Formal Analysis of Check, Please!
Beginning in 2013 as a side project during her university years, Ngozi Ukazu’s webcomic Check, Please! has become extremely popular, with an (as of 2017) estimated 120K readership, 10K of which regularly rely on digital updates from Ngozi for the next page in the story. Yet this webcomic does not follow the traditional format of a comic — one storyline, using one website, and only tangentially connected to its readers with, for example, comments at the end of a webpage. Instead, Check, Please! pushes the boundaries of representation as well as how comics are being told in the new digital era.
The basic story follows Eric “Bitty” Bittle who describes his life playing in the Samwell University’s Men’s Hockey Team, alongside the team’s captain (and eventual love interest) Jack Zimmerman, Shitty, Ransom, Holster, and a bunch of other wild and wacky characters. Most of the main cast goes by affectionate nicknames:
The simplest format of the webcomic is to read just the comic itself from the beginning. Each page is called an “episode” in reference to the way the comic is narrated: as Bitty’s personal vlog, with the layout similar to that of a YouTube video’s aspect ratio. Very recently, the website has changed its format to view one panel at a time — clicking on the image to read the next panel in a slideshow format — instead of its previous layout where all the panels were displayed at the same time on the same webpage, like a traditional comic book. This not only makes the panels easier to read, but lends itself to feeling more like the fictional vlog it’s based around.
The art initially starts out as black and white, then quickly turns into full color with increasingly complex and detailed drawings, parallel to the amount of talent and time Ngozi puts into making the comic. Another interesting trait that started in the First Year (Bitty’s freshman year) was the occasional use of gifs, something a traditional comic book wouldn’t be able to include.
There are also side-comics sprinkled throughout that introduce hockey terms to non-hockey fans in a friendly (if bro-typical) way.
By far the most stunning page from the First Year is an example of self-referencing remediation: an homage to original picture books (usually for children and often in the form of a fairytale), which sets Jack’s tragic backstory in stark contrast with the usual modern-day content. Yet by the last panel the reader is thrown back into the present with the non-storybook phrase “this little shit came along”, featuring a happy Bitty holding an innocent pie. We are then transported back into Bitty’s vlog style of narration.
The story continues this way — a tiny baker struggling to fit into the macho hockey team — until the comic’s first major breakthrough in which the subtext lying underneath is revealed. Near the halfway point of First Year, Bitty comes out as gay to one of his teammates (the “will affirm all sexual identities” Shitty). Then, during the finale episodes of Year Two the two main characters finally kiss. It was during this time the webcomic began its climb to popularity, largely thanks to the primarily liberal atmosphere on its host site Tumblr.
To read the comic in this more traditional, page-by-page fashion would be perfectly fine; no crucial details are left out of the main storyline. But that is what the comic acts as: a main storyline onto which an online world has been created.
Starting soon after the creation of the comic, Ngozi began to take advantage of the style of Tumblr’s blogging website to allow fans, both by username and anonymously, to “Ask a Whellie”. On Tumblr, this meant sending an Ask message to the inbox of the blog, which Ngozi would then reply to in comic form as if the characters themselves were answering the questions in real life.
This form of hypermedia reaches peak self-reference when Shitty has an epiphany about the “anonymous” sender icon on the website, as well as the fourth-wall breaking Johnson addressing his existence in a webcomic, which of course all the other characters think is weird.
Perhaps the most multimedia quality of Check, Please! is the use of Twitter as an additional, transparent, and “real-time” aspect of the storyworld. Bitty has his own Twitter account which he started using June 17, 2014, coinciding with the summer after the end of First Year. He then continues to post on his Twitter, parallel in time to the events happening in the webcomic.
It should be noted that the tweets match up with canonical dates, not the dates the actual episode was posted. For example, episode 19 was posted on Tumblr on February 26, 2016, but the canonical date the events in the episode occurred on was, according to Bitty’s Twitter, May 18, 2015. This means Ngozi intentionally matches up her tweets to post on the same date as the episode’s events, as if Bitty was actually tweeting about his life in real time.
Also, like any other Twitter user in the real world, Bitty interacts with other users on the site and frequently uses hashtags (ex: #HausSweetHaus). Another occasional feature is “photos” of the team only available on Twitter and not seen anywhere in the actual comic. These details give life to the storyworld and make Bitty seem more real, instead of just a character seen only in the comic, as would be the case with traditional comic books.
Ngozi herself addresses this concept of transmedia or multi-platform storytelling:
“I actually had no idea I was using this storytelling strategy until late last year when [a writer] said she liked my “transmedia” approach to my webcomic–that is, how I was using an in-character Twitter to supplement the main comic. The more I researched transmedia and multiplatform storytelling (which are pretty interchangeable terms), the more I realized what Bitty’s Twitter could potentially do for the story, including interacting and engaging with readers.
I actually ended up writing my graduate thesis on the topic of multiplatform storytelling in online comics. With Check, Please! you can get a unique point of view on what’s happening in the story if you follow Bitty on Twitter at @omgcheckplease. And because Bitty can break the fourth wall, each interaction a reader has with him makes him more real. People have tweeted to me that they sometimes forget he’s fictional!”
Notably, to match the canon, Bitty does not talk about his sexuality or his relationship with Jack on Twitter due to the notoriously homophobic world of hockey, as is discussed in the main storyline on occasion. It is only much later in the story that Bitty and Jack begin to make decisions as far as coming out publicly. This is not addressed on Twitter because Bitty’s tweets stop on June 6, 2016, most likely due to Ngzoi having an increasingly busy schedule, including her newest book deal which will bring her story from web to print, instead of the other way around.
While it’s multimedia, multi-platform, and hypermedia nature is certainly groundbreaking in and of itself, being one of several webcomics and stories online which are paving the way for new digital narratives, if you were to ask many fans (including myself) why we enjoy the story so much, I would have to point you to what I believe is the heart of the story. The best digital narratives reach beyond their coded web pages to have a real world impact. Hockey is, unfortunately, a very homophobic sport — that is just as true in the real world as it is in the canon. Comparable to how the 2016 anime Yuri!!! On Ice created a safe space for discussion and acceptance in the equally-homophobic ice skating world, Check, Please! has created a similar atmosphere for queer hockey fans (and even caused some non-hockey queer readers to gain an interest in the sport).
Ngozi herself has stated she’s created the comic to subvert the traditional culture, which she’s done with loveable characters and a storyline that breaks the boundaries of both storytelling techniques in comic books and machismo in the world of hockey. It is a winning goal for breakthroughs of both new digital narratives and more diverse stories.
And with that, I leave you with the heart of the story, as summarized by Ngozi:
