Simon GrennanUniversity of Chester | UC · Art and Design
Simon Grennan
PhD
About
105
Publications
5,125
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Introduction
Professor Simon Grennan is an awarded scholar of visual narrative and graphic novelist. He is author of Thinking Through Drawing (Bloomsbury 2022), A Theory of Narrative Drawing (Palgrave 2017), Drawing in Drag by Marie Duval (Book Works 2018) and Dispossession (Cape, 2015). He is co-author and editor of Key Terms in Comics Studies (Palgrave 2022) and co-author of Marie Duval, Maverick Victorian cartoonist (MUP 2020), Marie Duval (Myriad 2018) and The Marie Duval Archive (www.marieduval.org).
Additional affiliations
January 2023 - present
Education
October 2008 - October 2011
Publications
Publications (105)
This book offers an original new conception of visual story telling, proposing that drawing, depictive drawing and narrative drawing are produced in an encompassing dialogic system of embodied social behavior. It refigures the existing descriptions of visual story-telling that pause with theorizations of perception and the articulation of form. The...
"Inspired by Anthony Trollope’s 1879 novel John Caldigate, Dispossession embeds the reader in a uniquely wrought experience of the mid-nineteenth century, including the first ever appearance of the Aboriginal Wiradjuri language in a graphic novel. Taking unique advantage of the graphic form to conjure the material world of the Victorian era in a gl...
The archive consists of newly commissioned high-resolution scans of the extant work of Marie Duval (1847 – 1890?) that can be zoomed. The scope of the Search, List and Browse functions offered by the site is outlined on the Search page, along with a Search rationale and rationales for the inclusion or exclusion from the archive of unsigned work and...
This volume is a cross-disciplinary collection of essays in the fields of nineteenth-century history, adaptation, word/image and Victorianism. Featuring new writing by some of the most influential, respected and radical scholars in these fields, Transforming Anthony Trollope constitutes both a close companion to Simon Grennan’s 2015 graphic novel D...
Comics
This chapter explores the medium of comics as popular visual literature, characterised by both the medium's relationships with the history of drawing and by the changing historic contingencies under which the medium has been recognised, utilised and transformed. Drawing encompasses comics. Very few types of drawing are specific to comics alo...
Artists Grennan & Sperandio established a fine arts studio in 1990, moving to Manchester, UK and Manhattan, US, exclusively working together (Steeds 2014).
The artists’ fine arts practice made collaborative remote working part of an encompassing strategy, which relocated and demoted concepts of embodied authorship. The artists hypothesised that the...
Models of translation are sometimes used to describe significant transcultural media and transmedia relationships, such as those between the genres of anime, manga and the graphic novel. (Grennan 2017, Brienza 2016, Couch 2010).
However, the stability of translation concepts such as ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignisation’ (Venuti 1995) is largely chal...
This paper will consider the emerging activities, characteristics, identities and roles of a new type of cultural producer, the visual journalist in the London periodical press of the 1870s.
In common with nineteenth-century entertainments and news media of all types, from stage performances to novels, periodical publishing was a complex and dynami...
Models of translation are sometimes used to describe significant transcultural media and transmedia relationships, such as those between the genres of anime, manga and the graphic novel. (Grennan 2017, Brienza 2016, Couch 2010).
However, the stability of translation concepts such as ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignisation’ (Venuti 1995) is largely chal...
Gilles Deleuze describes how the painter Francis Bacon used the word “graph” to describe his conception of the function of marks made by the body – that of clearing away existing ideas of image, representation, depiction and function. In this conception, the mark is a phenomenal impression that is not itself a trace of either an immanent mind or an...
This chapter looks at several works produced by architects and students in order to discuss and illustrate some uses of the comics medium as a tool both to visualise and explain, to develop stories and discourses, and start morphogenetic processes that lead to novel architectural form, or even rethink architectural space.
Focusing on the temporal structure of narrative, the Keynote will scrutinise the relationships between depiction, drawing and time, discussing some key concepts that coalesce to suggest a dialogic narrative architecture revealed in depictive drawing in particular.
It will present a step-by-step exposition of a structure of narrative time as a serie...
This paper will consider Manouach’s own explanation of the genesis of Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge (2018) in theorisations of cross-media visual correspondence systems (Bogost 2012), utilising the concept of the ontograph, or “a graphical […] representation that provides concise and detailed information about the units and the ways they re...
This chapter will consider Manouach’s own explanation of the genesis of Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge (2018) in theorisations of cross-media visual correspondence systems (Bogost 2012), utilising the concept of the ontograph, or “a graphical […] representation that provides concise and detailed information about the units and the ways they...
This chapter contextualises narrative drawing, first identifying types of drawing that are specific to comics. It proposes that the comics medium intervenes in the long history of drawing, by introducing polygraphy as a recurrent feature of comics. Referring to Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony (or multiple voices) in the novel, polygraphy accounts fo...
Visual journalist and actress Marie Duval (Isabella Emily Louisa Tessier 1847–90) was one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth-century. Her work focused on the humour, attitudes, urbanity and poverty of the types of people she knew, in a period of diversifying leisure activities for working people. Frequ...
Biography of Isabel Emile de Tessier (Marie Duval and others).
This accessible book explains the significance of relationships between the body and the mark, visual imitation, drawing and writing and visual storytelling, providing a simple guide to these key ideas. For millennia drawing has been conceived as an exploratory activity, mediating between the vision of the drafter and what they are drawing. Drawing...
Key Terms in Comics Studies is a glossary of over 300 terms and critical concepts currently used in the Anglophone academic study of comics, including those from other languages that are currently adopted and used in English. Written by nearly 100 international and contemporary experts from the field, the entries are succinctly defined, exemplified...
Over the last 25 years, the field of comics studies has become firmly established in Anglophone academia. The number of comics-specific book series, journals, and conferences has steadily increased, and the field continues to gain ground in universities through comics courses and degree programmes at the bachelors and masters levels. While this bod...
Key Terms in Comics Studies is a glossary of over 300 terms and critical concepts currently used in the Anglophone academic study of comics, including those from other languages that are currently adopted and used in English.
Written by nearly 100 international and contemporary experts from the field, the entries are succinctly defined, exemplified...
The original version of this chapter has been revised and an updated bibliography has been incorporated in the chapter.
This chapter will examine ways in which my production of the 2018 comics album Drawing in Drag by Marie Duval (Grennan 2018) attempted to discover, examine and articulate a concept of the gendered subject, through the revival and performance of drawing activities that visually ventriloquised nineteenth-century cartoonist and actress Marie Duval (18...
Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval (Isabella Tessier, UK, 1847–90), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the nineteenth century.
Duval's cartoons, strips and illustrations revolutionised print comedy. Her London characters became a mainstay of Judy m...
Introduction to "Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist”
Marie Duval and the technologies of periodical publishing
Appendix 2: questions of terminology and historicisation
This chapter argues that the power of comics resides in the historic appearance and modulation of the affective possibilities of the comic strip register. On this basis, it explores how this power is realized in popular visual literature, which derives from, develops and transforms the historic contingencies of reading. Analysing examples in the wo...
I Know How This Ends is the second volume in a series that started with Parables of Care: Creative Responses to Dementia Care (2017). The project explores the potential of comics to enhance the impact of dementia care research. This comic book presents, in synthesised form, stories crafted from narrative data collected via interviews with professio...
Drawing, as activity and material, remains under-theorised in comics scholarship. Conceptions of the functions and identities of drawing are few, as aspects of encompassing explanations of the experience of making and reading comics. There is no tradition of comics scholarship devoted to drawing and no schools of thought describing current consensu...
‘A Theory of Narrative Drawing’, published in 2017, aims to explain experiences of making and viewing drawings that show stories. The measure by which I decided to include or exclude any topic or method in achieving this aim, was simply its saliency in helping me to achieve an explanation. A theory explains salient features by identifying, describi...
Spanish language edition of 'Parables of Care: creative responses to dementia care, as told by carers' (2017).
This paper considers a range of ways in which comic strips and drawings published by cartoonist and stage performer Marie Duval (Isabelle Émilie de Tessier 1847–1890) in the weekly Judy, or the London serio-comic journal, in the 1870s and 1880s, visualised ideas of European leisure travel, for working class Britons.
The pan-European infrastructure...
The multiverses of superhero comics, developed in part as pragmatic, post-hoc responses to inconsistencies and contradictions in the production of related stories by many authors over many years, now provide an “ontological given” (Kukkonin 2010: 39). This ontology is sometimes claimed to contradict, if not destabilise, theories of fiction that ins...
This paper considers ways in which a range of visualisations of ‘women of business’ were informed by debates about the gendered body and sexuality, spectacle and spectatorship, domesticity, leisure and work, in the journals and literature of the later nineteenth century. It examines aspects of the life and work of London cartoonist and stage perfor...
This paper will interrogate the transnational relationships between traditions of manga, the graphic novel and a range of commodity registers, according to a list of key discursive characteristics. It will focus on a number of case studies that exemplify some foundational activities for the genres beween1980 and 2000.
As a prelude, the paper will c...
Discussions of the conception of that exemplar of the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century urban modernity, the flâneur, have focused on both critique of the figure’s masculinity and more radical and nuanced conceptions of women’s flânerie. This article considers both the re-gendering and ungendering of flânerie in the character of t...
The short comic book includes 14 informative and touching stories, drawn by Simon Grennan, which were adapted by more than 100 case studies of real-life dementia care situations described by a range of carers. These case studies in which the comic book is based are available at http://carenshare.city.ac.uk/
In the collection at Chetham’s Library, Manchester, is an illustrated novel, published in 1877.Titled The Story of a Honeymoon, the novel was written and illustrated by Charles H. Ross and Ambrose Clarke. It is a comic novel, cheaply produced, telling a titillating and amusing story of a marriage that goes fatally awry on the couple’s honeymoon. Th...
This section describes the creation and publishing of The Marie Duval Archive, a free online image archive which brings together the known extant work of pioneering London cartoonist and theater actress Marie Duval (1847–1890). It shows how analysis of the current canon of nineteenth-century comic strips influenced both the purpose and the form of...
This paper considers a range of ways in which comic strips and drawings published by Marie Duval (1847–1890) in the weekly Judy, or the London Serio-Comic Journal parodied the business of mounting the Royal Academy of Arts’ annual Summer Exhibition, the exhibiting artists, visitors and artworks on display.
The Summer Exhibition, instituted in 1769,...
Marie Duval (Isabella Emilie Tessier [1847–1890]), was one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century. Duval’s work appeared in serial magazines and books, at a time––the 1860s and 70s––when the professional identity of visual journalists, cartoonists and illustrators was in radical flux, for both men...
Affect has been described as a change from one phenomenal experience to another, invariably incorporating a degree of inhibition or facilitation of the capacities of the body. Affect is prenoetic, and consequently inhibits and facilitates noetic behavior (Damasio 1994/201-22). It constitutes a dynamic and comparative encounter. In every instance, t...
Self-observation is the capacity to scrutinise and constrain subjectivity by adopting a socially agreed point of view, in the production of representations (Crossley 1996/10 and 03). In this sense, society is the consensus represented by constrained forms of expression (as ‘generalised others’ as Mead puts it [Mead 1967]), in a system of relationsh...
An introduction and analysis of the work of Victorian cartoonist and actress Marie Duval, for a general audience.
Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012) is a box containing fourteen items that can be read in any order, and for this reason it appears to offer its readers a great deal of choice over the narrative structure of the work. This paper contrasts Building Stories with the video games Fallout: New Vegas and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to demonstrate that...
'Parables of Care' is a 16-page micro-comic that presents true stories of creative responses to dementia care, as told by carers, adapted from case studies at http://carenshare.city.ac.uk
This paper discusses Neil Cohn’s application of the role of structures of cognitive language systems to types of visual representations other than writing. He writes that he has “introduced a new notion of ‘permeability” or a new conception of the influence of one modality upon another (2013). The term permeability also describes his general projec...
This presentation reports on work in progress by Ernesto Priego at City University of London, Peter Wilkins at Douglas College, and Simon Grennan at The University of Chester to develop two short comic book manuals of best practices for dementia care in the UK and Canada. This project collects information in focus groups from caregivers from across...
Discussions of the conception of that exemplar of urban modernity, the ‘flâneur,’ of the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, have focused on both critique of the figure’s masculinity (Wolff 2000) and upon more radical and nuanced conceptions of women’s ‘flâneurie.’ (Parsons 2000).
This paper considers the gendering of flâneur...
Grennan provides a balanced summary of existing theories and methods in the study of storytelling, providing a new explanation of the structure of story and discourse, according to established descriptions of intersubjectivity. He explicitly encompasses his explanation of the experience of drawing, visual depiction and imagination (made in Chapter...
Grennan provides a new explanation of the experience of drawing, visual depiction and imagination, creating a systematic theoretical framework describing the relationship between causes and consequences, the general potential resources of the body, institutions and ideas. He provides a needed explanation of the key distinction between correspondenc...
Grennan presents the second of two practical visual demonstrations of his theory of narrative drawing. These are highly original, due to the well-crafted methodological and theoretical framing of both the analysis and the personal application of the exercise by the author. Grennan frames this second demonstration with a detailed discussion of the p...
Grennan presents the first of two practical visual demonstrations of his theory of narrative drawing. These are highly original, due to the well-crafted methodological and theoretical framing of both the analysis and the personal application of the exercise by the author. This first visual demonstration is framed by a detailed examination of existi...
Considering pages from Andrei Molotiu’s abstract comic Nautilus, of 2009 and pages by Carlos Nine from his bande dessinée Saubón le petit canard, also of 2009, this chapter will describe in detail how the functions of depiction rely upon tendentiousness or self-fulfillment: comprehension embodied in types of recognition and mis-recognition of ideas...
This paper will consider some of the relationships between subjects, social institutions, media and ideas that characterise differences between the environments in which both comics and fine art are produced, used and become comprehensible.
It will outline a specific theoretical framework encompassing these differences, describing the discursive c...
In reviews of Chris Ware’s Building Stories, critics regularly draw attention to the board-game like design of the comic’s box and elements of the text within. Yet while many have noted the similarities between Building Stories and the visual/physical design of board games such as Monopoly, and Ware himself has cited ‘French "Jeux Reunis" game sets...
Gilles Deleuze describes how the painter Francis Bacon used the word “graph” to describe his conception of the function of marks made by the body – that of clearing away existing ideas of image, representation, depiction and function. In this conception, the mark is a phenomenal impression that is not itself a trace of either an immanent mind or an...
Considering pages from Andrei Molotiu’s abstract comic Nautilus, of 2009 and pages by Carlos Nine from his bande dessinée Saubón le petit canard, also of 2009, this paper will describe in detail how the functions of depiction rely upon tendentiousness or self-fulfillment: comprehension embodied in types of recognition and mis-recognition of ideas....
This paper will discuss my adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (1878-79) as a new graphic novel, Dispossession and its French edition Courir deux lièvres.
Trollope’s writing style formalises his approach to plot, succinctly tying style to genre. In the plot of John Caldigate, the narrator both consistently avoids making definitive state...
This paper will discuss my adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (1878-79) as a new graphic novel, Dispossession and its French edition Courir deux lièvres.
Trollope’s writing style formalises his approach to plot, succinctly tying style to genre. In the plot of John Caldigate, the narrator both consistently avoids making definitive state...
"Grennan looks forward, underlining key changes in the graphic novel, which in the twenty-first century is seeing transformation in terms of reception – becoming an accepted artistic form worthy of scholarly editions and study in academia – but also format, as technology allows for experimentation, for example via high-resolution reproduction in a...
This paper will consider some of the relationships between subjects, social institutions, media and ideas that characterise differences between the environments in which both comics and fine art are produced, used and become comprehensible.
It will outline a specific theoretical framework encompassing these differences, describing the discursive c...
Phillipe Marion uses the neologism ‘mediagenius’ to describe the way in which stories specify themselves though the systematic, discursive relationships that constitute communications registers, by means of what Jan Baetens calls ‘style’, ‘storytelling’ and ‘medium’ (2001). In Marion’s sense, comic strips have a specific mediagenius that is quite d...
This paper will present and theorise aspects of the facture and iconography of the work of pioneering female cartoonist Marie Duval, in relation to conceptions and representations of women’s dress in London in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s.
Duval’s work appeared in a variety of the cheap British penny papers and comics of the 1860s-1880s. An actress a...
There is still no agreed pedagogic definition of practice-based research. However, there is not a dearth of definitions, but rather a wide variety, predicated upon the developing programmes of individual places of study. This article will examine these definitions in terms of underlying concepts of intentionality and alterity and the ways in which...
This paper will discuss my forthcoming adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (1878) as a new graphic novel, Dispossession. Produced in the context of an academic conference on Trollope in 2015, the new graphic novel functions as a research outcome in the sense that its academic audience is a ‘knowing one’, to use Linda Hutcheon’s term (Hu...
This paper will present and theorise aspects of the facture and iconography of the work of pioneering female cartoonist Marie Duval, in relation to conceptions and representations of women’s dress in London in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s.
Duval’s work appeared in a variety of the cheap British penny papers and comics of the 1860s-1880s. An actress a...
Avec cette brillante adaptation de Trollope, le plus célèbre des écrivains réalistes de l’âge victorien, Simon Grennan propose un passionnant récit d’aventures, tout en reconstituant de manière très authentique la culture de l’époque.
The method of analysis of communications registers outlined by linguists Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad (2009), begins with the identification of what they term the ‘situational characteristics’ of a register. These characteristics are as much social as material. They claim that before a register can be identified or expressive content considered,...
In the United Kingdom, practice-based research has been the subject of pedagogic debate for over a quarter of a century, in particular in the context of both the study methods and the adjudication of higher research degrees. However, there is still no agreed pedagogic definition of practice-based research in the visual and performing arts in Britai...
Dispossession (2015) is a 96-page colour graphic adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s 1879 novel John Caldigate. It is the primary outcome of a 2012 commission from the University of Leuven to develop, draw and rationalise a new graphic novel relative to Trollope’s (Fig. 1). Dispossession will be published in an English edition and as Courir deux lièvr...
In reviews of Chris Ware’s Building Stories, critics regularly draw attention to the board-game like design of the comic’s box and elements of the text within. Yet while many have noted the similarities between Building Stories and the visual/physical design of board games such as Monopoly, and Ware himself has cited ‘French "Jeux Reunis" game sets...
Dispossession (2015) is a 96 page colour graphic adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s 1879 novel John Caldigate that I was commissioned by the University of Leuven in 2012, to develop, draw and rationalise. Dispossession will be published in an English edition, and as Courir deux lièvres (To run two hares) in a French edition, in support of a 2015 acad...
In reviews of Chris Ware’s Building Stories, critics regularly draw attention to the board-game like design of the comic’s box and elements of the text within. Yet while many have noted the similarities between Building Stories and the visual/physical design of board games such as Monopoly, and Ware himself has cited ‘French "Jeux Reunis" game sets...
Both Jo Sutliff Sanders, Sophie Van der Linden and Natalie Op de Beek independently generalise the formal distinctions between comics and picture books in similar ways, arguing that, despite exceptions, “comics tend to use multiple panels per page, with closure between them; picture books tend to use full-page or double-page images, with closure co...
From reality television to celebrity gossip magazines, today's technologies have enabled a vast number of personal narratives that document our existence and that of others. Multiple academic disciplines now define the self as fluid and entirely changeable: little more than a performance that is chosen according to the situation. While news journal...
Karen Parner claims that “…the very definition of narrative is dependent on temporality.” (Parner 2001), referring to the ways in which narrative expressions are structured, rather than the arrangement of plots.
Focussing on the temporal structure of narrative, this paper will scrutinise the relationships between depiction, drawing and time, discus...
The method of analysis of communications registers outlined by linguists Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad, begins with the identification of what they call the ‘situational characteristics’ of a register. These characteristics are as much social as material. They claim that
before a register can be identified or expressive content considered, the ana...
Michael Podro titles the function of depictive drawing the ‘synoptic view’ (Podro 1998), in which recognition of content relies on adjudicating the particular properties of graphic marks in relation to the world they depict. This function provides “...our sense of the subject emerging...” (ibid, 13), taking place “...within a framework of other rec...
Utilising examples from the work of Debbie Dreschler (2008), Frank
Miller (2005) and Joe Sacco (2001), this paper will examine the ways in which intentionality and alterity describe a divided subject, as revealed in the production and reception of narrative drawing and theory. As Patricia Hempel (1989) has neatly observed, “The story also has a sto...