Beyond Illustration: Shaping Thought Through Comics

• In Event: Aesthetics and Analysis: Method in the Practice of Arts-Based Educational Research

Abstract

In its form and its content, my work in comics form asks what possibilities for discovery are we missing when we restrict ourselves to a single mode, specifically text-based? Susanne K. Langer (2009) suggests that due to its linear form, language falls short in conveying feelings and emotions, and thus discursive forms are seen as intelligent, while other modes are dismissed, labeled irrational (p. 143) and relegated only to conveying the aesthetic. Through a dissertation written and drawn entirely in comic book form, I seek to pose a challenge to the very forms conducting and representing research can take. In the process of exploring this larger goal, I also need to demonstrate that comics – much maligned for much of their history – are indeed a legitimate means for conducting scholarly research. To this end, I see it as imperative to take an “amphibious” approach – that is not image illustrating text, but fully integrating visual alongside verbal. By making full use of the range of capacities for expression unique to comics, I gain access to means for understanding beyond what I can otherwise reach through more traditional means. Comics to me, resonate with what Wallace Stevens wrote of poems, “‘not ideas about the thing but the thing itself,’ part of the world and not about it.” More recently, I was prompted by Donald’s question in response to an ABER panel I participated in to articulate this concisely as “aesthetics equals analysis.” There is no separation between my aesthetic concerns and analytic investigations. Image isn’t auxiliary to my more “serious” work but an equal partner in making meaning. The work emerges from a conversation between the two in which each equally informs the other. And what is produced is something whole – “the thing itself.”

Beyond the obvious visual difference between text-only and work done in image-text form, it is also important to note how content unfolds in distinct fashion respective to each form. What follows in a sequence of text often takes an altogether different route when taking spatial composition into consideration. In fact, this attention to form as being inseparable from content, facilitates new connections and often leads to unanticipated conclusions in the work altogether. The flow and shape of this work that integrates theory and practice in a single form resembles its theory-only relative only in passing. Sparked by an initial question, it is in paying heed to the dynamic feedback cycle between form and content that my work finds its ultimate expression. Making the work teaches me where I need to go and its visual form is never a secondary pursuit. In this joining of aesthetics and analysis, I feel we can create spaces from which to generate new possibilities for understanding.

Examples of this work can be found at www.spinweaveandcut.com
Nick Sousanis, doctoral candidate, Teachers College, Columbia University

Reference

Langer, S.K. (2009, 1962). Philosophical sketches. New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc.

Author

• Nick Sousanis, University of Calgary