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“The exuberance of the prose and lovely phrasing beautifully offset the topic, which is exceptionally well-researched as well as being very clearly elaborated. The book was a pleasure to read and has the potential to reshape scholarly engagements with the material and affective dimensions of comics reading processes.” —Kate Polak, author of Ethics...
Citations
... Es ist ein "konstitutiver blinder Fleck der dem Comic eigenen Zeichenform, des Cartoons" (Packard, 2006, S. 242). Dies muss gleichzeitig als besonderes ästhetisches Potenzial begriffen werden, da Comicund Animations-Protagonist*innen wesentlich deutungsoffener bleiben können, was Kategorien sozialer Repräsentation von etwa Geschlecht oder Hautfarbeund generell Kategorien von Körperlichkeitanbelangt (Klar, 2013;Packard et al., 2019, S. 151-184;Szép, 2020). In Lewis Trondheims Mister O (2003) oder Mister I (2006 [2005]) figurieren als Hauptfiguren etwa lediglich die anthropomorphisierten Buchstaben O und I, wodurch fixierte Identitätszuschreibungen ebenso umgangen wie dekonstruiert werden können. ...
Comics und Animation teilen sich nicht nur viele ästhetische Eigenschaften, sondern auch ein unbequemes und spannungsreiches Verhältnis zu medienwissenschaftlichen Zugängen: Comics werden häufig mit bestimmten narrativen Gattungen und humoristischen Genres in eins gesetzt. Ebenso gut können sie aber auch als übergeordnetes Erzählmedium oder als semiotische, transmediale Kulturtechnik verstanden werden. Der folgende Beitrag nähert sich dem Zusammenhang von Comics und Animation aus zwei unterschiedlichen Perspektiven an. Zunächst werden die medienästhetischen Differenzen von Comics und Animation anhand verschiedener Strategien der Zeit- und Bewegungsdarstellung beleuchtet. Im Anschluss daran werden die Gemeinsamkeiten beider, distinkt stabilisierter Medienkonfigurationen am Begriff des Cartoons herausgearbeitet, mit dem nicht nur Formen des visuellen Einbild-Witzes sowie ein (animiertes) Kurzfilmformat bezeichnet werden, sondern auch eine bestimmte Bildlichkeit abstrahierter oder überzeichneter Körperdarstellungen, an die spezifische narrative Konventionen geknüpft sind. Zuletzt bezieht der Beitrag noch einmal neuere Digitalisierungsprozesse mit ein, durch welche sich Comic und Animation auch medienästhetisch noch stärker aneinander annähern.
... Like any scholar currently exploring phenomenological aspects of comics reading, I am indebted both to scholars who have glanced at this issue briefly but tellingly, including Charles Hatfield (2005, 58-64) and Roger Sabin (1993, 52), and to those who have given it more concerted attention, including Pascal Lefèvre (1998), Katalin Orbán (2014), Ian Hague (2014), and Karin Kukkonen (2015). But in this discussion of Meyer, I will first discuss some aspects of the phenomenology of comics reading that have been underexplored in the context of fandom, and then contrast my discussion with a recent, much differently situated vision of comics reading by Eszter Szép (2020). ...
... In general, these graphic narratives can be categorized as autobiographical comics that portray themes related to women's social and individual embodiment (Chute 2010;El Refaie 2012;Szép 2020). More specifically, however, they emphasize responses to the social stigma associated with disease. ...
Teva Harrison’s autobiographical graphic memoir In-Between Days (2016), which chronicles her experiences living with a metastatic breast cancer diagnosis, is a hallmark text of graphic medicine that must be approached from a framework that combines knowledge of disease process and comics art. As she reflects on her rounds of treatment, her symptoms, her anxieties, and her everyday experiences since diagnosis, Harrison combines text and image in innovative page layouts that exploit the artistic possibilities of the medium. Attention is paid to paratextual elements of comics, panel shape and sequence, and word-image interactions, with reference to comics theory and previous work on cancer in graphic novels. Giving voice to her individualized patient experience, Harrison also crafts a memoir with pedagogical value for comics scholars and healthcare providers alike. By applying the concepts of “metavivorship” (Tometich et al., 2020) and “narrative repair” (Nielsen, 2019) to In-Between Days, analysis highlights the creator’s efforts to reconcile body and mind as she lives with metastatic disease.
Bringing together comics analysis, autobiography studies, and narrative theory, this article aims to analyse different ways in which graphic life narratives expose the illusion of a stable and unified autobiographical subject. The first part focuses on the perceived split between the present and past self and its manifestation in autobiographical discourse as the narrating-I and narrated-I, exploring different methods autobiographical comics employ to foreground the fragmented self and to favour the perspective of the past or of the present. The next part analyses the interplay between the narrating-I and the narrated-I in a short comic story from Aline Kominsky Crumb’s Need More Love (2007). Not only does this story challenge the divide between the two positions of the self, it also illustrates the view of identity as a performative construct. The final part of this article offers an interpretation of Katie Green’s Lighter than My Shadow (2013), focusing on the way this graphic memoir enacts narrative self-construction as an interpretative and meaning-making process that can facilitate healing. While this process typically involves finding coherence and continuity in the narrated experience, the memoir also reveals that such coherence-building has its limitations.
https://www.comicsgrid.com/article/id/11034/
Drawing attention to the ways in which art activism can be mobilized “with the objective of achieving social and or political change” (Serafini, 2018, p. 3), in this article, I attend especially to the image of the womb as a powerful visual metaphor for political intervention. Analyzing the transformative potential of an embodied medium such as political cartoons, the present article focuses on Wombastic, a Tumblr-based initiative organized by the Spanish collective Autoras de Cómic in response to the restrictive abortion bill that the Spanish right-wing Partido Popular approved in the Council of Ministers on December 20, 2013. While right-wing legislators have turned women’s bodies into battlefields in their attempt to reinstate heteropatriarchal gender norms, feminist graphic interventions reclaim the body as a site of resistance to disrupt neoconservative propaganda. Studying the sociopolitical context in which it was launched, this article underlines the connection between the “repoliticization of Spanish social life” (Herrero, 2019, p. 127), and the resurgence of powerful feminist activism, centering on reproductive rights. Steeped in the post 11M social climate, this study reveals the discursive power of political cartoons at a time of renewed politicization of the body, increased social mobilizations, and powerful feminist activism. Socially engaged comics and cartoons such as the ones uploaded to Wombastic display feminist agency, reclaiming women’s creativity and ownership of their own sexuality and reproductive choices.
The Cambridge Companion to Comics presents comics as a multifaceted prism, generating productive and insightful dialogues with the most salient issues concerning the humanities at large. This volume provides readers with the histories and theories necessary for studying comics. It consists of three sections: Forms maps the most significant comics forms, including material formats and techniques. Readings brings together a selection of tools to equip readers with a critical understanding of comics. Uses examines the roles accorded to comics in museums, galleries, and education. Chapters explore comics through several key aspects, including drawing, serialities, adaptation, transmedia storytelling, issues of stereotyping and representation, and the lives of comics in institutional and social settings. This volume emphasizes the relationship between comics and other media and modes of expression. It offers close readings of vital works, covering more than a century of comics production and extending across visual, literary and cultural disciplines.
The Cambridge Companion to Comics presents comics as a multifaceted prism, generating productive and insightful dialogues with the most salient issues concerning the humanities at large. This volume provides readers with the histories and theories necessary for studying comics. It consists of three sections: Forms maps the most significant comics forms, including material formats and techniques. Readings brings together a selection of tools to equip readers with a critical understanding of comics. Uses examines the roles accorded to comics in museums, galleries, and education. Chapters explore comics through several key aspects, including drawing, serialities, adaptation, transmedia storytelling, issues of stereotyping and representation, and the lives of comics in institutional and social settings. This volume emphasizes the relationship between comics and other media and modes of expression. It offers close readings of vital works, covering more than a century of comics production and extending across visual, literary and cultural disciplines.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the precarious
porosity of the human body. Biological vulnerability and
the fear of contagion in recent times has prompted the
exercise of caution by enforcing distinct demarcating
boundaries between the environment, the self, and the
other. Thus, the faculty of touch is restricted despite its
importance in functional, developmental, haptic,
intimate, non-verbal, therapeutic, cultural, and social
dimensions. Avenues of direct contact have been barred,
with digital and mediated touch dominating various
spheres. The lived experience of a population negotiating
with the loss of tactile contact finds expression within the
subjective narratives of the viral subject detailed
insightfully through the medium of comics. Taking
instances from graphic medicine, this paper aims to
analyse the parameters of touch and tactility during the
COVID-19 pandemic by close reading comic panels from
various sources.
Partiendo de una concepción del cómic que se aleja de su tradicional definición monosensorial en favor de un acercamiento multisensorial, el objetivo de este artículo es examinar la capacidad del medio para representar la diversidad y los trastornos sensoriales, centrándose para ello en el ejemplo paradigmático de Diagnósticos (2013), de Diego Agrimbau y Lucas Varela. Este volumen de historias cortas independientes conectadas por la presencia de distintas alteraciones sensoriales hace uso de algunos recursos formales del cómic (como la visión holística o los diferentes grados de integración de texto e imagen) para ofrecer el punto de vista subjetivo interior de sus protagonistas, todas mujeres. La obra se analiza a luz de la medicina gráfica, aunque, pese a lo que sugiere su título, se trata de un cómic de ficción que no pretende ser un manual médico. Se examinan, pues, la potencialidad del cómic de ficción con representaciones estereotipadas para generar empatía y otros aspectos relacionados con la diversidad funcional como la identidad y el género. Se concluye así que, a pesar de algunas figuraciones estereotipadas, Diagnósticos constituye un ejemplo único de la representación de la diversidad sensorial en el cómic por su carácter experimental y autoconsciente.
