Comics and/as Mechanics: Intersections between Comics, Zines and Games

Comic scholars have argued that the comics grid itself is a technology of revealing "a system of gathering and showing images in a framework" (Priego and Wilkins 2018). This framework, as Priego and Wilkins argue, is specific to the comics medium and resists previous concepts of "the language of comics" (Gubern 1972; Saraceni 2003) or "the visual language of comics" (Cohn 2013). Instead, treating comics as a technology opens up a new theoretical framework for comics. I argue that when thinking of comics as technologies, the use of games studies concepts like mechanics further opens this reading of comics as both having and being mechanics. Several studies have noted the similarities between comics and games, calling some comic-games and game-comics. Daniel Merlin Goodbrey defines game comics as hybrids between comics and the ludic qualities of games or "a type of hypercomic that exhibits some of the key characteristics of a game and uses some of the key characteristics of the for of comics as the basis for its gameplay" (Goodbrey 2017, 126). However, these studies tend to be limited to the ludic potential of digital comics and digital games. I argue that games like The Framed Collection (Loveshack Entertainment 2018) demonstrate that comics themselves have ludic properties, namely mechanics. The digital game demonstrates that the closure that happens in the gutter as defined by McCloud (1993) can be seen as a mechanic according to Hunicke et. al's MDA Framework (2004). This builds on researching the intersection of zines and games (Austin and Eladhari 2024).