This chapter provides an overview of the variety of contemporary digital comics.

Digital comics encompass diverse objects, both online and offline, ranging from print comics that are digitized to webcomics that resist print publications and have greater affinities with video games or animation. The chapter regroups these different formats into three main categories; it reconstructs the history of digital comics, isolating four partially overlapping phases connected to the evolution of digital culture. It traces the similarities and divergences between digital and print comics, identifying their formal specificities and contextualizing them in the analog/digital debate; and discusses their different characteristics in terms of immersion and agency. Finally, it reflects on the relationship between digital media and participatory practices on the one hand, and comics preservation on the other, elaborating on the issue of copyright infringement.

In doing so, the chapter offers a multidisciplinary and comprehensive account of the heterogeneous nature and stratified history of digital comics.

In “Digital Nature,” Lai-Tze Fan adapts Lawrence Buell’s criteria for ecofiction in order to demarcate the emergent genre of “digital ecofiction,” which includes hypertext novels, video games, and other forms of multimedia art. Fan contends that the self-reflexive nature of digital texts like J. R. Carpenter’s The Cape and Eugenio Tisselli’s The Gate fosters in readers/users a critical awareness of their implication in environmental degradation through the use of digital technologies. Fan also suggests that digital ecofiction is well suited to address the challenges of the Anthropocene since it evokes alternative temporalities such as deep time and cyclical time.