Like any other field of cultural production, comics is a medium that has been dramatically transformed by digital culture. Virtually all aspects of the making, publishing, marketing, distributing and (increasingly) reading of comics have now become digital, while more and more new forms of comics can be called digitalborn (and not just “transferred to a digital format”), yet not always in the forms predicted in the 1990s, when e-comics started to emerge.
At the same time, however, there also exists a strong resistance to digitalization in comics, mainly due to two reasons. First, there is the very conservative approach of digitalization in the traditional comics industry that merely considers digitization a useful instrument of cost-efficiency and maximization of profit, hence missing all creative opportunities offered by the new digital environment and confusing its consumers with online copies of originals in paper that simply don’t work on screen (newer e-comics have...