A Comic Is a Comic Is a Comic: Exploring Prototypes, Parameters, and (Post)Digital Comics

The history of comics has seen countless variations, yet its most fundamental elements have long remained relatively consistent: paper, a combination of text and drawn images, panel layouts, the narrative sequence. Digital comics, however, have more conspicuously hybridized the affordances of the medium, reconfiguring its materiality and semiotic space, possibly integrating multimedia elements, hyperlinks, animations, and game-like features. In response, certain scholars have strengthened the boundaries of print comics to exclude (some) digital instances; yet the issue invariably confronts the field’s longstanding resistance to definition and the polarization of theoretical positions around the elusive idea of comicsness. This paper engages with this debate by proposing a framework for identifying a set of parameterized characteristics that define prototypical comics, situating digital comics at the periphery of the medium in reason of differences in reading protocols and the types of agency afforded.