Comics studies - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Comics studies is an academic field that focuses on comics

Comics

Comics denotes a hybrid medium having verbal side of its vocabulary tightly tied to its visual side in order to convey narrative or information only, the latter in case of non-fiction comics, seeking synergy by using both visual and verbal side in...

and graphic novels. Although comics and graphic novels have been generally dismissed as less relevant pop culture texts

Text (literary theory)

A text, within literary theory, is a coherent set of symbols that transmits some kind of informative message. This set of symbols is considered in terms of the informative message's content, rather than in terms of its physical form or the medium in which it is represented...

, scholars in fields such as Semiotics

Semiotics

Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...

and Composition Studies

Composition studies

Composition Studies is the professional field of writing research and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States...

are now re-considering comics and graphic novels as complex texts deserving of serious scholarly study.

Theorizing comics

Although there have been the occasional investigation of comics as a valid art form, specifically in David Kunzle’s The Early Comic Strip; Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825, Gilbert Seldes

Gilbert Seldes

Gilbert Vivian Seldes was an American writer and cultural critic. He was editor and drama critic of The Dial. He also hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz....

’ The 7 Lively Arts and Martin Sheridan’s Classic Comics and Their Creators, contemporary anglophone Comics Studies in North America can be said to have burst onto the academic scene with both Will Eisner

Will Eisner

William Erwin "Will" Eisner was an American comics writer, artist and entrepreneur. He is considered one of the most important contributors to the development of the medium and is known for the cartooning studio he founded; for his highly influential series The Spirit; for his use of comics as an...

’s Comics and Sequential Art

Comics and Sequential Art

Comics and Sequential Art is a 1985 book by Will Eisner that provides an analytical overview of comics. It is based on a series of essays that appeared in The Spirit magazine, themselves based on Eisner's experience teaching a course in sequential art at the School of Visual Arts...

in 1985 and Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud

Scott McCloud is an American cartoonist and theorist on comics as a distinct literary and artistic medium...

’s Understanding Comics

Understanding Comics

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is a 215-page non-fiction comic book, written and drawn by Scott McCloud and originally published in 1993. It explores the definition of comics, the historical development of the medium, its fundamental vocabulary, and various ways in which these elements...

in 1993. Comics studies also can trace its roots back to the work of post-structuralist semioticians such as Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes

Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...

, particularly his Image—Music—Text.

Defining comics

There are many definitions of “comics.” Will Eisner defined comics simply as “sequential art.” Scott McCloud, using Eisner’s definition as a starting point, defines comics as “juxtaposed pictoral and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” Dylan Horrocks in his essay Inventing Comics, noticing how "hostile most cartoonists are to suggestions that comics are illustrated texts", criticized McCloud’s definition for his de-emphasizing of some elements on a continuum from word-only texts to picture-only texts, such as “cultural idiom”, a “publishing genre”, a “set of narrative conventions”, a “kind of writing that uses words and pictures”, a “literary genre” and as simply “texts.” He asks where on that spectrum should we draw the border between comics and illustrated texts? Both Dylan Horrocks and R.C Harvey challenge McCloud definition, confronting McCloud to consider other texts such as children’s books.

Composition studies

In the field of Composition Studies, an interest in comics and graphic novels is growing, partially due to the work of these comics theorists but also due to Composition Studies’ growing focus on multimodality and visual rhetoric

Visual rhetoric

Visual rhetoric is the fairly recent development of a theoretical framework describing how visual images communicate, as opposed to aural, verbal, or other messages. The study of visual rhetoric is different from that of visual or graphic design, in that it emphasizes images as sensory expressions...

. Composition studies theorists are looking at comics as sophisticated texts, and sites of complex literacy

Literacy

Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...

.

Gunther Kress

Gunther Kress

Gunther Kress is Professor of Semiotics and Education in the Department of Learning, Curriculum & Communication at the Institute of Education of the University of London.-External links:**...

defines multimodality as “the use of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event, together with the particular way in which these mode are combined” or, more simply as “any text whose meanings are realized through more than one semiotic code”. Kristie S. Fleckenstein sees the relationship between image and text as “mutually constitutive, mutually infused”—a relationship she names “imageword.” Fleckenstein sees “imageword” as offering “a double vision of writing-reading based on [the] fusion of image and word, a double vision of literacy”.
Dale Jacobs sees the reading of comics as a form of “multimodal literacy or multiliteracy, rather than as a debased form of print literacy”. According to Jacobs, comics can help educators to move “toward attending to multimodal literacies” that “shift our focus from print only to multiple modalities”. He encourages educators to embrace a pedagogy that will give students skills to effectively negotiate these multiple modalities.

Educational institutions

Comics studies is becoming increasingly more common at academic institutions across the world. Some notable examples include: University of Florida

University of Florida

The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...

, University of Toronto at Mississauga, and University of California Santa Cruz among others. Beside formal programs and degrees, it is common to see individual courses dedicated to comics and graphic novels in many educational institutions.

Publications

Scholarly publications dedicated to comics studies are growing both online and in print with more on the way. ImageTexT is a peer reviewed

Peer review

Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...

, open access journal

Open access journal

Open access journals are scholarly journals that are available online to the reader "without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself." Some are subsidized, and some require payment on behalf of the author.Subsidized journals...

that began in the spring of 2004 and is based at the University of Florida. There are many others in circulation, such as European Comic Art, Image and Narrative, and the International Journal of Comic Art.

Conferences

Although presentations dedicated to comics are commonplace at conferences in many fields, entire conferences dedicated to this subject are becoming more common. There have been conferences at Georgetown, Ohio State, Bowling Green State and there is a yearly conference at University of Florida. Additionally, there is an annual Michigan State University Comics Forum, which brings together academics and professionals working in the industry. The International Comics Arts Forum (ICAF), begun in 1995 at Georgetown University by Guy Spielmann and Tristan Fonlladosa, is an annual academic conference distinguished by its international focus and scholarly rigor http://www.internationalcomicartsforum.org/icaf/the-history-of-icaf.html. The German Gesellschaft für Comicforschung (ComFor - Society for Comics Studies) has organized yearly academic conferences since 2006.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Theorizing comics

Defining comics

Composition studies

Educational institutions

Publications

Conferences

See also

External links