Abstract

A motion comic combines artwork, panels and narrative from comic books with affordances from animation, film, graphic design, sound design and interactivity and is commonly referred to in the literature as a “hybrid medium,” a “medium in between.” Motion comic production can be located within the broader industry tendency for media forms and their associated languages to fluidly recombine. This paper aims to understand the creative space of the motion comic in terms of media hybridity. Drawing on literature from motion comic scholarship, industry discussion, critical reviews and analysis of motion comic exemplars, the paper presents a theoretical explication of the hybrid media context of motion comics as a type of narrative motion graphics. The analysis concludes that the motion comic occupies an ambiguous space in terms of media modalities, aesthetics, literacy and critical reception and is symptomatic of the underlying attributes of software-induced hybridization of traditional media.