I was able to further refine the concept of Medlay during my graduate thesis¹, which aimed to compare the cinema and comics media forms and formulate a new creative way to crossbreed them on the Web.

Below is the main reasoning behind my thesis:

• Remediation
• Digital revolution
• Sequential art
• Hybrid media form

Remediation

The relationship between the two media of cinema and comics is a long story of competition and reciprocal remediation².

The term remediation does not refer to the transposition of contents³ between cinema and comics, but rather to the reciprocal borrowing and reshaping of their media forms by both.

A practical example of remediation is the way the movie Sin City—a transposition of the graphic novel of the same name—has remediated a typical device of the comics media form: the splash page.

Through “splash pages” […] comics have the distinctive potential to convey in purely graphic terms the importance of a (literally) “big” moment in the story.

Greg M. Smith, Shaping The Maxx: adapting the comic book frame to television

Restricted by the film’s seemingly fixed, invisible frame the movie remediates and reshapes the “splash page” device through camera movement and the artificially frozen pose of the jumping character.

Digital revolution

Before the digital revolution, these reciprocal remediations were always limited by different production, recording, transmission, and reproduction technologies.

After the digital revolution, the technological differences between the two cultural forms—absorbed by the World Wide Web—have been reset. However, in most cases, cinema and comics have continued to be considered and remediated separately.

Is it possible to create a new hybrid media form that integrates the characteristics of cinema and comics that once seemed incompatible, now that the two mediums potentially differ only in their respective processes?

Sequential art

To assess the potential for interbreeding between the two cultural forms, cinema and comics have been subsumed under the broader concept of sequential art: the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea—a definition created in 1985 by Will Eisner⁴ and expanded in 1994 by Scott McCloud⁵. This concept has been used to compare cinema and comics, highlighting their affinities and differences.

The comparison analyzes the following points:

• the respective procedures by which cinema and comics represent time and space, both at the level of the cinematic shot and the comics panel, as well as at the level of the sequence of shots and panels;

• the differences between the cinema split screen and the comics layout;

• the differences between the format of the cinema shot and that of the comics panel;

• the respective procedures by which cinema and comics represent voice, noise and music;

• the respective procedures of interpretation.

Hybrid media form

The consequences of the mid-1980s digital revolution⁶, the emergence of the new digital media and their characteristics, and the new possibilities for producing dynamic images enabled by computers and the Web have been subsequently examined.

In the end, a new hybrid media form that integrated both cinema and comics was proposed and demonstrated: Medlay.

This hybridization was made possible by the mid-1980s digital revolution and the ever-growing, eclectic and inclusive Web environment, which serves as a melting pot for various old media forms and has increasingly become a crucial distribution channel.

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