ABSTRACT
The internet and haptic technologies of tablets and phones have offered new ways to create and read comics. In many respects the scrolling function of web pages or mobile interfaces has afforded new modes of experimentation within the medium but has also accentuated the sequential flow of comics that has been an abiding attribute in many of the medium’s definitions. In this context a re-examination of the features that make a comic a comic is especially pertinent. Without wishing to fix a definition, and acknowledging the myriad forms that make a strict definition both impossible and undesirable, the author looks at the central features of the medium that makes it distinct as a mode of communication. While offering a brief history of the medium’s emergence, the author then considers: the relationship between word and image; the medium’s use of notation, understood as graphic marks irreducible to word or image; then the co-presence of units spatially arranged on the “page” as the feature most specific to the medium. Having different units simultaneously available enables forms of communication (showing and reading) not available to other media.
