Digital comics halfway between experimentation and participation: the example of Homestuck

Digital comics that try to maximize the affordances of their medium seem to be condemned to in-betweenness: their strength (leveraging on unusual narrative potentials) often becomes their limit, and authors are hardly able to free themselves from the role of niche experimenters and open up to audience participation. A significant exception, however, is Homestuck, a gigantic webcomic by Andrew Hussie. Strongly connected to videogame culture and the very nature of the internet, Homestuck features animations, sounds, embedded flash games, and so on. The webcomic resulted in various transmedial branches (a videogame spin-off and several friendsims, a multi-volume soundtrack, a book epilogue) and an ongoing intermedial adaptation in book format. It has equally managed, over the years, to consolidate an extremely lively community active both in its interactions with the author (with a constant exchange of ideas and an endless readiness to subsidize his projects), in its interpretation of the canon production, and in providing an amazing extent of fan production. This contribution aims to analyze Homestuck as a possible mediation between the two inclinations (experimental and participated) of digital comics.