The Comics Form: The Art of Sequenced Images

by Chris Gavaler

Answering foundational questions like "what is a comic" and "how do comics work" in original and imaginative ways, this book adapts established, formalist approaches to explaining the experience of reading comics. Taking stock of a multitude of case studies and examples, The Comics Form demonstrates that any object can be read as a comic so long as it displays a set of relevant formal features. Drawing from the worlds of art criticism and literary studies to put forward innovative new ways of thinking and talking about comics, this book challenges certain terminology and such theorizing terms as 'narrate' which have historically been employed somewhat loosely.

In unpacking the way in which sequenced images work, The Comics Form introduces tools of analysis such as discourse and diegesis; details further qualities of visual representation such as resemblance, custom norms, style, simplification, exaggeration, style modes, transparency and specification, perspective and framing, focalization and ocularization; and applies formal art analysis to comics images. This book also examines the conclusions readers draw from the way certain images are presented and what they trigger, and offers clear definitions of the roles and features of text-narrators, image-narrators, and image-text narrators in both non-linguistic images and word-images.

248 pages, Hardcover

First published June 16, 2022

About the author

Chris Gavaler’s novel-in-stories SCHOOL FOR TRICKSTERS was published by Southern Methodist University Press (2011) and his romantic suspense novel PRETEND I’M NOT HERE by HarperCollins (2002). His short fiction appears in over three dozen national literary journals, including PRAIRIE SCHOONER, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW, HUDSON REVIEW, and WITNESS. He is also a four-time winner of the Pittsburgh New Works Festival’s Outstanding Playwright award. He received an MFA from the University of Virginia and is an Assistant Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA.

Reviews

[Luis Esteban · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe the comics form was the sequence we made along the way