Continuity: Inside the frame and behind the screen

Abstract

Since their appearance, digital comics have posed many challenges to the world of comic studies. Are they really comics? Should we talk about them as video games or interactive experiences? The questions are many, and they usually stumble on the – apparently – most important question: how can we define a comic? And how do we start analysing them? Scholars have multiplied paths and definitions, features and prototypes, trying to tame such a complex and ever-evolving object, with varying degrees of success. With this visual essay I will focus on – and concretely show – the aspect I believe is the most relevant: the structural relation between simultaneity and continuity, between global and local embedded in comics language. If, as Fresnault-Deruelle put it, ‘discontinuity is the basis of comics universe’, there will be necessarily some sort of continuum on which this discontinuity can emerge. Normally, this continuum is the white page itself, but with digital comics things get more complicated: the change in physical support calls for a big difference in affordances, new sensory modes make their way in, infinite spaces unfold and so on. Through an interdisciplinary approach and a dive in Peircean semiotics, I hereby suggest how the dialectic between continuity and discontinuity might be a good starting point, on a level of both formal and critical analysis, to tackle an object as chimeric as digital comics.