Comics and Videogames This book offers the first comprehensive study of the many interfaces shaping the relationship between comics and videogames. It combines in-depth conceptual reflec- tion with a rich selection of paradigmatic case studies from contemporary media culture. The editors have gathered a distinguished group of international scholars working at the interstices of comics studies and game studies to explore two interrelated areas of inquiry: The first part of the book focuses on hybrid medialities and experi- mental aesthetics “between” comics and videogames; the second part zooms in on how comics and videogames function as transmedia expansions within an increas- ingly convergent and participatory media culture. The individual chapters address synergies and intersections between comics and videogames via a diverse set of case studies ranging from independent and experimental projects via popular franchises from the corporate worlds of DC and Marvel to the more playful forms of media mix prominent in Japan. Offering an innovative intervention into a number of salient issues in current media culture, Comics and Videogames will be of interest to scholars and students of comics studies, game studies, popular culture studies, transmedia studies, and visual culture studies. Andreas Rauscher is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is the author of Das Phänomen Star Trek [ The Star Trek Phenomenon ] (2003), Spielerische Fiktionen: Transmediale Genrekonzepte in Videospielen [ Ludic Fictions: Transmedial Genre Concepts in Videogames ] (2012), and Star Wars: 100 Seiten [ Star Wars: 100 Pages ] (2019). Daniel Stein is Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is the author of Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz (2012), co-editor of From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (2013/²2015), and one of the editors of Anglia: Journal of English Philology Jan- Noël Thon is Professor of Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Guest Professor of Media Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany, and Professorial Fellow at the University for the Creative Arts, UK. He has published widely in comics studies, game studies, and media studies. Routledge Advances in Game Studies Fans and Videogames Histories, Fandom, Archives Edited by Melanie Swalwell, Helen Stuckey and Angela Ndalianis Identity and Play in Interactive Digital Media Ergodic Ontogeny Sara M. Cole Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity Rob Gallagher Evolutionary Psychology and Digital Games Digital Hunter- Gatherers Edited by Johannes Breuer, Daniel Pietschmann, Benny Liebold, and Benjamin P. Lange The Playful Undead and Video Games Critical Analyses of Zombies and Gameplay Edited by Stephen J. Webley and Peter Zackariasson Hybrid spaces Crossing Boundaries in Game Design, Players Identities and Play Spaces Edited by Adriana de Souza e Silva and Ragan Glover-Rijkse Forms and Functions of Endings in Narrative Digital Games Michelle Herte Independent Videogames Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics Edited by Paolo Ruffino Comics and Videogames From Hybrid Medialities to Transmedia Expansions Edited by Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan-Noël Thon Comics and Videogames From Hybrid Medialities to Transmedia Expansions Edited by Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan- Noël Thon First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan-Noël Thon; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan-Noël Thon to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. The Open Access publication of this book was assisted by generous funding from the Volkswagen Foundation (www.volkswagenstiftung.de/ en). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing- in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 9780367474195 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003035466 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK Contents List of figures vii List of contributors viii Acknowledgments xiii 1 Introduction: Comics and videogames 1 A N D R E A S R AUSCHER, DANIEL STEIN, AND JA N- NOËL THON PART I Hybrid medialities 15 2 Of Pac- Men and Star Raiders: Early mutual representations between comics and videogames (1981– 1983) 17 N I C O L A S L A B ARRE 3 Interfacing comics and games: A socio-affective multimodal approach 29 CA R M A N N G 4 Game comics: Theory and design 45 DA N I E L M E R LIN GOODBREY 5 Game-comics and comic-games: Against the concept of hybrids 60 H A N S - J OAC H IM BACKE 6 Building stories: The interplay of comics and games in Chris Ware’s works 84 N I N A E C K H O FF- HEINDL vi Contents 7 Homestuck as a game: A webcomic between playful participation, digital technostalgia, and irritating inventory systems 96 T I M G L A S E R 8 Metal Gear Solid and its comics adaptations 113 C L AU D I U S STEMMLER PART II Transmedia expansions 127 9 Many Spider-Men are better than one: Referencing as a narrative strategy 129 D O M I N I K MIETH 10 The not-so Fantastic Four franchise: A critical history of the comic, the films, and the Disney/Fox merger 149 RO B E RT A LAN BROOKEY AND NAN ZHANG 11 The road to Arkham Asylum : Batman: Dark Tomorrow and transitional transmedia 164 J A M E S F L E URY 12 When rules collide: Definitional strategies for superheroes across comic books and games 186 W I L L I A M U RICCHIO 13 The manifestations of game characters in a media mix strategy 201 J O L E E N B L OM 14 Creating Lara Croft: The meaning of the comic books for the Tomb Raider franchise 222 J O S E FA M U CH 15 Beyond immersion: Gin Tama and palimpsestuous reception 240 S U SA N A TO SCA Index 255 Figures 3.1 Exploded view of Batwoman Vol. 2: To Drown the World (Williams and Blackman 2013, 54–55; see also Bateman et al. 2017a, 478). 31 3.2 Transcription of Metal Gear Solid 2: Bande Dessinée (narrative stage: development). 34 3.3 Intermedial features in Metal Gear Solid 2: Bande Dessinée (x- axis: number of instances; y- axis: chapters). 35 3.4 Dynamic layouts and time-lapse effects by dialing motion in Breathing Room © Erik Loyer. 36 3.5 Capture from Gorogoa (2017). 37 7.1 “- - turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ectoBiologist [EB] at 18:13 - - ” (Hussie 2018, 324). © Homestuck and VIZ Media. 100 7.2 “ Homestuck > Enter name.” (Hussie 2018, 1). © Homestuck and VIZ Media. 103 11.1 Dual film and comic book licensing in Superman (1978) (composite by the author). 165 11.2 Comic book licensing combined with film elements in Batman: Return of the Joker (1991) (composite by the author). 166 11.3 Categories of Batman texts, derived from Nick Browne’s “The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text” (1984). 171 11.4 The packaging for Batman: Dark Tomorrow (2003) emphasizes its ties to the comic books. 173 11.5 Images from the 2001 E3 preview of Batman: Dark Tomorrow (composite by the author). 174 11.6 Examples of foreshadowing in the Batman: Dark Tomorrow comic books (composite by the author). 176 11.7 Transmedia components of the Arkhamverse (composite by the author). 180 14.1 Overview of the Tomb Raider franchise. 228 14.2 Overview of the Tomb Raider reboot franchise. 233 Contributors Hans- Joachim Backe is Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Games Research of the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds an MA degree and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany. He was chairperson of the ICLA Research Committee on Comparative Literature in the Digital Age and is a member of both the German Association for Comics Studies (ComFor) and the Comics Studies Research Group in the German Society for Media Studies (GfM). He has published extensively on self-referentiality and discourses of alterity in videogames and comics, as well as on ecocriticism, narrative theory, and media theory. Website: www.hajobacke.com/. Joleen Blom is a lecturer at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and a lecturer at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She holds a BA degree in Japanese Studies, an MA degree in Media and Performance Studies, and a PhD in Game Studies. During her PhD, she contributed to the Making Sense of Games project for which she wrote her thesis on dynamic game characters, developing a transmedial approach to study their proliferation across popular cultural media, with special attention to the role of games and characters within the Japanese media mix. Robert Alan Brookey is a Professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Ball State University in the US. His books have included Hollywood Gamers: Digital Convergence in the Film and Video Game Industries (2010) and Playing to Win: Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play (2015). His work has also appeared in Games and Culture , Convergence, and Communication, Culture and Critique , and he has served as the Editor for Critical Studies in Media Communication Nina Eckhoff- Heindl is a MSCA-Fellow in the program “a.r.t.e.s. EUmanities” at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities, University of Cologne, Germany (Horizon 2020: Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant No. 713600). Currently, she is a PhD student in art history at the University of Cologne, Germany, as well as the University of Zurich, Switzerland, with a pro- ject on aesthetic experience and the visual-tactile dimensions of comics. List of contributors ix Her research as well as her publications focus on modern and contem- porary art, image theory, aesthetics, comics studies, disability studies, and Holocaust studies. Website: www.ninaheindl.com. James Fleury is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis in the US. He received his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from UCLA in 2019. He is the co-editor of the anthology The Franchise Era: Managing Media in the Digital Economy (with Bryan Hikari Hartzheim and Stephen Mamber, 2019). His publications have appeared in Mediascape , the South Atlantic Review , and the edited collections James Bond and Popular Culture: Essays on the Influence of the Fictional Superspy (edited by Michele Brittany, 2014), Film Reboots (edited by Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis, forthcoming), and Content Wars: Tech Empires vs. Media Empires (edited by Denise Mann, forthcoming). Website: www.jamesfleury.net. Tim Glaser is a PhD student and a Research Associate at the Chair of Media Studies at the Braunschweig University of Art, Germany. His research focuses on videogame culture, digital comics, platform capita- lism, and speculative fiction. Recent publication: “oh no—this comic is literally me: Webcomics im Zeitalter ihrer memetischen Rezeption.” [“oh no— this comic is literally me: Webcomics in the Age of Their Memetic Reception.”] CLOSURE: Kieler e- Journal für Comicforschung 4.5 (2018): n.p. Website: www.timglaser.de. Daniel Merlin Goodbrey is a Principal Lecturer in Narrative and Interaction Design at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. A prolific and innovative comics creator, Goodbrey has gained international recogni- tion as a leading expert in the field of experimental digital comics. His hypercomic work received the International Clickburg Webcomic Award in Holland in 2006 and his smartphone app A Duck Has an Adventure was shortlisted in the 2012 New Media Writing Prize. Website: www. e-merl.com. Nicolas Labarre is an Assistant Professor at University Bordeaux Montaigne, France, where he teaches US society and culture, comics, and videogames. He is the author of Heavy Metal, l’autre Métal Hurlant (2017), a trans- national history of the Heavy Metal magazine, and of Understanding Genres in Comics (2020). He has published several articles on the topic of adaptation into comics. Dominik Mieth is Professor of Game Design at the Mediadesign University of Applied Sciences in Munich, Germany. He has worked on a variety of different videogames as game designer and producer at developers like Coreplay GmbH, where he oversaw design and production of projects such as Jagged Alliance: Back in Action (2012). His academic interests include game design and development, narrative design for interactive x List of contributors narratives, and the history of videogames. His lectures cover game design and game development documentation, game rules and mechanics, inter- active storytelling, and the history of game development. Josefa Much is a Lecturer and Research Associate at the Chair of Media Research and Adult Education at the University of Magdeburg, Germany. She holds an MA degree in Media Literacy from the University of Magdeburg and is currently working on her PhD thesis, which deals with the presentation of biography in videogames and comics. Her research interests include game studies, media literacy, film studies, transmedia storytelling, biography studies, and new forms of interactive and audio- visual communication. Carman Ng is a Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with the University of Bremen and the Free University Berlin, Germany, with research sojourn experiences in the US (Fulbright) and Germany (Erasmus Mundus, DAAD). Her current research explores the intersections of game studies, transmedia studies, and affective sciences in order to theorize multimodal semiotics for social impact game designs that engage with empathy and mental health. She is interested in examining aesthetics and ideologies of popular media, including videogames, anime, comics, graphic novels, and media art. Outside academia, she has participated in the Hong Kong community theater as a performer, writer, and techie. Andreas Rauscher is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany, where he focuses on film and game studies. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Mainz, the University of Kiel, and the University of Freiburg, and has also worked as a journalist and academic curator for the exhibition Film and Games: Interactions at the Frankfurt Film Museum (2015). He is the author of Das Phänomen Star Trek [ The Star Trek Phenomenon ] (2003), Spielerische Fiktionen: Transmediale Genrekonzepte in Videospielen [ Ludic Fictions: Transmedial Genre Concepts in Videogames ] (2012), and Star Wars: 100 Seiten [ Star Wars: 100 Pages ] (2019) as well as the co- editor of essay collections on The Simpsons , superhero movies, the Czechoslovakian Nová Vlna, and the James Bond film series. Website: www.andreas- rauscher.de/. Daniel Stein is Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is the author of Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz (2012) as well as the co-editor of From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (with Jan- Noël Thon, 2013/ ²2015) and Nineteenth- Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s–1860s (with Lisanna Wiele, 2019). His work has appeared in Popular Music and Society , Southern Literary Journal , Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics , and Amerikastudien/ List of contributors xi American Studies . He co- edits Anglia: Journal of English Philology as well as the Anglia book series and has received the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize in 2013 (German Research Foundation/Ministry of Education and Research). Claudius Stemmler is a PhD student at the University of Siegen, Germany, where he currently receives a scholarship from the House of Young Talents graduate center. His PhD thesis presents an analysis of the oeuvre of Japanese videogame designer Hideo Kojima. Previously, he has contributed to edited collections on the Call of Duty videogame series and jazz singer Billie Holiday. Jan-Noël Thon is Professor of Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Guest Professor of Media Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany, and Professorial Fellow at the University for the Creative Arts, UK. Recent books include From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (co-edited with Daniel Stein, 2013/ ²2015), Storyworlds across Media (co-edited with Marie-Laure Ryan, 2014), Game Studies (co-edited with Klaus Sachs-Hombach, 2015), Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture (2016/ ²2018), Subjectivity across Media (co-edited with Maike Sarah Reinerth, 2017), and Comicanalyse (co-authored with Stephan Packard, Andreas Rauscher, Véronique Sina, Lukas R. A. Wilde, and Janina Wildfeuer, 2019). Website: www.janthon.net. Susana Tosca is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Humanities at Roskilde University, Denmark. Over the past twenty years, her research has combined aesthetic and media studies approaches to investigating the reception of digital media. She has published widely in the areas of hypertext, digital literature, computer games, and transmediality, including the books Literatura Digital (2004), Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction (with Simon Egenfeldt- Nielsen and Jonas Heide Smith, 2008/²2013/ 32016/42020), and Transmedial Worlds in Everyday Life: Networked Reception, Social Media and Fictional Worlds (with Lisbeth Klastrup, 2019). William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT in the US as well as at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which explores inter- active and participatory reality-based storytelling. His work explores the frontiers of new media, at times using a historical lens (old media when they were new, such as nineteenth-century television) and at times by working with interactive and algorithmically generated media forms (interactive documentaries and games in particular). He has received numerous awards for his work, including Guggenheim, Humboldt, and Fulbright research fellowships, as well as the Berlin Prize. xii List of contributors Nan Zhang is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Telecommunications at Ball State University in the US. She worked as an Editorial Assistant for Critical Studies in Media Communication . Her research interests include social media, user-generated content, and cross- cultural consumer behavior. Acknowledgments This book emerges from the three-day symposium “Comics|Games:Aesthetic, Ludic, and Narrative Strategies,” which took place from 5 to 7 November 2018 at Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover, Germany. We wish to thank all participants for their spirited contributions to a number of wide-ranging discussions, their consistently outstanding scholarship, and their willingness to build on the latter in developing the chapters presented on the following pages. Moreover, we are very grateful to the Volkswagen Foundation for generously funding not only the symposium itself but also the Open Access publication of the present volume. newgenprepdf 1 Introduction Comics and videogames Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, and Jan- Noël Thon In recent years, comics studies and game studies have each developed from marginal subfields into two of the most dynamic and vital areas of current humanistic scholarship. Increasingly, this entails not only an expanding corpus of in-depth studies on comics and videogames as aesthetic forms (e.g., Carrier 2000; Ensslin 2014; Etter 2020; Groensteen 2007; Juul 2019; Kirkpatrick 2011), their narrative potentials (e.g., Domsch 2013; Kukkonen 2013; Mikkonen 2017; Murray 2017; Postema 2013; Thon 2016), and their phenomenological appeal (e.g., Aldama 2012; Anable 2018; Hague 2014; Isbister 2016; Keogh 2018; Packard 2006) but also the codification of knowledge via a growing number of wide-ranging edited collections (e.g., Deterding and Zagal 2018; Meskin and Cook 2012; Perron and Schröter 2016; Ruberg and Shaw 2017; Stein and Thon 2013; Williams and Lyons 2010), field-defining handbooks (e.g., Bramlet et al. 2016; Hatfield and Beaty 2020; Raessens and Goldstein 2005; Sachs-Hombach and Thon 2015; Smith and Duncan 2017; Wolf and Perron 2014), and introductory textbooks (e.g., Abel and Klein 2016; Beil et al. 2017; Duncan and Smith 2009; Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. 2020; Newman 2013; Packard et al. 2019). Despite the fact that comics and videogames have intersected frequently since the late 1970s and early 1980s, neither comics studies nor game studies have adequately addressed the various historical synergies between the two media or their increasing convergence in the current cultural landscape. Evidence of such synergies abounds: In 1979, Atari published a videogame based on DC’s Superman comics; in 1982, a videogame developed by Parker Brothers based on Marvel’s Spider- Man comics followed. Both videogames used abstract variations of stock scenes from the comic books and turned them into ludic standard situations for scrolling action games (Rauscher 2012, 2014). A few years later, a series of three adventure games— Questprobe Featuring Hulk (1984), Questprobe Featuring Spider-Man (1984), and Questprobe Featuring Human Torch and Thing (1985)— were published by Adventure International. In contrast to the earlier Atari action games that had focused on dexterity and capacity of reaction, these graphic adventures made an effort to adapt the narrative patterns of superhero comics. Instead of exercising skill- based movements, players had to collect 2 A. Rauscher, D. Stein, and J.-N. Thon clues and solve puzzles to free the superheroes’ friends and battle their foes. Moreover, comic tie-ins accompanied these videogames in an early example of transmediality until Adventure International’s bankruptcy in 1985. Videogames produced for the Atari home consoles like Yar’s Revenge (1982) and Centipede (1983) were accompanied by comics that were included in the videogame boxes and written by popular comics authors such as Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas (see also the contribution by Labarre in the present volume). Comparable to the popular 1980s toy fran- chise Masters of the Universe , which featured comics as a special gimmick for every action figure, the comics accompanying these early videogames added background stories that helped “color” the gameplay. The images in the comics thus provided narrative and visual details to the videogames’ storyworld that, due to limitations in processing power and graphic ca pacities, could not be represented within the videogames themselves. Often, these comics also integrated more extensive intermedial references. To take just one example: The 3D-comic The Adventures of Lane Mastodon , which accompanied the Infocom adventure Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986), contained not just information necessary to completing the game (and thus acted as a form of copy protection) but also offered a wealth of references to the iconography of science-fiction B-pictures that further enriched the peculiar humor of the largely text-based videogame. By the early 1990s, stand- alone comics series based upon successful videogames such as Double Dragon (1991), Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1991), or Street Fighter (1993) sold separately, while comic tie-ins have also increasingly been used to bridge the narrative gap between videogame sequels and to add detail to an expanding storyworld (see below). Despite the fact that both videogames based on successful comics series and comics based on successful videogame franchises have been in produc- tion for several decades, the examination of their synergies and interactions remains largely uncharted territory in both comics studies and game studies (with the scope of existing studies focusing on comics and videogames [e.g., Backe 2012; Goodbrey 2015; Lippitz 2019] remaining considerably more limited than those focusing on comics and film [e.g., Burke 2015; Davis 2016; Gordon et al. 2007] or on videogames and film [e.g., Brookey 2010; Kallay 2013; Lenhardt and Rauscher 2015]). This is even more surprising since the two media forms’ move from the margins to the mainstream of current media culture and the considerable rise in associated fan activities (Bolling and Smith 2014; Scott 2019; Tosca and Klastrup 2019) have made their complex interrelations ever more visible. Among the plethora of poten- tially productive avenues of inquiry that are thus opened up, we highlight two different, and arguably complementary, kinds of interrelations between comics and videogames. On the one hand, it is possible to frame the ways in which comics and videogames borrow, adapt, and transform a diverse range of aesthetic, ludic, and narrative strategies conventionally associated with the “other” medium in terms of hybrid medialities ̧ which are realized in a Introduction: Comics and videogames 3 broad range of examples such as Comix Zone (1995), Homestuck (2009– 2016), A Duck Has an Adventure (2012), or Framed (2014) (see also the contributions by Backe, Eckhoff-Heindl, Goodbrey, Glaser, and Ng in the present volume). On the other hand, both comics and videogames often function as transmedia expansions of existing media products, whether as adaptations of specific stories (e.g., Hassler-Forest and Nicklas 2015; Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013; Parody 2011) or as more dispersed contributions to the kinds of transmedia franchises that have increasingly come to define our current media environments (e.g., Freeman and Gambarato 2018; Jenkins 2006; Johnson 2013). Parallel to the recent rise of superhero blockbusters based on intellectual property originating in the realm of comics (e.g., Burke 2015; McEniry et al. 2016; Yockey 2017), popular videogames from very different genres contribute to a variety of comics-based franchises from those built on Bill Willingham’s Fables series (2002–2015) or Alan Moore’s Watchmen series (1986) to DC’s Batman comics or Marvel’s Spider-Man comics (see also the contributions by Brookey and Zhang, Fleury, Mieth, and Uricchio in the present volume). Similarly, videogame–based franchises from Metal Gear Solid or Persona 5 to Tomb Raider or Warcraft have included comics of various kinds amongst their more prominent installments (see also the contributions by Blom, Much, and Stemmler in the present volume). While it goes without saying that the centripetal force of hybrid medialities and the centrifugal force of transmedia expansions are not mutually exclusive, distinguishing between them may still be a helpful first step toward coming to terms with the complex synergies, interactions, and interrelations between comics and videogames. From hybrid medialities to transmedia expansions The notions of hybrid medialities and transmedia expansions both draw on a more fundamental conceptualization of comics and videogames as media. While it would go beyond the scope of this brief introduction to reconstruct the many different and partially contradictory conceptualizations of the term medium and the development of its different forms in any detail (e.g., Bolter and Grusin 1999; Manovich 2001; McLuhan 1964; Murray 2012; Ryan 2006; Schmidt 2000), we would still suggest that “newspapers,” “novels,” “photographic pictures,” “films,” or indeed “comics” and “videogames” may be best understood as conventionally distinct media , “which can be distinguished not only by way of the technological or material base and/or the semiotic system(s) they use but also by way of the ‘social fact’ that they are conventionally treated as distinct media” (Thon 2014, 335; see also Rajewsky 2010; Ryan 2006; Thon 2016; Wilde 2015; Wolf 1999). Mediality would then, at least in principle, refer not just to “transmedial notions of ‘medium- ness’ ” but also “to the set of prototypical properties that can be considered constitutive for a conventionally distinct medium” (Thon 2014, 335), even 4 A. Rauscher, D. Stein, and J.-N. Thon though “the dynamic processes shaping, modifying and transforming the conventions of this distinct medium” (Wilde 2015, 2) are often complex and may put the always already remediated mediality of a specific manifestation of what we might consider a comic or a videogame into sharp relief only if we attempt to differentiate it from another media form. Scott McCloud, for example, notes that “the basic difference [between animation and comics] is that animation is sequential in time but not spa- tially juxtaposed as comics are” (1993, 7; see also, once more, Wilde 2015). While many action adventures and platformers do indeed appear much closer to animation than to traditional comics, one can also find more than a few videogames that do not just draw on stories told by comics but also (or primarily) work to evoke the combination of words and pictures in panels and panel sequences that defines comics’ mediality. As mentioned above, an early example of this kind of hybrid mediality is the 1995 beat ’em up Comix Zone , which presents its game spaces much like a comics page, with several panels to be traversed by the protagonist as he fights the evil mutant Mortus. More recently, the 2014 puzzle game Framed tasks the player with (re)arranging different comics panels represented on the screen in order to allow the player- controlled character to escape from his relentless pursuers in the videogame’s heavily noir-inspired storyworld. Evidently, both Comix Zone and Framed foreground their remediation of comics elements, but it is worth stressing that one can also find numerous less pronounced—but cer- tainly no less important—examples of this kind of remediation, including the third- person shooter Max Payne (2001), which employs cutscenes that take the form of comics, and the first-person shooter XIII (2003), which is based on a successful comics series with the same title and uses a cel-shading technique that results in a graphic style reminiscent of “hand-drawn” comics, while also employing a panel- like structure to represent part of its gameplay. While videogames can reproduce the verbal-pictorial form of comics quite easily, then, the situation is slightly more complicated when print comics attempt to remediate the interactivity and nonlinearity of videogames. While there are well-known examples such as Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series (2004–2010) that evoke videogame tropes, print comics that launch more ambitious attempts to integrate ludic elements tend to draw on the realm of nondigital games. The resulting processes of remedi- ation are still quite diverse, however, ranging from the nonlinear narrative structure in comics such as The Unwritten #17 (Carey and Gross 2010) and Adventure Time #10 (North et al. 2012), both of which are clearly inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, to the integration of board game elements in Chris Ware’s experimental “ ‘Fairy Tale’ Road Rage” (Ware 2000) and Building Stories (Ware 2012) (see also the contri- bution by Eckhoff-Heindl in the present volume). While not as common as videogames’ remediation of comics’ mediality, the fact that this integration of elements from nondigital games into print comics has recently even been taken up by an entry in Marvel’s Deadpool franchise would indicate that it Introduction: Comics and videogames 5 is anything but marginal. Indeed, You Are Deadpool (Ewing et al. 2018) not only includes a pair of Deadpool - branded dice and pencils that allow the reader/player to follow the many different “forking paths” that the comic’s nonlinear narrative structure affords. It also employs even more pronounced forms of metareferentiality and metalepsis than the above-mentioned examples (which is, of course, very much on brand for the Deadpool fran- chise [e.g., Darowski 2009; Thon 2017; Wolf 2009]). Repeatedly switching between graphic styles, narrative frames, and ludic references, the comic’s self-reflexive approach to its hybrid mediality is established early on, when Deadpool (the character) encourages the reader/player to build a dice from a punch- out- sheet, only to be killed by the scissors on the next page if the reader/player follows his instructions. As instructive as these instances of print comics remediating elements of nondigital games are, we also find numerous and no less pertinent examples of webcomics remediating video game elements, which sometimes leads to a noteworthy blurring of the (conventionally drawn) line between the two media forms: Andrew Hussie’s webcomics series Homestuck , for example, tells a story that focuses on a group of teenagers exploring the world of the upcoming videogame Sburb, which increasingly turns out to be closely integrated with the characters’ actual world. Homestuck also uses a com- plex combination of static pictures, animations, and interactive segments that commonly include the remediation of videogame elements—from the initial prompt to the reader/player to name the protagonist via the various battle commands that the characters can execute during so-called strife to the obnoxiously complex and unintuitive inventory system of the Sylladex— not just on the level of the represented storyworld but also on that of its multimodal representation (see also Glaser’s contribution in the present volume). Another example of this kind of hybrid mediality would be Daniel M. Goodbrey’s A Duck Has an Adventure , which employs a simpler, but also decidedly more nonlinear narrative structure to tell the story of a duck making a number of consequential choices. While the focus here is primarily on the agency of the reader/player in deciding which course of action the duck should take, A Duck Has an Adventure also integrates a videogame- inspired scoring system that keeps track of the number of endings the reader/ player has explored, the number of hats they have successfully made the duck collect, and other assorted achievements they have attained (see also the contribution by Goodbrey in the present volume). As this necessarily brief discussion of salient examples should already have illustrated, there is a rich tradition of comics and videogames “borrowing” formal elements conventionally attributed to the “other” medium, and while these processes of remediation may only very rarely push a given work beyond the boundaries of what we would still recognize as a “comic” or a “videogame,” they still create a continuum of what could be described as hybrid medialities (see also, again, Wilde 2015; and, for a critical per- spective, the contribution by Backe in the present volume). As mentioned