Studying Comics and Graphic Novels

Today’s comics and graphic novels tackle serious themes and win Pulitzer prizes. This guide introduces their distinctive characteristics, traces their historical development, and analyzes their narrative structure. An ideal course book, the text includes material on sub–genres, such as autobiography and literary adaptation, and deploys the principles of cognitive science to explore how we respond to texts that fuse visual and linguistic storytelling techniques. Studying Comics and Graphic Novels includes study activities, assignments, and essay questions on each topic as well as an extensive glossary and list of prominent comic and graphic novel publications, making this an invaluable student resource.

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: How to Use This Book 1 What This Book Holds 2 Working Definitions 4 1 What′s in a Page: Close–Reading Comics 7 Cognitive Processes and Critical Terms 7 Navigating the Comics Page 16 Entering the Storyworld and Meeting its Participants 19 Comics Analysis – A Basic Checklist 26 2 The Way Comics Tell it: Narration and Narrators 31 Showing and Telling 31 Story, Discourse, and Plot 34 The Narrator 39 Narration, Focalization, and Point of View 44 Narrative as Meaning–Making 48 Graphic Narrative – A Basic Checklist 49 3 Narrating Minds and Bodies: Autobiographical Comics 55 Style and Subjectivity 55 Autographic Agents 57 Embodiment 60 Self–Reflexivity 61 Time, Story, and History 65 Alternative Agendas and Authenticity 68 4 Novels and Graphic Novels: Adaptations 73 Transporting Stories 74 Media Affordances and Adaptation Strategies 75 Fidelity in Adaptation 80 Literary Complexity 85 The Page Revisited 90 5 Comics and Their History 99 The Beginnings of Comics History 99 Precursors in Emergent Mass Culture 102 Newspaper Comics (1900s–1930s) 103 The Comic Book (1930–54) 106 Comics Censorship (1954) 110 Comics as Popular Culture 113 Breaking the Code 1: Pop Art and Underground Comix 117 Breaking the Code 2: The British Invasion 118 6 The Study and Criticism of Comics 123 Resources for Studying Comics 123 Access to Comics Texts 123 Critical Work on Comics 124 Critical Approaches to Comics 125 Comics Semiotics 126 Comics Narratology 128 Cognitive Approaches to Comics 129 Historical and Auteurist Approaches 131 Cultural Studies and Gender Studies 133 Psychoanalysis 134 How to Write Your Essay on Comics 139 The Crime Scene 142 The Witnesses 142 Making Your Case 144 End Credits 146 Conclusion: Comics as Literature 149 Appendix: More Comics and Graphic Novels to Read 155 Glossary 167 Index 179

Karin Kukkonen is Balzan Postdoctoral Research Fellow at St John’s College, University of Oxford, UK. Her research focuses on the emergence and development of comics as a narrative form during the twentieth and twenty–first centuries. Dr Kukkonen has published work on metaphors, metafiction, and multi–perspective storytelling in comics. Her recent monograph, Contemporary Comics Storytelling (2013) examines how the comics of recent years engage with the legacy of postmodernism.