The unfortunates: towards a history and definition of the motion comic

Motion comics – despite being widely overlooked by the discipline of Comics Studies – are a formally diverse multimedia format. Straddling the line between limited animation and the comic book, the diversity of motion comics have allowed them both to elude general definitions and to evolve into another new media format: the motion book. This article argues against the disciplinary prejudice that has defined this maligned format over the past decade in order to better grasp both the industrial overlap between the American comic book and film industries and the developmental processes of new media. Moreover, this article begins to explore how tablets and e-readers are remediating and re-inventing the comic in 2014.