I haven’t been back to my alma mater since graduating, so presenting at the Illustration, Comics, and Animation conference at Dartmouth was wonderful for many reasons. Comics and animation isn’t my area of expertise, but I love presenting at these conferences, as I always find them enlightening and enjoyable, even if I experience a twinge of regret that I didn’t pursue it as a career. Geeking out about comics over drinks, and realizing I’m not the nerdiest person in the room, never fails to be an amazing feeling.
I presented a paper titled “Mobius double reacharound: The convergence of comics, animation, and gaming in Homestuck,” the online MSPaint webcomic that complicates notions of authorship, participatory culture, readership and ways of reading, and fandom. The Q&A was unexpected but illuminating, as the question I got stuck on concerned why Homestuck was interesting to readers, and (perhaps) why scholars should look at the text. I think I was stumped because I gravitate to difficult texts that ask me to look outside the text and learn, but maybe ultimately it comes down to that: a self-selecting readership that values difficulty and continually ups the ante.
Access copy of the talk below.
Mobius Double Reacharound: The Convergence of Comics, animation, and gaming in Homestuck
Vyshali Manivannan, Rutgers University School of Communication & Information
Illustration, Comics, & Animation Conference, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
April 19, 2013
[1] In Andrew Hussie’s webcomic Homestuck, the Mobius double reacharound expresses a grand entanglement of multiverses containing alternate timelines and interconnected worlds destined for simultaneous destruction, reconstitution, and unification. This is an apt metaphor for the feedback loop created by Homestuck’s subsumption of comics, animation, and games, which renders it simultaneously static and animated, textual and hypertextual, silent and musically scored, linear and multicursal, and controlled by both author and audience. As such, it reformulates the relationship between illustration, animation, ergodic literature, and affective experience, establishing its semiotic and semantic systems through under-language generated by multimodal juxtapositions and the affective dimensions of animation, gameplay, and the properties of the interface itself. Homestuck serves as a paradigmatic case study signifying that the boundaries separating comics, animation, and games are not so discrete. Their convergence may even recuperate the cognitive modes of Internet consumers, who are often typecast as possessing high frustration and low boredom thresholds. In this presentation, I will take a formalist approach to Homestuck‘s hybridization of comics, animation, and interactive fiction, examining the under-language, somatization, and cross-modal processing it engenders.
[2] Informally called the Ulysses of the Internet for its length and labyrinthine nature, Homestuck is described by Hussie as “a tale about a boy and his friends and the game they play together.” The narrative is polyphonic, alternating between the second-person viewpoints of a sprawling ensemble cast of adolescents who, in beta-testing a video game, trigger an apocalypse that plunges them into the game world. It is narratively complex, operating on symbolic registers ranging from the cosmogenic to the genetic to the metafictive to the horological. At its heart, however, it is a Bildungsroman about largely computer-mediated social maturation. Starting in media res with one player group [3], the story spirals outward to overlap with the game sessions of [4] preceding and successive player groups [5], as well as characters [6] self-referentially revealed to be responsible for controlling these players via text input lines, a la text adventure games. The goal is the restoration of the characters’ respective universes by beating or breaking the sandbox-style game that brought them all together.
[7] As of this writing, Homestuck is over 6,000 pages long. Each page is titled with the input line of the previous page, consists of visual and verbal elements, and concludes with an input line hyperlinked to the next page. [8] The input text may also identify the present focal protagonist and signal changes in narrative point-of-view. Pages are organized in columns where information outside the central frame is generally but not always extraneous to the story, such as the site banner or navigation bar. Verbal elements include input lines; plainly visible, second-person descriptions of the illustrated action meant to amplify, augment, or structure reader interpretation; and optional, first-person dialogic text [9] that requires extra clicking and may include links to intertextual material such as other comics by Hussie [10] or proleptic or analeptic rhetorical moves within Homestuck [11]. Visual elements may include static illustrations; animated GIFs; or complex, musically scored flash animations and games. These components begin at the top of the central frame, with descriptive and dialogic text positioned below them, mimicking the structure of a graphical interactive fiction game. [12] Where the size of the frame is exceeded, readers must scroll down to view the complete page. Perusal is thus generally organized vertically and linearly, although the consumer may select alternate reading pathways via graphical or text-based site maps. [13]
In general, comics as a media form are predicated on bimodal structures of visual and verbal signs [14] that, according to Cohn et al, reflect a holistic semiosis reliant on our neurological capacity for multimodal communication. The interplay between these structures yields what Alan Moore famously termed under-language, summarized by Moulthrop as “neither the ‘visuals’ nor the ‘verbals’ but a unique effect caused by the combination of the two.” Unlike dynamic visual media like film or animation, which present images singly and linearly, visual elements in comics are presented in groups and are typically read by broadly scanning the page and then focusing on particular regions as dictated by the arrangement of elements in panels, panels on a page, or transitions between panels and pages. Thus, multimodality compels switching between cognitive modes of consumption, namely deep attention and hyper attention, a switching that is only compounded by the incorporation of dynamic components. [15]
Hayles defined deep attention as lengthy, uninterrupted focus on a single object, while hyper attention comprises rapid, shallow attention-switching between multiple information streams. Eye-tracking studies by Baggett et al, Goolkasian, and Underwood et al have indicated that consumers begin reading hyper-attentively before recursively processing details through deep attention. Homestuck necessitates attentional faculties similar to those required by comics in its simple visual-verbal conjunctions, [16] as seen here, where our hyper-attentive eye fixations vertically sweep over the scene before deep attention decodes cumulative meaning by recalling and examining signifiers in this new context: the smiley face, the username, and the horological and narrative significance of colors. More complex juxtapositions, such as this scene, [18] compel multiple forms of attention-switching and multicursal reading. Here, hyper-attentive consumers could easily miss the significant event occurring in the rarely used top frame or, in rushing to the next page, might skip the extranoematic task of revealing and reading the dropdown text. Other consumers might similarly indulge in what Barthes termed tmesis, skipping ahead due to the allure of discontinuous reading, but could easily keep each page open in separate tabs for side-by-side backreading and comparison. Whatever the pathway, under-language, recursive reading, and ergodic engagement are required for thorough comprehension. Homestuck’s format permits uses of expansive space and multimodality that are infeasible or unachievable in print, collapse hermeneutic distinctions, and insist on extranoematic responsibility. As Rugnetta has suggested, this fact—coupled with Homestuck’s fanatical readership—defies the assumption that Internet audiences are prone to abandoning cognitively demanding projects. Instead, like fans of Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, Homestuck’s audience responds to structural complexity, rich characterization, parodic humor, and the explosion of familiar syntactical arrangements.
Since Homestuck tends toward conventional combinations of static image and static text, its innovative uses of dynamic elements invite closer examination: namely, its incorporation of animated GIFs, flash animations, and interactive flash games, the latter two of which occur infrequently. Animated GIFs may be visual or verbal [19] and may be employed singly, with static elements, or with other GIFs. GIFs, and flash animations for that matter, may be read as the compression of multiple, looping panels into a single image, [20] such that under-language exists in the movement within and between frames. The movement in isolated GIFs alters our perceptual processing and somatic management of affect display [21], panel-to-panel transitions [22], mediated control [23], and narrative suspense [24]. Combined with static images, the unexpectedness and incongruity of movement emphasize the affect, object, or action being animated, [25] focusing deep attention on relevant signifiers in surrounding panels and consecutive pages. Cognitive versatility is required when GIFs are combined, as visual complexity, looping, and synchronicity across images result in juxtapositions that are constantly changing. [26] These brief, looping animations render Homestuck contingent and doubling [27], as a single screen may present two avenues, or able to fracture the form [28] or utilize it to its fullest extent [29]. Here, dynamic visual and verbal elements coexist in the top frame, but the latter is a hidden mouseover function. Animated text is superimposed over animated image in illustrating cohabiting and coevolving double narratives, such that hyper and deep attentionalities are needed to comprehend them separately and together.
On a larger scale, Homestuck’s flash animations present us with densely encoded information streams containing new images, recurrent semiotic signifiers, and musical leitmotifs. [30] Flash animations typically occur rarely and in conjunction solely with input text lines, but illustrate moments of extreme narrative significance. They range from two to fifteen minutes in length and, like GIFs, alter our perceptual processing of panel transitions and juxtapositions. Consumers must review the sequence using hyper attention and deep attention with regards to noteworthy signifiers before finally considering the images in conjunction with available verbal components, such as titles, most of which accumulate meaning through reuse. Flash animations also provide semiotic signifiers, both visual and aural, that recur solely in animation sequences, sometimes across hundreds of pages, encouraging consumers to draw connections between characters, conflicts, and so on. [31]
Additionally, Homestuck’s dynamic components further an affective experience of reading, namely with regards to cuteness and anticipation-arousal. [32] According to Tomkins and Brennan, affect consists of the biological portion of emotion, which is social in origin if somatic in effect. Ngai described the affective response to cuteness as “a way of aestheticizing powerlessness,” a sentimental, protective attitude adopted toward the weak or formally simple. Homestuck is largely characterized by an aesthetic of cuteness, where characters are pointedly and simply rendered in neotenous symbolic abstraction [33] and subject to exaggerated affect displays of cheerfulness [34], anger [35], or helpless bewilderment [36] intended to trigger biological, sympathic responses of attachment and care in consumers. Notably, this affective technique changes only during consumer-anticipated moments of key significance: namely, animations, signaled by [S] in the input text, which signals pivotal plot points and “cool” art and action [37]. In this sense, animation pages may be likened to the narrative construct of aporia and epiphany, used by authors and game designers to reward consumers for their persistence.
The affective dimensions of under-language are only intensified in the embodied experience provided by games, where representative and affective dimensions of engagement are more like a Mobius strip than a clear divide [37]. Animation occasionally prefaces Homestuck’s flash games, as seen here, where filmic techniques and a foreboding musical score heighten anticipation-arousal prior to gameplay. Affective experience is compounded in that games are not signaled in the input text, such that playability yields surprise, excitement, or dread of what is to come. “Coolness” collides with cuteness, imparting conflicting experiences of anxiety and care and promoting investment of effort in order to defend cute, perceivably helpless characters as well as illuminate the narrative.
As a storytelling vehicle, Homestuck’s flash games are cybertextual, opening up avenues closed by the comic’s standard format and providing a literal game-world or world-game where the topological structures of the textual machinery craft a multicursal labyrinth composed by consumption. Aarseth defined cybertexts as literature that is ergodic and must be traversed through nontrivial, extranoematic effort. Homestuck’s structure facilitates this involvement by emulating interactive fiction. For the first few acts, consumers “played” it like interactive fiction by submitting input lines in an open lottery to advance the narrative. Although Hussie has assumed total authorial control, flash games like this one allow consumers to control their cognitive mapping, by selecting pathways of traversal, character avatars, and dialogue responses. Inessential signifiers may be missed if consumers engage hyper-attentively, as this player does, whereas deep attention and thorough exploration would reveal narrative details that are unattainable elsewhere. Meaning is also buried in recurrent titles that accumulate various meanings, as in the binaries around “ascend” and “descend,” and in image and sound. Ergodic engagement in these games, like the games themselves, is optional, but better informs narrative comprehension and bolsters the satisfaction of discovery.
[38] In these ways, consumers retain control over perusal, such as the decision to thoroughly play a flash game from multiple points of view or bypass optional visual and verbal elements. Thus, consumers could opt for a largely visual and static reading, a largely visual, static, and dynamic reading, or a largely verbal reading supplemented by hyper-attentive scanning of visual elements. These choices, and the cognitive modes they require, result in radically different hermeneutic insights, affective experiences, cognitive maps, and recognition of signifiers across thousands of pages. [39] Consumers who ergodically engage must “explore the simulated world and establish causal relationships between the encountered objects,” accessing the narrative on symbolic and affective registers precluded by most traditional fiction, heightening consumers’ sense of reward [40] over actively “earning” narrative insights. Homestuck’s under-language thus emerges through information feedback loops, structured and multicursal reading pathways, and multimodal information streams. In its cybertextual hybridization of illustration, animation, and interactive fiction, it asks us to constantly switch our cognitive modes to ergodically parse semiotic meaning within and across words, illustrations, animations, and games over the course of thousands of pages. In doing so, Homestuck challenges existing notions of cognitive modes of reading, Internet audiences, and rigid hermeneutic approaches to illustration, animation, and games. [41]
