Studies in Comics - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2014

Régis Loisel’s Peter Pan (Vents d’Ouest, 1990–2004) is a striking re-formulation of the origins of this mythical character due to its stylistic, narrative and thematic darkness. This article uses Loisel’s bande dessinée to examine the potential of comics as an adaptive medium, and the reading process of the comic prequel, two aspects which are productively linked by the concept of the network. I draw on Sanders’ and Groensteen’s uses of the concept in adaptation studies and comics studies respectively, to reflect on both the way that Loisel’s bande dessinée is connected to the network of proliferating Peter Pan narratives, and the way in which the comic functions as a network itself, engaging the reader in a translinear and plurivectoral reading. This article first explores how core elements of the well-known Peter Pan narrative are adapted in Loisel’s comic, both echoing and contrasting with previous versions as Loisel’s bande dessinée engages with and re-formulates the character’s textual and visual multiplicities from the network of Peter Pan narratives. This article then draws on Paul Sutton’s theorization of the ‘dual temporality’ of the prequel to reflect on the reading process of Loisel’s Peter Pan as a comic prequel that productively uses the nature of a comic as a network, and its potential for translinear and plurivectoral reading. Loisel’s Peter Pan engages the reader in an active, retrospective, prospective and anticipatory reading process, in a dynamic of repetition and difference.

Renée French contributes to the growing subgenre of comics about medical issues and disability in her wordless text, H Day. Working with an invisible impairment, migraine, as her subject, French creates separate points of view, connecting them with overlapping imagery and externalizing focalization. Using a traditional iconography of dogs as pain proxies, the work also contributes significantly to larger discussions about agency in the identity politics of invisible disability.

For scholars in visual rhetoric, the recent wave of visual narrative forms have posed a particular challenge in terms of analysis: how might one read the sort of text that refuses to conform to visual genres as we have come to know them and yet draws upon a number of conventions from these genres and the media they typically appear in? As visual narrative forms like comics and their remediations become more ubiquitous, how do we read them and explicate what these forms have to offer in terms of meaning-making? One particularly compelling example can be found in The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders. This work incorporates a blend of media – such as prose, comics, and most especially photography – while eluding any easy designation into any one of those categories. Part travelogue and part photojournalism, The Photographer tells the story of Didier Lefevre’s travels with Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan during the war between the Soviet Union and the Afghan Mujahideen. Drawing upon scholars such as Barthes, Mitchell, Bolter and Grusin, as well as assorted comics scholars and commentators, I contend in this article that by positioning text against drawing and each against photography, The Photographer calls attention to the potential hegemonic function of any one of these discursive modes. Using close reading and rhetorical analysis, I explicate how the notion of hybridity informs the rhetorical work of the book in terms of its authorial voice(s), its form, and its content. By destabilizing fixed categories of medial and cultural identity, The Photographer enables its subjects to take on a sort of humanity than might otherwise be available to them in more traditional modes of representation and enables different forms of immediacy for its readers.

The introduction of Steve Ditko and Stan Lee’s Amazing Spider-Man radically changed the face of graphic literature. Spider-Man would go on to be one of the most recognized and beloved characters in western culture, and by mixing the individualist Zeitgeist of the mid-twentieth century with the ideals of Romanticism, co-creator Steve Ditko set a standard that would lead to some of the most significant work in comic book history. Unlike any comics creator who had preceded him, Ditko set a clear path for the psychological growth of his character and developed him over more than 38 issues. Applying a particular view of the Byronic hero, Ditko created a sort of ‘Romantic epic’ that continued in his post-Spider-Man works with the Blue Beetle, the Question and Mr A. Ditko set himself further apart from his contemporaries by developing a complicated view of violence that challenged the Comics Code Authority. The ‘right to kill’ that Steve Ditko invented for superheroes was not intended to bring the anti-hero to comics; rather, Ditko utilized it to demonstrate the moral authority of heroes against villains that, in his view, forfeited their lives. By pairing this new right to kill with psychologically complex protagonists, Ditko’s work reflected the anxieties of 1960s western culture and brought about a paradigm shift in Code era comics. This shift would lead to even more challenging works from creators like Alan Moore and Frank Miller and the eventual abandonment of the Code.

A theory of multimodality helps to explain how meaning is created by readers of comics at the level of the page and how readers situate themselves in relation to specific comics texts. In this article, I want to build on that theory in order to argue that in reading a comics text making meaning also involves the internal and external linkages that are continually made and unmade for and by readers. That is, it is not only at the level of a particular sequence of panels or page layout that meaning is made by comics creators and readers, but also through the connections that are made between various parts of the comics text itself (arthrology) and between the comics text and external texts (transtextuality). This article seeks to extend theories of multimodality to Thierry Groensteen’s arthrology and Gerard Genette’s transtextuality, concepts that help explain both the internal and external linkages created within comics texts. In doing so, I wish to explore some questions regarding how readers make sense of a complex comics text such as It’s a Bird by Steven Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen. What are the elements with which a reader must engage, at both the level of the page and the level of the text as a whole? How do these elements combine in the reading process? What accounts for the divergence of narrative meanings and textual interpretations between readers? In this article I examine how reading It’s a Bird involves making sense of the multimodal elements of each page, the arthrological connections between panels at both restricted and general levels, and the multiple kinds of transtextual connections between this text and myriad other texts.

Although regularly contested and rejected, the idea of a ‘grammar of comics’ continues to be applied to the analysis of comics in many disciplines and frameworks. The motivation for this is the evident regularity and systematicity exhibited by the comics medium as a form of expressive communication. Less commonly realized is that nowadays there are powerful descriptive mechanisms developed in approaches to verbal texts and linguistics that do not require the assumption of ‘grammar’ to explain productive structural regularity. This is important for the future study of comics because the notion of ‘grammar’ is in many respects deeply problematic when applied outside of its home area of natural language. In this article we demonstrate how more recent accounts of dynamic discourse provide a more appropriate set of mechanisms for talking about visual media such as comics. These mechanisms allow us to naturally relate panel, page and multiframe compositions as well as their combinations. By critical discussion of examples addressed in the literature, we show how these constructs also entail treatments of panel transitions that move beyond overly tight linking of panels and panel transitions to time and space and offer a methodologically sound way of identifying units of analysis in comics in general.

Studies in graphic selfhood: A review essay

Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, Michael A. Chaney (ed.) (2011) Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 336 pp., ISBN: 9780299251048, p/bk, $26.95

Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, Hillary L. Chute (2010) New York: Columbia University Press, 316 pp., ISBN: 9780231150620, h/bk, $85.00; ISBN: 9780231150637, p/bk, $28.00

Bump; How to Make, Grow and Birth a Baby, Kate Evans (2014) Brighton: Myriad Editions, 320 pp. ISBN: 9781908434357, p/bk, £10.49

Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK, British Library, London, 2 May–19 August 2014