Hybridity and Agency in Interactive Comic Books

Abstract

This paper focuses on interactive and animated comic books as visual storytelling medium. With the rise of digital media, previous forms and methods of storytelling has been changed and reformed in hybridity and/or as emerging medium. Like movies, documentaries, games; comic books gained digital, moving, and interactive levels to be described and examined. This research aims to analyze interactivity maps to reach forms of interactivity used in selected comic books as examples representing emerged types of this media under various names such as motion comics, interactive comics, hyper comics, interactive game comics and web comics. As Goodbrey (2007) states different types of comics in the scope of hybridization and digitality of the medium, a distinction between levels of interactivity in video games is offered in digital game theory. Digital types of comic books are not all interactive in the sense of content and may be more linear than a printed “choose your own adventure” comic book like Eight Grade Witch (Gaska et. al, 2021). With digitality of the medium, interactivity is set firstly in form providing an agency for the interactor by turning the pages or making the reader click on pages. Some examples, such as web comics expands the medium to develop an interactivity between text and audience; some of them became more interactive providing more agency on the page; some are interactive in content and others converge comics books with games and redefine the medium with play at the center. Main question guiding the research is how they provide different forms of interactive of storytelling. Meanwhile: An Interactive Comic Book (Zarfhome Software, 2018), Framed (Noodlecake Studios, 2014), Florence (Mountains Studio, 2018) and Our Plague Year (Burton, 2022) are selected examples representing different forms of digital comic books and interactive – sequential storytelling to be analyzed comparatively within the scope of this research. In conclusion interactivity forms and maps are exposed and discussed through Sheldon’s interactivity categories. The epistemology of interactivity is reconsidered with an analysis of interactive and animated comic books which combine various media and provide distinct ways of hybridity.