This contribution investigates a specific subcategory of digital comics – part of what I call ‘expanded digital comics’ - considered by many to be inherently more interactive than prototypical comics, and otien related to video games. However, whether they are indeed more interactive, and what it means for a comic to be interactive at all, is an open question. Through a reframing of the concept of interactivity as one of the possible subtypes of agency (narrative, interpretative, material and social) that a semiotic text allows for, this contribution will survey and discuss a selection of ostensibly interactive digital comics, interrogating the types and degrees of interaction they establish and reflecting on the specificities of their meaning-making processes.

Ccs Concepts

• Applied computing~Arts and humanities~Media arts • Humancentered computing~Interaction design~Interaction design

theory, concepts and paradigms

KEYWORDS Digital comics, Webcomics, Narratology, Comics studies, Media studies

Giorgio Busi Rizzi. 2023. All click and no play: how interactive are interactive digital comics? In 34th ACM Hypertext conference (HT’23). ACM, Rome, Italy, 7 pages. hflps://doi.org/10.1145/3603163.3609052

https://doi.org/10.1145/3603163.3609052

This paper will discuss a sample of digital comics - mostly

webcomics - that are, or can be considered, hypertexts, and that have been marketed or discussed by foregrounding and highlighting their interactive component. Referring to a framework centered on narratology, comics studies and media studies, this paper wants to put into perspective the role and effects of interactivity for its own sake, reabsorbing it within a broader taxonomy of the types of agency that digital comics can activate. The paper will therefore discuss objects that are at the fringe of this conference's focus, for three reasons; first, in relation to the idea of comics, since it will discuss digital comics, objects that many consider being too far away from what proper, ‘true’ comics are (for a critical overview of this debate, see [1, 2]); second, in relation to the idea of hypertexts: not all digital comics are hypertexts, and a contextualization is needed to identify those that are so (Goodbrey calls them "hypercomics" [3], and defines “game comics" [3] a specific subcategory of hypercomics); third, and crucial for this discussion, in relation to the idea of interactivity at large, and to the different kinds of interaction that these comics elicit.

Let us start with hypertexts. Theodor Nelson, who coined the

term, envisioned it as “a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper” [1965: 2]. Years later, George Landow influentially defined hypertexts as "text[s] composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web, and path" [2006: 2].

The actualization of hypertexts requires some degree of

interaction by a user, and that is particularly true for hypertext narratives (due to the focus of this contribution, I am not incorporating into my reflection the close concept of IDNs, Interactive Digital Narratives, which applies less to the digital comics I am discussing. For an articulated discussion of IDNs, see [6, 7]). Nonetheless, there is no absolute consensus on the nature of such interaction.

HT ‘23, September 4-8, 2023, Rome, Italy Busi Rizzi

Ryan differentiates “narratives games”, where “narrative

meaning is subordinated to the player’s actions”, from “playable stories”, which “induce a much more aesthetic pleasure than narrative games” [2009: 45-46], and ascribes hypertext fiction to the second category; however, she contends that hypertexts limit “the user’s agency to selecting an item from a menu of possible choices” [2009: 44].

Espen Aarseth starts by stressing the precondition for

interactivity to truly convey a sense of agency, that is, in his view, the fact that the actions involved must require a nontrivial effort to accomplish (Aarseth defines them as “ergodic”) and be relevant to the story narrated. According to Aarseth, “narratives have two levels, description and narration. A game such as football has one level, the ergodic. A video game (e.g., Atari's Pac-Man) has description (the screen icons) and ergodics (the forced succession of events) but not narration” [1997: 99]. In his perspective, hypertexts can instead have all three: description, narration, and ergodics.

Hypertexts, then, seem to have a close relation with

interactivity; but before we discuss more in detail the nature of this interactivity, I should clarify the intersections between digital comics and hypertexts.

“Digital comics” is an umbrella term that covers diverse

objects, which complicates their analysis, especially when considering their relation to more prototypical comics (that is, essentially, print comics), particularly in terms of mediality and affordances, and needs an unpacking to properly understand the relation between digital comics and hypertexts.

I propose to distinguish three different types of digital comics.

I will call the first (and most common) type homothetic digital comics: digitized comics and skeuomorphic digital ones (i.e., digital comics strips), that are static and framed by a grid-like layout, hence keeping or reproducing the print format based on the panel/strip/page structure.

The second type are those that I (provisionally) propose to call

linked digital comics. They either rely on scrolling, conceiving the screen as a window that actualizes a potentially infinite surface, free from the constraints of the page and able to take all possible directions (that McCloud influentially defined “infinite canvas” [10]); or on panel delivery, isolating one panel at a time and only revealing or foregrounding the following one once the readers click/tap on it (hypercomics in the form of branched narratives belong to this category).

The third type, that I suggest calling expanded digital comics,

is made of comics featuring intra-panel expansions that allow for a different perception of the storyworld compared to traditional comics. One could further distinguish comics featuring enhanced panels (motion comics and AR comics, that add layers – usually animated - to the static presentation of the diegesis) from those featuring explorable panels (game comics and VR comics, that allow one to navigate their storyworlds and are, at such, gamelike hypertexts).

Interestingly, several scholars and practitioners believe that

exactly digital objects belonging to the second and (notably) the third type are too different from prototypical comics, and as such, should not be considered comics. Indeed, several of their formal features – most of all, when the comics control the reading pace or frame one panel at a time – result in a subversion of the meaning-making effects of prototypical comics, in favor of strategies and protocols remediated from close media (this will be discussed more in detail later on). There is no space to thoroughly examine the issue of their comicness (for a more articulate discussion, see [2]), but I argue that, as Ian Hague sums up, ultimately “a comic is what is produced or consumed as a comic” [2014: 27]. Thus, they will be considered comics insofar as their socio-cultural positioning identifies them as such, although taking into account their peripheral position compared to prototypical comics.

levels and types

Since my perspective is grounded on transmedial narratology,

my understanding of interactivity owes to the work of Marie- Laure Ryan. Ryan establishes two different classifications of the interactivity of a text, by levels and by types.

In The Interactive Onion: Layers of User Participation in Digital

Narrative Texts [12], Ryan distinguishes four levels of interactivity: the first level, which she calls ‘peripheral interactivity’, is the simple act of clicking on an arrow (on a hyperlink) to go to the next page; the second level, where interactivity concerns narrative discourse and story presentation, is that of hypertexts and branching plots; the third level, where interactivity creates variations in a partially predefined story, occurs in (most) video games. The fourth level is, so far, still hypothetical - although generative AIs seem to anticipate possible evolutions in this sense - and concerns real-time story generation, envisioned amongst others by Star Trek screenwriters and taken up (as a metaphor) by Janet Murray in her foundational Hamlet on the Holodeck [13]. To this, Ryan adds what she calls "metainteractivity," a concept that depicts a type of interaction carried on by active users, for example, by “designing a new level for a computer game, creating new costumes for an avatar, [...] and generally expanding the possibilities of action offered by the storyworld” [2011: 59].

Around the same years, Ryan proposes a different, qualitative

classification of interactivity [14], following two axes: internal/external and exploratory/ontological. In internal

interactivity, users project themselves as an integral part of the fictional universe, by means of an avatar or through a first-person perspective; in external interactivity, they are situated outside the virtual world in an impersonal, "top-down" position. At the same time, in exploratory interactivity, users are free to move around the virtual world and explore its details, but their activity does not influence the storyline; while in ontological interactivity, the story develops from, and because of, users’ decisions and interactions. Four prototypes of interactivity are derived from

All click and no play: how interactive are interactive digital comics? HT ‘23, September 4-8, 2023, Rome, Italy WOOD

these two axes (to which Ryan adds various intermediate combinations that will not be discussed here):

internal/exploratory interactivity, where users are immersed in the narrative through a virtual body, but cannot influence the plot, which is structured in a linear narrative path that typically involves solving a series of puzzles/obstacles/mysteries (Ryan gives the example of Tomb Raider); external/exploratory interactivity, in which users can choose their own path of navigation through the virtual space, but also loop back and follow other possibilities, so that the choice does not really involve an ontological engagement with narrative events (Ryan assigns hypertext narratives to this category); external/ontological interactivity, in which users are outside the virtual world, but their decisions exert an influence on the story and the fates of the characters (this is the case of simulators like The Sims, where godlike users control the destiny and unfolding of the whole storyworld); and internal/ontological interactivity, in which users move through diegetic space and have the ability to control their own destiny by making decisions that follow the space-time laws of the storyworld. The latter is the category into which Ryan brings Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, in which users choose their own path in a branching narrative, and Massive Multi-Player Online Games (MMOGs), in which players reciprocally interact (via the Internet) in a shared virtual world.

Rather than complementing each other, the two classifications

proposed by Ryan partially end up conflating, especially between the second and third levels and the two types of ontological interactivity. I will incorporate in my analysis the classification into different types. Nonetheless, the former one (into different levels) is very interesting for several reasons: first, because it posits that at least two levels of interactivity are possible which convey full meaning and agency. Although this may seem commonsensical, it is not, as for example Dominic Arsenault and Bernard Perron have argued that the interactivity of video games instead results from “a chain of reactions” where the player “does not act so much as he reacts to what the game presents to him, and similarly, the game then reacts to his input” [2008: 119-120]. Analogously, according to Charles (both quotes also feature in Stang [16]), “the game’s demands for functional reactivity promote an illusion of agency which lulls the player into an interpretative passivity” [2009: 289]. One cannot help wondering what, then, would elicit an interpretative agency, and which kind of interaction would that be.

Secondly, Ryan’s taxonomy of levels is extremely interesting

because of its edges, that is, “peripheral interactivity” and “metainteractivity”. Indeed, while it appears that both imply something that is not proper interactivity, they still configure some clear type of interaction with the text, which presupposes some kind of agency on behalf of their users. So, again, which kind of interaction is that?

agency

These questions tie in with our purpose is to understand how

interactive digital comics are (and in what sense they are interactive). In fact, going back to our types of digital comics, most examples belonging to the second and third types - notably those that Batinić defines as “enhanced webcomics” [3] and those that Goodbrey calls “hypercomics” [3] - claim maximizing the interactive affordances allowed by the digital environment. They do so to mark their difference from print comics, which, according to Ryan [12], can only go as far (in terms of affordances) as the second level, while digital can go as far as the third level. Nonetheless, as Groensteen remarks, they often limit themselves to a disappointing “surface playability” [2013: 54] or only offer one possible outcome, which would give rise to reservations about their interactive nature. Are these digital comics, then, destined for disappointment? Are they, as Backe comments, hybrids of hybrids, a category therefore liminal, unstable, and even methodologically unhelpful? [20]

My answer is no, but getting there requires rethinking the

interaction between comics (digital, but not only) and their readers. To better understand how these comics shape their reading processes, both cognitively and materially, I want to focus on a broader perspective, centered on reader/user agency, to envision a different idea of how users interact with a text. Similarly, while discussing video games, Sarah Stang argues that “true player agency lies not within pre-scripted videogame narratives, but in the players’ interpretations of the game text, in their engagement with fan communities, and in the exchanges that occur between fans and developers” [16]. Focusing on this larger interaction allows to consider both “diegetic (within) interaction with non-diegetic (out) interaction” [Antonini et al. 2020: 288] of digital comics, seen “as an integrated ecosystem of authorial, editorial, funding and reading tools, mediating a complex network of interrelation between the key actors of the [digital comics] life cycle” [Antonini et al. 2020: 289]. This shift in perspective also follows Jan Baetens and Domingo Sánchez- Mesa’s claim that interactivity is “situated at the crossroads of two fundamental mechanisms of today’s culture: participatory culture, on the one hand, and convergence culture, on the other hand” [2020: 25].

The taxonomy I am presenting is influenced by Frank Serafini's

idea that users assume four roles when faced with multimodal texts (navigator, interpreter, designer, and interrogator) [23], and by Marc Fourmentraux’s four different ‘types’ of relations that can be established with interactive art - Fourmentraux’s distinguishes between exploratory interaction, contributing interaction, alterating interaction, and alteracting interaction [15]. Moreover, my proposal is (by mere synchronicity) remarkably similar to that established by Katie Salen Tekinbas and Eric Zimmerman in Rules of Play, where they envision four modes of interactivity: interpretive participation, functional interactivity, explicit interactivity, and beyond-the-object interactivity [25]. Most of all, though, it is grounded in the historical unfolding of comics practices: comics are a medium that is deeply connected to

HT ‘23, September 4-8, 2023, Rome, Italy Busi Rizzi

interactive behavior - both a social one encompassing the fan practices and exchanges that marked the history of the medium, and a cognitive one, that characterizes its reading – but that wouldn’t show when only consider interactivity in its narrow sense, that is, as identified in Ryan’s second and third level.

I will thus propose reframing interactivity to become part of a

broader set of interactions users have with texts, which implies four types of user agency: narrative, material, interpretive, and social.

In this perspective, narrative agency would encompass

interactivity in its proper sense, and I will stick to the two axes (internal/external and exploratory/ontological) proposed by Ryan [14]. Material agency is essentially what Ryan called peripheral interactivity, and is related to the gestures users choose (or are able) to make, which in turn stem from the materiality and design of the interface with which they interact. We can more clearly identify four issues at stake when considering digital comics: the extent to which material interaction is semanticized – that is, meaningful and closely related to narrative progression; the (de)naturalized nature of the gestures users are asked and allowed to perform; whether users keep control of the reading pace; and whether they can see the whole page or zoom in/out. As Crucifix and Dozo observe, the reader of e-comics can be given “the role of the ‘animator’ through clicking, scrolling, swiping, and other movements” [26], creating a set of gesture analogous to those of paper reading. Of course, naturalized gestures (such as turning a paper page, clicking on an arrow, or scrolling) and denaturalized ones (such as clicking on a half-hidden link or recomposing a narrative scattered on loose sheets) imply a very different cognitive load. And whether these gestures allow users the control of the pace and the perception of the comics as a whole or not, they have very different repercussions on cognitive processes and agency.

Interpretive agency, which takes place at the textual and visual

level, is made of the cognitive processes involved in the reception of a text (and specifically of comics, in this case), and the set of inferences and correlations that the readers project onto what they are reading. This action is thus twofold: on the one side, it requires readers to fill in textual lacunae; on the other, it asks them to weave connections between different elements in the text. In the first sense, comics require readers to fill at least three macrocategories of gaps: narrative gaps, that is, events that are not explicitly present in the narrative, but that we understand must have happened [27], and that “function as a provocation to meaning-making and problem-solving across the arts, inviting the audience to make a connection” [Mikkonen 2017: 18]; sequential gaps, i.e., what McCloud influentially called ‘closure’ [1993: 60- 93], the process according to which, during comics reading, we supplement its patchy structure and lack of details by filling in the gaps (the ‘gutters’) between consecutive panels with our own projections and assumptions; and visual gaps, related to the level of detail and deformation - i.e., the property, which McCloud calls ‘iconicity’, of evoking, for example, a face by drawing a circle with two points and a line [1993: 24-59]. All these processes imply the activation, by the readers, of the network of semiotic, intertextual,

and real-life references that they possess (what Iser called "repertoire" [27]). In the second sense, comics always invite a reading that is not just linear and sequential. First of all, because of what Fresnault-Deruelle called “tabularity”, that is, the effect given by the holistic view of the page [30] (see also [31] for the narrative role played by the layout). Secondly, because they create a web of “iconic, plastic or semantic correspondences” [Groensteen 1999: 146] that tie together non-successive panels and that Groensteen dubs ‘general arthrology’ and ‘braiding’ [1999: 171-186], and that may require readers to browse the comics pages back and forth to perform the ‘weaving’ [33] that will materialize and (re)construct those links.

Interestingly, digital comics that belong to my second and

third categories oftentimes disrupt those meaning-making structures. When that happens, though, those comics borrow different meaning-making protocols from other media

(videogames, cinema) to reconstitute their systemic cohesion and recreate semantic, cognitive and visual links between panels. Nonetheless, it must be stressed how, in video games as well, “players, like readers and viewers, actively interpret the text and exercise agency over how it is received, discussed and understood, though that agency is itself constrained by socio-cultural realities. Players also exercise collective agency through participation in fan communities, which often engage in dialogue with developers and help to shape a game’s paratext, which is itself integral to the experience of play” [16].

Indeed, social agency concerns all social behaviors and

practices enacted by the readers/users in relation to comics texts. Social interaction has profoundly changed in the transition from paper to digital: on the one hand, it now encompasses what Shivener calls the ‘extensive agency’ of digital comics readers, their capacity for “downloading, reprogramming, editing, rescaling, redistributing, and circulating” [26: 57] comics – and to this, one may add liking, reposting, and all the other practices that take place through social media: Antonini, Brooker and Benatti mention “contributing to translations for the benefit of other communities, funding the author, providing feedback, publicizing the contents through social media, recommending and rating contents, commenting on the issue or commissioning new issues” [2020: 291]. On the other hand, it has accelerated, expanded geographically, and disintermediated most participatory modes that pre-dated the Internet and that have always been an integral part of comics culture: exchanging ideas with the authors, rewriting, speculating, commenting, sharing an interpretation, ‘shipping’ characters, and so on, in their digital version, are practices that can go as far as co-authorship and happen (almost) in real time - especially when concerning the production of serialized webcomics, which authors may want to create or modify by following the preferences and feedback of their community (see [21]). This is also consonant with Jonathan Gray’s view of media texts (and, one could add, especially digital ones) as in progress, evolving, existing in various forms at different moments in their becoming [34].

All click and no play: how interactive are interactive digital comics? HT ‘23, September 4-8, 2023, Rome, Italy WOOD

and applications

I will now apply my theoretical framework by considering

some key aspects concerning four digital comics: Daniel Merlin Goodbrey’s Icarus Needs (2013); the Meanwhile app, by Jason Shiga and Andrew Plotkin (2018); Randall Munroe’s Hoverboard episode, in Xkcd (2015); Mountain Studio’s Florence (2018); and Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck (2009-16).

Icarus Needs, by theorist-practitioner Daniel Merlin Goodbrey,

is a webcomic that functions as an example of what he considers “game comics”, and I will consider it the baseline for how hypercomics prototypically behave: through a succession of adjacent panels, the user must guide the main character’s progression through an oneiric adventure that features an inventory system and a series of puzzles that need to be solved through a given succession. Rather than properly moving the character, what happens when the user taps on the arrow keys is, in truth, that the storyworld of the comic book is traversed, showing a limited number of panels at a time, always around the central one, i.e., the one in which Icarus is located. In this way, the character's progression is not entirely free, but guided by the affordances of the webcomic and constantly segmented into a series of panels that each time recreate a grid-like structure with the previous and the next (and, phantasmally, with the whole comics body), thus aiming at keeping the interpretive agency allowed by prototypical comics as intact as possible (although this would need letting the user see the whole comic at a time). Moreover, while the comic allows for a certain level of material agency (the user can make the character go back to where he came from, or go to the wrong direction), and despite simulating an internal/exploratory progression, the interactivity configured is external/exploratory. The comic was published in its finished, non-serial form, and although the interface offered by Goodbrey's personal website invites registration for the forum and taking part in the chat, accessing it is not immediate, thus not facilitating social interaction .

Jason Shiga's Meanwhile is a highly similar (and probably

better known) object to Icarus Needs. It is a choose-your-ownadventure story in comic form that follows, one panel at a time, the main character through a series of initially trivial choices, such as between having a vanilla or chocolate ice cream. The latter, however, unfolds a surreal plot that leads to at least three sci-fi machines (a time machine, a doomsday device, and a mind reader) and allows for potentially 3856 different iterations. The interactivity that Meanwhile prefigures is thus

internal/exploratory. Interestingly, the app keeps the panels around the one in which the action takes place always visible, but turned grey, and all panels potentially visible, allowing for zooming in and out. This configures a higher interpretive agency, allowing to trace the overall path one has taken and giving the possibility of undoing a move and going back.

What is peculiar about Meanwhile is that, before being a tablet app, it was a hypertext in print form realized by Jason Shiga alone (2010) - for a time there was a version, apparently rather rudimentary, as a webcomic, but the site is no longer searchable. Striking in this sense is the contrast between the very difficult navigability of the book, whose overabundance of non-related panels in the small space of a page constrained the users’ material agency and hindered its unfolding, and the absolute readability of the app, which restores, albeit in ghostly form, semantic links between distant panels - while in the book version, the coexistence on the same page of panels belonging to different narrative lines ended up disassembling tabular and systemic coherence.

In contrast to these two quite prototypical examples of comics

hypertexts, Hoverboard looks like a peculiar object right from its frame: it is one of the special episodes of Randall Munroe's Xkcd, a webcomic strip that has been serialized for about two decades. Although the standard format of Xkcd’s strips is homothetic to the printed comic strip (with the exception of the hover text that appears by holding the mouse arrow over the image, and which generally contains a second-level punchline, commenting on the events taking place in the strip), the special episodes often experiment with the affordances of the digital (see in this regard the episodes Right Click, Throw Calculator, and especially the very famous Click and Drag, an explorable panel consisting of 2592 sections of 2048x2048 pixels). Hoverboard's conceptual operation in this regard is extremely refined: the episode begins by showing, within a single panel, much of the playground of what appears to be a retro-style video game in which one must retrieve several coins. While this grants a certain internal/ontological interactivity, the characteristic meaning-making of comics (and thus their interpretive interaction) appear thus limited, in favor of mechanisms that draw on the logic of video games. That this is a video game is explicitly confirmed by the text within the comic, which says it offers a "little game" to celebrate the author's newly published book. The gameplay, very basic and drawn with the minimal, cartoonesque traits that characterize Xkcd, involves a stick figure aiming to retrieve all the coins. If that happens, a message notifies the user that they have obtained x coins in x seconds, congratulating on a "great job." If the user tries to exit the play area, a message appears inviting them, rather forcefully, to return. If, however, one continues to leave the play area by going against the apparent rules of engagement of the game, the comic opens up to the exploration of an enormously larger narrative world (internal/exploratory interactivity) reminiscent of the aforementioned Click and Drag episode, whose static, noninteracting appearance falls back into the prototypical language of comics (with text dialogues) and whose storyworld serves as an explorable, readable platform embedding numerous intertextual and intermedial references to pop culture and the nerd subculture that constitute Xkcd's trademark. In this way, the material interaction, which seems to involve a basic agency clearly contained and channeled by the simple mechanism that drives the

HT ‘23, September 4-8, 2023, Rome, Italy Busi Rizzi

game, becomes instead the key element in changing the purpose and type of interaction with the episode and the very nature of the object visible to the user (from retro game in comics form to explorable comic featuring – disguised as - an embedded video game). Xkcd is accompanied by a Wiki curated by its users, which explains its many intertextual references, expands on the scientific explanations that very often appear in its episodes, and, in the case of special episodes, maps and illustrates their configurations. Munroe often refers to recurring themes on which community dialogue is constant, although the author is relatively elusive, which makes not easy to estimate the actual impact the fan community has on his work.

Another text that reflects on the different types of interactions

it enacts is Florence, an interactive story developed by the Mountains studio. Significantly - and despite appealing to almost all the features of digital comics, except the presence of dialogue in the form of written text - the app is marketed as a video game. Florence tells the story of the eponymous protagonist, Florence Yeoh, through twenty chapters divided into six acts. The scene shows one vertical rectangular panel at a time, occupying by default the entire extent of the screen (although inset panels open within it). The action progresses by tapping on arrows that appear when the scene being shown is finished (normally when an action has been performed by the user), which unfolds a visible slide to the next panel, as if the user were scrolling. The interaction required of the user is mainly trivial, and consists of simple movements: tapping, scrolling, some gestures that mimic those that the protagonist has to perform, and some mundane actions (arranging objects along the scene, which is mostly the apartment in which Florence lives); it is not possible to go back or undo an action. What is striking about the gestures required of Florence's users is how the requested movements, which initially seem endowed with pure kinaesthetic value, instead take on an increasingly strong semantic charge, mutating to embody, emphasize and symbolize the protagonist's emotional situation. In this way, material and interpretive interactions balance the low intensity (internal/exploratory) narrative agency that the app allows for. What at first seems to be a limitation, if not a flaw, of narrative agency turns out instead to be a ploy to emotionally engage the user in the story, aligning them with Florence's point of view and emotional state.

The last text I want to discuss in this brief overview is

Homestuck by Andrew Hussie. This mammoth serial webcomic was published over a period of more than seven years, coming in at over 8000 pages and 800000 words. The story is about a group of teenagers who unintentionally cause the end of the world by playing the beta copy of a video game called Sburb. The comic features animated GIFs, animations and games made with Adobe Flash, and its entire narrative structure is framed through the remediation of two digital devices: a chatlog that houses most of its dialogue and the visual and semantic reconfiguration of a retro text-based adventure game. Homestuck thus enlivens its references through what Veale calls "metamedia storytelling," [39] opening to a self-reflection on the concept and functioning of

video games and interactive narratives that substantiates the many metaleptic infractions the story enacts. The peculiarity of Homestuck is, however - similarly to Florence and Hoverboard, and unlike Icarus Needs and Meanwhile - that the

(internal/exploratory) interactivity it stages and foregrounds from the very first panels is only apparent - or rather, confined to an extremely trivial and contained level of story at large. There are some branching paths, but they only allow one way to advance in the story; and its embedded minigames were playable (they are not anymore due to code obsolescence), but only allowed for a short set of (very odd) actions. Homestuck stands out, on the other hand, for its highly interactive nature in an interpretive and social sense: in the first sense, the comic would not be the object it is if one was unable to decode its discourse on its interactive and narrative natures. In the second, not only has the community of users around the webcomic created a very long and very detailed Wiki about it, without which deciphering its countless seconddegree in-jokes would be virtually impossible. These in-jokes, in turn, derive from and are related to the process of creating Homestuck, which was initially done by Hussie by following directly the directions given to him by the forum linked to the comic and, over the years and as the community has expanded exponentially, has continued to be based on users interactions and suggestions, incorporating the constant and substantial references to dialogue, interpretive hypotheses, and plot desiderata of its community into the comic. Homestuck also stands out for the extent of its transmedia expansion and fantext, both of which can be attributed to the fundamental role of its fans, who were welcomed by Hussie into its creative team, initially for some particularly time-consuming passages of the comics creation (animations, soundtrack, and so on) and later on fully included when it came to designing the video games that were derived from the comic itself (for more details on this topic, see [35]). As such, the complex web of its interpretive and social interaction not only make up for, but tie to its material and narrative ones, possibly configuring a prototype of what participative, interactive, transmedial storyworlds could be.

Comparing prototypical cases of hypercomics’ use of

interactivity with more eccentric examples shows how the interaction between narrative objects and their users is composed of a range of dynamics and mechanisms that have only in part to do with the effects of interactivity in its narrow sense.

In his examination of electronic literature, James O'Sullivan

warns against what he calls " the rhetoric of interaction, the idea that there is something to be automatically gained from presenting what we read in particular structures": electronic literature, he says, is not “the epitome of the Barthesian writable text”, what occurs is the opposite, “a relationship between author and reader, coder and user, that is entirely based on platformenabled illusions." [2019: 78]. Moreover, he adds, we must always keep in mind that hypertextual fiction "can give the appearance of freedom, but no medium can transcend fixity." [2019: 81] - that

All click and no play: how interactive are interactive digital comics? HT ‘23, September 4-8, 2023, Rome, Italy WOOD

is, that the narrative options made available to the reader are ultimately finite. While it is fundamental to break free of this “ideology of interactivity an agency” [37], prosumerism, fan culture, and distributed authorship, which are ubiquitous in digital culture, constantly reconfigure the ways users interact with (semiotic) texts. Moreover, as Lev Manovich reminds us, all art “is ‘interactive’ in several ways. Ellipses in literary narration, missing details of objects in visual art, and other representational ‘shortcuts’ require the user to fill in missing information” [2001: 56].

Considering digital comics hence helps to rethink interactivity

as part of this larger framework of interactions that take place between, and connect, texts to their readers/users.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Giorgio Busi Rizzi’s research was supported by a BOF (Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds, Special Research Fund) fellowship (01P03819) awarded by Ghent University.

[1] Lukas Wilde. 2015. "Distinguishing mediality: The problem of identifying forms

and features of digital comics." Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 8.4, 1-14.

[2] Giorgio Busi Rizzi. 2023. “Digital Comics: An Old/new Form.” In Maaheen

Ahmed (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Comics. Cambridge University Press, 102-121.

[3] Daniel Merlin Goodbrey. 2017. The impact of digital mediation and hybridisation

on the form of comics. Professional Doctorate in Design (Ddes), University of Hertfordshire School of Creative Arts.

[4] Theodor H. Nelson. 1965. “Complex information processing: a file structure for

the complex, the changing and the indeterminate.” Proceedings of the 1965 20th national conference, 84–100.

[5] George P. Landow. 2006. Hypertext 3.0: Critical theory and new media in an era

of globalization. JHU Press.

[6] Hartmut Koenitz et al. (eds.). 2015. Interactive digital narrative: history, theory

and practice. Routledge.

[7] Hartmut Koenitz. 2023. Understanding Interactive Digital Narrative: Immersive

Expressions for a Complex Time. Routledge.

[8] Marie-Laure Ryan. 2009. “From narrative games to playable stories: Toward a

poetics of interactive narrative.” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 43-59.

[9] Espen J. Aarseth. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Johns

Hopkin University Press.

[10] Scott McCloud. 2000. Reinventing Comics. Perennial. [11] Ian Hague. 2014. Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and

Graphic Novels. Routledge.

[12] Marie-Laure Ryan. 2011. "The interactive onion: Layers of user participation in

digital narrative texts." In Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas (eds). New narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the DigitalAage. University of Nebraska Press, 35-62.

[13] Janet H. Murray. 2016. Hamlet on the Holodeck, updated edition: The Future of

Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT press.

[14] Marie-Laure Ryan. 2006. Avatars of Story. University of Minnesota Press. [15] Dominic Arsenault and Bernard Perron. 2008. "In the frame of the magic cycle:

The circle (s) of gameplay." In Mark Wolf and Bernard Perron (eds). The Video Game Theory Reader 2. Routledge, 131-154.

[16] Sarah Stang. 2019. "’This action will have consequences’: Interactivity and

player agency." Game studies 19.1, n. p.

[17] Alec Charles. 2009. “Playing with one’s self: notions of subjectivity andagency

in digital games.” Eludamos 3.2, 281-294.

[18] Josip Batinić. 2016. "’Enhanced Webcomics’: An Exploration of the Hybrid Form

of Comics on the Digital Medium." Image & Narrative 17.5, 80-91.

[19] Thierry Groensteen. 2013. Comics and Narration. University Press of

Mississippi.

[20] Hans-Joachim Backe. 2020. "Game-comics and comic-games. Against the

concept of hybrids." In Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, Jan-Noël Thon (eds). Comics and Videogames: From Hybrid Medialities to Transmedia Expansions. Routledge, 60-83.

[21] Alessio Antonini, Sam Brooker, and Francesca Benatti. 2020. “Circuits, Cycles,

Configurations: an Interaction Model of Web Comics”. In International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling. Springer, 287-299.

[22] Jan Baetens and Domingo Sánchez-Mesa Martínez. 2020. "Transmedializing the

fantastic, a user-based approach." Brumal VIII.2, 21-40.

[23] Frank Serafini. 2012. “Expanding the four resources model: Reading visual and

multimodal texts”. Pedagogies: An international journal 7.2, 150-164.

[24] Jean-Paul Fourmentraux. 2005. Art et Internet: les nouvelles figures de la création.

CNRS Edition.

[25] Katie Salen Tekinbas and Eric Zimmerman. 2003. Rules of play: Game design

fundamentals. MIT press.

[26] Benoît Crucifix and Björn-Olav Dozo. 2018. “E-Graphic Novels.” In Jan Baetens

et al. (eds). The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel. Cambridge University Press, 574-90.

[27] Wolfgang Iser. 1978. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Johns

Hopkins University Press.

[28] Kai Mikkonen. 2017. The Narratology of Comic Art. Routledge. [29] Scott McCloud. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Kitchen Sink

Press.

[30] Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle. 1976. “Du linéaire au tabulaire.”

Communications 24.1, 7-23.

[31] Benoît Peeters 1998. Lire la bande dessinée. Case, planche, récit. Casterman. [32] Thierry Groensteen. 1999. Système de la bande dessinée. Presses Universitaires

de France.

[33] Barbara Postema. 2013. Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of

Fragments. RIT Press.

[34] Jonathan Gray. 2013. “When is the author?.” In Jonathan Gray and Derek

Johnson (eds). A Companion to Media Authorship. Wiley Blackwell, 88-111.

[35] Giorgio Busi Rizzi. 2020. "Il fumetto digitale tra sperimentazione e

partecipazione: il caso Homestuck." H-ermes. Journal of Communication 18, 45- 72.

[36] James O'Sullivan. 2019. Towards a Digital Poetics: Electronic Literature and

Literary Games. Springer.

[37] Noam Knoller and Udi Ben-Arie. 2015. "The holodeck is all around us—interface

dispositifs in interactive digital storytelling." In Hartmut Koenitz et al. (eds.). Interactive Digital Narrative. Routledge, 51-66.

[38] Lev Manovich. 2001. The Language of New Media. MIT Press. [39] Kevin Veale. 2019. "‘Friendship isn’t an emotion fucknuts’: Manipulating

affective materiality to shape the experience of Homestuck’s

story." Convergence 25.5-6, 1027-1043.