Virtual Reality project for HTC Vive
Comics scholars have long emphasized that reading imagetexts involves multiple literacies. Comics as a medium requires the adoption of specific strategies for interpreting comics’ complex lexical and visual languages, codes, and rhetorics. While true, this focus on literacies situates comics principally as narratives. Even scholarship on comics’ formal and aesthetic qualities often treats comics as texts and their audiences as readers. But comics are not simply texts to be read, nor works of visual art to be viewed; they are spaces to be navigated. A reader-navigator moves through a comic’s environment with eye and hand, visually scanning over images and text while turning pages or scrolling and clicking. Comics-as-spaces are generally constructed as two-dimensional objects: physical pages or digital images. The navigation of most comics occurs on an x-y plane that has certain technologically- and materially-determined environmental confines. Creators construct their comics in ways that manipulate navigators’ movement through spaces.
Digital comics require “navigation” in its function as the term for clicking hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are typically used to linearly move between “pages” of digital comics. However, Emily Carroll’s hypercomic “Margot’s Room” (2011) is constructed as a group of “pages” that are accessed individually through a hyperlinked “home” image, then scrolled through. This project explores the process and effects of navigating “Margot’s Room” through a version of the comic that has been placed by in a 3D virtual reality space using Tilt Brush for HTC Vive. “Margot’s (Virtual) Room” exemplifies the new ways of navigating comics that are afforded by a z-axis. Allowing the reader-navigator to move through the space of a comic with their entire body challenges our perceptions of the functions and capabilities of comics and further complicates the problem of distinguishing comics from other media.
original images © Emily Carroll
Conference paper presentation on “Margot’s (Virtual) Room” by Madeline Gangnes at the 2018 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels
