Few objects of study are as oblique and multifaceted as play and games, activities so variegated, structural and embedded in our existence as human beings and as societies that we might even take them for granted. In all the different traditions and domains that tackled play and games (Huizinga 1939, Piaget 1945, Caillois 1958, Winnicot 1971, Bateson 1972, Vygotskij 1976, to name a few), from psychology to sociology, from ethology to semiotics, the only common trait is a vague idea of “oscillation” among presence and absence concerning play, which opens to the vast potential field in which play finds space (Bartezzaghi 2016). Far from seeing play as something that needs order and categorization, I would rather consider it as a process (Basso Fossali 2008) in which different actors, human and non-human, create new forms of enunciation, defining a passage between modes of existence (Paolucci 2020). A process not to be considered as mental, but as a form of perceptual intersubjective semiosis in which are merged materiality (Malafouris 2008), culture and rules. Following the obliquity of the subject, with this poster I will draw on the experience of the “comics based research” as a field of practice (Sousanis 2015, Peterle 2021) to concretely show the entanglements and relations between the domains that tackled play as a topic, and the focal role of semiotics in future investigations. Perhaps it is in the oscillation between images and words, between sequential and simultaneous that lies the key to a better, transdisciplinary understanding.