Of the vignette to the crosshead

Locke & Key is a series of comics written by Joe Hill, son of writer Stephen King, and designed by Gabriel Rodriguez. It is published in the United States by Idea + Design Works and French version under the Milady Graphics label of Bragelonne editions. The COMICS series has experienced several adaptation projects, including a Netflix series broadcast in 2020 on the streaming platform under the same title.

The comic has served as inspiration for the world of video game since almost its origins. If we start with superheroes, it is impossible not to talk about direct adaptations: from classics such as spiderman or the famous superman by Nintendo 64 to the prolific saga of batman: arkham or marvel vs capcom . The references to the bullets have been present in an implicitly and implicitly present, for example, in the recent Marvel s Spider-Man of Insomniac Games until we allowed us to create our own staple covers in the photo mode. Leaving the Superheroes aside, Telletthale brought several comics to the videogame, although focusing more on the narrative ground. Among them, it is easy to highlight the successful The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among US , based on the Saga Fables by Bill Willingham. All this without the famous scott pilgrim , comic that already used codes and winks to videogames continuously (extra lives, scores, mention of consoles such as PSP) and that later became a great beat em up held in Pixel Art.

Otherwise famous video game adaptations appear, such as the sagas The Legend of Zelda and Tales of together with the exhaustive sleeve of UMINEKO WHEN THEY CRY. It is easy to find the comic as Transmedia element of videogames, often to tell stories that are left out of the main title. Dishonored, Dragon Age or Bloodborne have their own Spin Offs that expand the original world. These comics are usually well cared for, with cartoonists and writers of the size of Q Hayashida, Greg Rucka, Carmen Raf or Saching Teng.

Personally in this field I would like to highlight two comics. The first, The last of us: American Dreams that has the excellent drawing of Faith Erin Hicks, covers of Julián Totino Tedescu and is written by Neil Druckmann itself. This comic works as a premure of the first Tlou and follow the adventures of Ellie and Riley in the fireflies. In a curious case of Transmedia transmedia, in Uncharted 4 The cover of a fictional sequel called American Daughters appears in one of the characters. The second to stand out is the Kingdom Hearts manga in charge of Shiro Amano, a somewhat free adaptation but is distinguished by his charism, sense of humor and a drawing that feels like a glove to the game of Square Enix.

The collaboration between comic and videogame artists is very enriching and has given us bright results. We Dwell in Possibility is a game created by Robert Yang, who defines it as a Queer gardens simulator in which we can manipulate the elements of a space. According to the components that we have chosen, the crowd who walks through the garden will react in one way or another, for example, if we put Churchill statues there will be many policemen and, if we put radios, the walks will dance. The art and animations of this title are in charge of the artist Eleanor Davis author of The difficult tomorrow or Tu, a bike and the road . Davis employs colorful and non-line funds, in contrast to the contoured human figures and with flat colors. The animations are very fluid, to the point of being overwhelmed when the crowd is too close.

Thomas Wellmann, author of pimo & rex and drawn in the series hora Aventuras has been manager of the illustrations of characters and funds from the mobile game Miracle Merchant . The style of it with thick line, hard shadows and flat colors fits very well in a game of fantastic inspiration in which we have to perform a series of potions for our customers. Guillaume Singelin, author of the comic book PTSD , has collaborated with the Editor Fellow Traveler and is manager of the character design at Bravery Network and is currently the main artist of Citizen Sleeper. It is also worth mentioning the work of Scott Campbell, illustrator of several children s books and comics, has also made conceptual art for the Double Fine study with which he has collaborated at BROKEN AGE , BRÜTAL Legend and the recent Psychonauts 2 . The art of it stands out for the use of color, watercolor texture, stylized shapes and a thick and expressive line.

Let s comply a little more about the subject. What is the difference between a video game and a comic? Scott McCloud defines the comic as juxtaposed illustrations and other deliberate sequence images, with the purpose of transmitting information or obtaining an aesthetic response from the reader . This definition is open enough for how extremely versatile the world of comic. He does not even get into issues to include vignettes or sandwiches since many comics lack these elements. For the definition of video game the thing gets even more belly. In the recent Epic case against Apple, the circumstance was given that no one was able to provide a definition accepted throughout the industry. The judge tried to describe the videogame as something with a certain level of interactivity or intervention between the player and the medium that requires some kind of order or choice that is plastered in the game. She also talks about videogames are rendered or lively, unlike other means such as cinema or real image television.

Arrived at this point What is the difference between a game like UMINEKO WHEN THEY CRY or Butterfly Soup and a digital reading comic? Umineko has no bullets since it always presents the same full screen frame with identical text boxes at the bottom. However, there are many comics that use an equal structure, for example, Garfield s comic strips or the political vignettes of newspapers. Comics like the mr. Milagro of Tom King and Mitch Gerads use a page composition with all the equal bullets changing only the content. If we go to the point of interactivity, there are comics with structure of follow your own adventure as Maldita enchanted house of Artur Laperla. If we read this title in digital format, is it converted into a video game?

Currently more and more comics are read on the mobile, so its aesthetic appearance adapts to elongated and narrow formats for vertical reading. There are even comics entirely animated in their digital format, such as Joe Sparrow s wonderful The Hunter (which is also made in pixel Art ). In the field of WebComic we find some who play with interactivity, such as the famous homestuck , inspired by the world of video games and from which it was subsequently launched his own: Hiveswap .

In this sense it seems to me that the interesting thing is not to limit the two fields, but the opposite: to investigate at those borders where the definitions are losing strength and means are inspired and imitated others, feedback. Starting from these diffuse lines, the hybrid appears internal Affairs DDCollection , a saga of three comics published by the PEOW publishing in program format. With this digital reader we are allowed to manipulate each comic, zoom in, change page and even edit the 3D background. Once we have finished each volume we run into a screen with statistics as the reading time and the amount of bookmark we needed. This screen has no utility beyond emphasizing the video game of the program, resorting to its codes as a wink.

In the opposite case we find comic codes in the video game. Many games like vagrant story use sandwiches to place the dialogues, which makes a showy contrast with the high fantasy setting it has. Others, such as Neo: The World Ends With You also use vignettes overlapping together with sandwiches to illustrate talks. This causes them to be showy and dynamic, remembering the manga aesthetics. Something similar happens with river city girls, hugging the inspiration of the world of manga and includes vignettes drawn and inked traditionally at different points of history, instead of the cinematic classics.

Gorogoa is a game of puzzles in which we always move in four vignettes that represent different spaces. These vignettes can be manipulated to advance the action, but the type of movements (zooms, remingence and camera approaches) are very similar to those that are usually used in the digital comics. This is not casual since Jason Roberts, a game developer, cites the intention of creating an interactive comic before finally deciding on a videogame. Something that can also be appreciated in the artistic style, very similar to the one that presents the classic illustration.

In addition to Gorogoa, Florence also uses elements of comics such as vignettes and famous sandwiches, it has even been defined as interactive comic. With the increase of the amount of games that are published and the number of people who make them each time the union between media such as cinema, theater, and of course, the comic. The fascinating here is how they can interact and enrich each other. Just as there are mixtures such as Butterfly Soup, the collaboration between Robert Yang and Eleanor Davis or the Peow comics will be very interesting to see what new forms these borders break.