Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies

This volume showcases some of the best research published in the Studies in Comics journal.

Comics have always embraced a diversity of formats, existing in complex relationships with other media, and been dynamic in their response to new technologies and means of distribution. This collection explores interactions between comics and other media and technologies, employing a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives.

By focusing on key critical concepts within multimodality (transmediality, adaptation, intertextuality) and addressing multiple platforms and media (digital, analog, music, prose, linguistics, graphics), this collection expands and develops existing comics theory and addresses multiple other media and disciplines. This volume demonstrates the evolution of comics studies over the last decade and shows how this research field has engaged with various media and technologies in a continuously evolving, multimodal artistic and production environment.

List of Figures

Foreword

   Roger Sabin

Introduction

   Madeline B. Gangnes, Christopher Murray, and Julia Round

SECTION ONE: MULTIPLICITY AND (INTER)TEXTUALITY 

1. The Shape of Comic Book Reading
   
   A. David Lewis
   
   
2. Re-inventing the Origins of the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up: Regis Loisel’s Peter Pan

           Armelle Blin-Rolland

1. The Myth of Eco: Cultural Populism and Comics Studies

           Marc Singer

1. Intertwining Verbal and Visual Elements in Printed Narratives for Adults

           Pascal Lefèvre

SECTION TWO: METACOMICS AND THE DIGITAL 

1. Spiegelman’s Magic Box: MetaMaus and the Archive of Representation

           Elisabeth R. Friedman

1. Meaning from Movement: Blurring the Temporal Border between Animation and Comics

           Joshua Gowdy

SECTION THREE: LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE 

1. Narrative, Language, and Comics-as-Literature

           Hannah Miodrag

1. The Cognitive Grammar of ‘I’: Viewing Arrangements in Graphic Autobiographies

           Christian W. Schneider

SECTION FOUR: SOUND AND VISION 

1. Sound Affects: Visualizing Music, Musicians, and (Sub)Cultural Identity in BECK and Scott Pilgrim

           Camilo Diaz Pino

1. The Musicalization of Graphic Narratives and P. Craig Russell’s Graphic Novel Operas, 'The Magic Flute' and 'Salome'

           Victoria Addis

SECTION FIVE: FROM MATERIAL TO TRANSTEXTUAL AND BEYOND 

1. 'Animating' the Narrative in Abstract Comics

           Paul Fisher Davies

1. Multimodal Duck-Rabbitry: Multistable Perception and the Narrative Potential of Fold-Ins

           Thomas Hamlyn-Harris and Ross Watkins

1. Resisting Narrative Immersion

           Greice Schneider

1. Square Eyes: Augmenting Bodies, Boredom, and Things

           Merlyn Seller

Afterword

           Madeline B. Gangnes, Christopher Murray, and Julia Round

Notes on Contributors

Index

Madeline Gangnes is an assistant professor of English at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, USA. She is a co-editor of Studies in Comics and the advisory editor of Sequentials. Her work appears in Studies in Comics, the
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, the Victorian Periodicals Review, and Key Terms in Comics Studies, among other publications.

Professor Christopher Murray is professor of Comics Studies and English Literature in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law at the University of Dundee, Scotland. He leads the Masters in Comics and Graphic Novels and is director of the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies and Dundee Comics Creative Space. He is a founding co-editor of Studies in Comics.

Julia Round’s books include Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (2014) and the award-winning Gothic for Girls (2019). She is associate professor of English and Comics Studies at Bournemouth University, UK, and one of the founders and co-editors of Studies in Comics journal and the Encapsulations book series.