“Webcomics Archive? Now I'm Interested”: Comics Readers Seeking Information in Web Archives

There is a longstanding tradition of understanding information needs and interaction behavior across different user groups to inform the design of digital products and services. There is a gap in such research of comics readers, specifically how they seek and interact with the information and interfaces of web-based archives provided by cultural institutions. For example, while information interaction research has now recognized that information-seeking for leisure and pleasure are important domains of study - consuming information based in fiction can help us escape to exciting worlds by captivating narratives - and while there have been studies of how people find fiction to read, there have to our knowledge been no user-centered studies on how people find and consume digital comics. This exploratory study provides an enriched understanding of the information needs and interaction behaviors of digital comics readers and how that understanding can inform the design of digital platforms to better support them.