Why Superhero Aesthetics Work So Well in Digital Gaming

Pull a Kirby issue off the shelf and you register the noise before the plot. Clusters of solid black dots boiling off a cosmic figure. Panels that walk your eye where the artist wants it. Color pulled from the narrow set that letterpress could actually hold.

The Jack Kirby Museum tracked those dots across twenty-five years of published work, from angular scratches in Blue Bolt #5 in 1940 to the tight round clusters of Fantastic Four #48 in 1966. A quarter of a century to settle a shorthand for cosmic energy. Comics had to sell themselves off a spinner rack, across a store, in about a second, and everything about how they look comes out of that job. Interactive games get roughly the same second. Not because anybody read Understanding Comics first, but because when you need somebody to register who the hero is and what just happened, the toolkit’s small.

Translating panels into reels

Games in this style are sold the way comics were sold, which is to say in miniature and at a glance. A grid of small images, none of them explaining anything, all of them competing to be the one you open. When browsing for slots online, games get picked at thumbnail size, by silhouette and palette, long before anybody reads a paytable or rule. That pressure shows up in what the things are called: the industry names its games after their pictures, not their mechanics. A casino can lead its slots page with Dead or Alive and Da Vinci Diamonds. One’s a western, the other’s an art-history motif, and neither tells you a single thing about how the game behaves. I’d say the same about comic covers, which sold me a great many issues before.

Comics solved the same problem with the cover, and the interior grammar followed. Will Eisner argued that a splash page exists to set a climate and prepare the reader’s attitude before anything happens, which is the job a loading screen has inherited. A multiplier that fires on a specific symbol is a power with a rule attached, and a power with a rule is the structure of a superhero fight.

The deeper borrowing is what happens between the panels. Scott McCloud’s argument about closure, that a reader supplies the motion the gutter leaves out, is the reason a comic can imply an entire punch with two static drawings. Interactive design leans on the same reflex constantly. A symbol that lands in one position and appears expanded in the next frame has not been animated across the gap so much as it has been trusted to the person watching, and the person watching does the work without noticing they were asked.

Hero, villain, and the two-second read

Clear opposition is cheap to draw and hard to misread. Bright saturated hues for the protagonist, cool desaturated shadow for the antagonist, and nobody has to be told which is which. Open more or less any current cape book, this year’s Emperor Aquaman as well as anything, and the hierarchy is legible from the cover thumbnail. There’s a floor under this in interfaces too: the W3C’s contrast rules require a 3:1 ratio for the graphical parts you need in order to understand what you’re looking at.

One terminology note, since this gets mangled constantly. It’s cell shading, after celluloid, and it’s a 3D technique that quantizes smooth lighting into flat bands. Comics never used it. Comics used flat inked color and Ben-Day halftone screens. Most game art in this register isn’t cel-shaded either. It’s 2D illustration built in Photoshop and Illustrator, then rigged as a skeleton and moved by bone deformation, which is what Spine and tools like it exist to do. That’s the production logic of cut-out animation. Sound design carries the rest of the read. It does the same job as the lettered “Pow!” did on the page, which is to tell you the outcome before you’ve finished parsing the image.

Why the flat look ages better

Hyper-real 3D dates the moment the render budget moves. Flat color, hard edges and heavy line do not, because they were never trying to look like anything except drawings. Dave Gibbons has said he favored Watchmen‘s nine-panel grid for the authority it gave the page, which is a claim about restriction rather than about capability, made by the man holding the pen.

Ben-Day dots came out of cheap letterpress printing. They weren’t an aesthetic decision at the time, they were what the press could do, and the style is the residue. Games reaching for that look today are imitating a production economy that stopped existing decades ago. They’re also, incidentally, inheriting its read speed, which is the part that still works.