice (DC Comics, 1990), we will try to reconstruct the media and cultural processes that paved the way for the technical and expressive modes of future digital comics. The objective of the article is to demonstrate the paradoxical co-presence, in these works, of optimism and pessimism towards the possibilities guaranteed by information technologies. Indeed, on the one hand, the authors of these works experimented with the opportunities offered by still rudimental PCs and software. On the other, they embodied worries about the sociocultural traumas triggered by the technological, which translated on the expressive level in the prefiguration of dystopian futures dominated by cyberpunk atmospheres.