Playfulness in Comics

Pursuing a decidedly interdisciplinary perspective at the intersection of game studies and comics studies, this extended abstract aims to explore how the concept of playfulness can be made productive for furthering our understanding of the production, aesthetics, and reception of contemporary comics.While playfulness has rarely been discussed in any particularly sustained way in comics studies thus far, it has, of course, become increasingly common within game studies to acknowledge that the terms "play" and "playfulness" do not refer to the same concept.While play can be considered a socially designated, organized, recognized, or otherwise "framed" activity, playfulness, in contrast, can be regarded as an attitude, mood, state of mind, or disposition that may or may not accompany a given (play) activity.Often, theorists then define playfulness in "autotelic" (Cskszentmihlyi 1975, 10) or "paratelic" (Apter 1991, 16) terms.Thus, despite differences of perspective on whether this attitude, mood, state of mind, or disposition applies mainly to free-flowing playing activities in the sense of paidia (Caillois 2001; see also, e.g.