The infinite feed: the potential of webcomics in the meme machine

Abstract

At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the webcomic developed independently from the publishing market through products specifically designed to be read online. The digital medium was configured as a unique and revolutionary space for the exploitation of new avenues within the comic, as predicted by authors such as Scott McCloud. However, the most popular phenomenon linked to online vignettes has ended up being the «meme», away from concepts such as the infinite canvas and closer to the debate on the technical reproducibility of the image or collective creation. It has changed, away from an existence in highly specialized corners of the network, it now receives millions of interactions in social networks; the webcomic has become a phenomenon, but not the one that its pioneers expected. The objective of this text is to analyze the expressive and narrative characteristics intrinsic to digital comics that have made it nowadays’s viral object par excellence.