Webcomics as Mediation

Abstract

This article focuses on Nadja Hermann’s uniquely inspiring webcomic Erzählmirnix (sometimes translated into English as ‘Emoticomix’), approaching it from a theory of mediation. In recent years, this perspective has been developed into a fine-grained model for the analytical application in comic studies. Applied alongside or complementary to narrative-focused as well as art-focused perspectives, a view on comics as mediation puts into focus the interrelations of communicative-semiotic, material-technological and conventional-institutional aspects of a comic’s production, distribution and reception. Erzählmirnix makes an excellent, intriguingly complicated test case, as it is at the same time incredibly influential in German-speaking countries while still being entirely neglected by research. ‘Mediation’ focuses on the distribution of agency between all the actors involved with (digital artefacts perceived as) comics: in a semiotic-communicative respect this refers to comic-specific ‘narrative instances’ (like narrators, perceived as distinct from authors or artists) as well as to affordances and limitations of genre traditions; in a material-technological respect it addresses the possibilities and constraints of platforms and material formats, while cultural-institutional perspectives take agency distributed between countless personal, institutional or corporate actors into account. My article then discusses how the entangled agentic structures surrounding Herrmann’s minimalistic graphics and ‘emoji’-pictures constantly bridge, undermine and negotiate distinctions between comics, cartoons, memes and actual social media commentary.

Webcomics as Mediation