ABSTRACT
In 2004, the US-based company IDW Publishing began releasing a Metal Gear Solid comics series adapted from the popular videogame Metal Gear Solid (1998) and its sequel Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001). As an adaptation, the comics series transposed the games’ complex multimodal systems into a linear narrative solely consisting of images and words. Later, the games’ publisher Konami itself opted to release adaptations of these comics for the Sony PlayStation Portable (in 2006) and as feature films on DVD (in 2008). Called digital graphic novels by Konami, these adaptations reproduced the comics’ narrative while taking advantage of their digital platforms’ audiovisual capabilities. Taken together, this unusual group of releases constitutes a unique object to study the relationship between videogames and comics. This chapter will present an analysis of this diverse and distinctive group of releases. Hence, its first section analyzes the narration of these various incarnations, while the second section examines their presentation. In both cases, this will give insight into how the properties of the different releases’ respective media formats shaped these elements.
