The Knowledge Codex: Comics as Expansive Graphic Repositories

Comics are now media that can be read by software applications. The intense ongoing digitization of comics and their transformation into machine-interpretable information have turned comics into expansive repositories of human knowledge, reshaping their production, perception, and dissemination. By leveraging the Semantic Web and other web ontologies, which provide structured methods for organizing and categorizing knowledge domains, artists and researchers can utilize data representations, complex relationships, constraints, and reasoning rules within the highly versatile medium of comics. Drawing on Harun Farocki’s notion of "operational images," this paper underscores the functional and mechanistic aspects of media perception, suggesting a shift in how comics are experienced within a technologically mediated landscape. Additionally, Paul Virilio’s concept of "synthetic perception" is employed to explore how the accelerated, artificial structuring of reader experiences in digital comics redefines artistic practices within the comics medium. This study also examines the recent synthetic comic object Tarwar by Ilan Manouach (Nero, 5C, Lystring, 2025) to illustrate the medium’s computational evolution and demonstrate how artists can expand their creative toolkits through these advancements. Together, these theoretical frameworks elucidate the paradigm shift in comics, demonstrating how AI and computational infrastructures dynamically expand our understanding of what comics are and what they can achieve.