Video games and comics enjoy a close relationship. Many web comics are explicitly based on video games or video game culture (8-Bit Theater, Penny-Arcade, and PvP), and video game crossovers are now common for superhero franchises. Max Payne is a perhaps more serious and artistic effort conveying the graphic novel form along with a film noir style. There is even a Little Nemo in Slumberland video game for the NES console. Furthermore, each medium's status in terms of “Literature” or the “Academy” is similarly marginal despite their cultural importance, artistry, and innovation as forms of narrative. If there is such thing as an academic ghetto, video games and comics are neighbors.

In this presentation, I would like to present a way of understanding what happens in the overlap between comics and video games by way of a few rather visible examples. In doing so, I suggest more generally that the notion of “visual nostalgia” provides a useful aesthetic framework for approaching instances of “remediation.” Doing so in terms of comics and videogames requires an understanding of both intrinsic and formal elements in each medium, and a separate question of structure as style.

In Remediation: Understanding New Media, authors Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin propose the term, “remediation”, as a way of approaching the phenomenon of one medium adopting the strategies of formal elements of another within its own frame. This process takes on a “double logic” whereby the inclusion amounts to either “immediacy” where the inclusion is transparent and makes itself invisible or “hypermediacy” where the included medium is opaque and visible for its own sake as a sort of artifact. There are nuances to these modes of remediation, but a Bolter and Grusin provide a fairly straightforward example with the classic game Myst. Myst incorporates the medium of books in the form of hypermediacy by making the form of the book visible on the page. Immediacy is also present in the game’s use of first-person-viewpoint which, they argue, is an “invisible” remediation of film noir techniques. The viewpoint is self-referential. A framed media object is, therefore, the pure hypermediation, and virtual reality is pure immediacy. While I have quibbles with their terminology, I find it instructive that the authors proceed with their argument by reading Myst as an allegory for the types of mediation it contains in that the book medium is presented as a trap, thereby placing the characters in a sort of “pre-digital” dungeon.

While the framework of remediation is useful in providing a vocabulary for games, the authors take a step too far in insisting that, for example, “Like film, television needs to remediate digital media in order to survive” (185). Though Bolter and Grusin argue that remediation is not intended as an aesthetic principle, statements such as this presuppose a succession of media forms where one form consumes and replaces another. In this context, television’s remediation of digital media is not chronological, but it is the desperate act of a dying medium latching on to the language of a newer medium. If remediation is, therefore, not temporally dependent (that is, it circumvents the obvious past tense of RE-mediation), then on what basis does one medium succeed or replace another? Yet, the principle of succession also implies a discrete ontology for competing media forms as opposed to a unique set of rules or modes for communication. In other words, media are better approached with an acknowledgement of their aesthetic relationships to each other as potentially conflicting ways of seeing. Understanding the differences between visible and invisible modes of inclusion are important, but such a study must be extending by questioning the semantics of the visible inclusion, and the internal coherencies or structures of the invisible conclusion.

In 2004, Dargaud released the much-anticipated game XIII for the usual variety of consoles (Xbox, PS2) as well as for the PC. The game is based on a graphic novel by the same name, and it’s major selling points or gimmicks derive from the extent to which it succeeds at being a “playable graphic novel”. Cel-shaded animation gives the action a hand-drawn look (the extent to which this is successful varies by the player’s graphics card), and the game includes visible word balloons, onomatopoeic action words, and intrusive frames to drive home it’s graphic novel look. Significantly, each level starts with the player entering “into” the space of a panel, visually breaking the frame of the page and entering into the 3-D rendered world.

In Bolter and Grusin’s terms, the game is remediating both graphic novels and film, so on the one hand, it’s a clear case of hypermediacy. The game beats us over the head with the sense of it being a comic, but on the other hand film also appears to be “contained” in more subtle ways. Grainy, black and white “playable” flashbacks interrupt levels and between levels, dramatic cut scenes consisting of FMV contained within panels carries the plot along from one point to the next. In terms of remediation, however, its difficult to describe what’s going on within each game level as anything other than a game. Though there are the splash panels, word balloons, and visible text/sounds generated within the level, the actual logic of play and the goals of the player are no different than any other non-comic game. The structures of each level are a fairly typical mixture of stealth and annihilating enemies, and one progresses toward level goals in a fairly linear fashion.

In this mode, the remediation analysis becomes confused. Is it more clear to say that “the game is remediating itself with the logic of immediacy” or that “the game/comic is remediating First-Person Stealth games with a logic of hypermediacy”? Neither classification describes much about whether the crossover is successful or which media form is being privileged to the detriment of the other. Stepping away from the logics of remediation, I believe there is another, more important context for understanding the roles each media form plays in relation to the other, nostalgia.

XIII is a game clearly occupied with the past. The game’s story revolves around a presidential assassination, and your character may have been the one to pull the trigger. At least, that’s what everyone says. XIII is the character’s name because he bears a roman numeral XIII tattooed on his chest, so the character’s goal is to figure out who he is and regain his past. Also, the president’s name is William Sheridan, and his brother, Senator Wally Sheridan is promising to pick up where his brother left off. In case you didn’t get the Kennedy reference, the game includes TV-like footage of the ticker tape parade where President Sheridan is assassinated—in an open car, in broad daylight, etc. Even though the weapons and vehicles in the game set it as roughly contemporary, this is a clear invocation of an event from America’s past. The story line of espionage and identity loss are, furthermore, reminiscent of spy fiction like The Prisoner, and Adam West’s straight-faced voicing of one of the main characters combine to remind the player of 60’s culture.

If one were to perform an allegorical reading of the game in the context of this preoccupation with the past, the immediate conclusion seems to be that the nostalgia expressed in the game’s narrative parallels a nostalgia for the comic book form. The game’s remediation of comics is, therefore, a citation of a lost art that is accessible by way of this new medium of games because of a collective memory of that lost medium. Fortunately, there appears to be another way of looking at the problem, one which allows broader implications for the related media.

In Postdmodernism, Fredric Jameson writes of the nostalgia film that it “was never a matter of some old-fashioned ‘representation’ of historical content, but instead approached the ‘past’ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image, and ‘1930s-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness’ by the attributes of fashion” (19). In the example of XIII, the question becomes whether the graphic novel within the game is a discrete, remediated medium or whether it is a style connoting ‘pastness’ by it’s being historically precedent to video games and ‘1960s-ness’ by its use of 60’s imagery (and Adam West). In other words, to what extent is XIII’s comic component a borrowed structure, and to what extent is it a style? While I argue that the latter conclusion of comic as style is a better description for what happens in the game, the fact that this inclusion raises the question of structure vs. style allows a way of understanding the relationship of any two media as a formulation of the same question.

In XIII, the game elements do not depend on the comics elements for their coherence, so it is possible to see at a glance which elements are “portable” stylistics from the comic format and which elements remain fixed in the untranslatable essence of the medium in itself. If every comic element of XIII is, therefore, extraneous to an essential definition of comics, we can cross several elements off the list immediately: word balloons, the gutter, sound words. This process of elimination suggests that if we were to remove these elements from comics, they would still be recognizable as such because of the fundamental quality of sequentiality—the way in which comics operate through a syntax of discrete moments which we read more or less continuously.

Therefore, the logic of nostalgia in conjunction with the language of remediation allows for cases of mediational overlap to reveal more about the workings and internal tensions of each medium by itself. By fetishizing the past in an a-historical context, the work of nostalgia in media becomes one of distillation. In the case of XIII, nostalgia allows for an understanding of comic style as a separate consideration from comic structure and clarifies, to a certain extent, the boundaries between the two. This principle may be applied to other instances of remediation where nostalgia is in fact a better term, and, it is hoped, such inquiry will bring the discrete, intrinsic qualities of media forms into clearer view. Who knows what wonders the past may hold.

Works Cited:

Bookmark/Search this post with:
– – –