Comics-Based Research: Affordances and Process, a Workshop

• In Event: 52.057 - How to Draw Comics the Scholarly Way

Abstract

Just as comics entered the academy as literature and literacy aid over the last decade, they are now increasingly being recognized and utilized to present and conduct scholarly research. While the interest is there, few academics have much experience with comics. Led by an experienced practitioner of comics-based research, this workshop will provide an insider’s view into the affordances comics offer researchers emphasizing both discussion and practical exercises in which researchers can employ comics in their own work.
A brief rundown of affordances comics provide that we will explore:
• Unification of word and image – the comics form offers creators the ability to move between words and pictures as it suits narrative needs. This is a useful tool for scholars exploring other sorts of relationships—for example, that between the theoretical and the concrete, the official story and the counterstory, or the objective and subjective.
• Multimodality – comics makers have access to a wider array of modes of communication (e.g., image, color) than text alone, each offering additional semiotic resources (Kress, 2009).
• Facility with narrative and processes (Abbott, 1986) – comics lend themselves to the elicitation, creation, and communication of research narratives, making CBR particularly useful for narrative approaches to research, like oral history.
• Sequential art – Scott McCloud defined comics as a sequential art, where panels are experienced sequentially with the action happening in the gaps or “gutters” between panels (McCloud, 1993, p. 66). The reader thus actively makes meaning and, unlike film, controls the pace. Moreover, this time between panels can be an instant or millions of years. For scholars, such a flexible tool allows for exploring the world on vastly different scales.
• Simultaneity – even as individual panels are “read” in sequence, they are also taken in all at once (withheld, 2015a). Groensteen (2007) suggests that meaning in comics is “braided” together (p. 146) in all directions across the page much like a network, allowing for reading possibilities that stray from the sequential hierarchy of text. The interplay of sequential and simultaneous modes offers researchers nonlinear, tangential, and multilayered possibilities for conveying complex information.
• Expression of style – style affords researchers an opportunity to explore and communicate their subjectivity. Through drawings particularly, the researcher’s presence is felt on the page.
The theoretical discussion will be accompanied by a walk through of the presenter’s own process – specifically the use of textual and visual metaphors to convey philosophical and scientific concepts. This work doesn’t begin with a written script to later add pictures to, but rather is generated in the sketching; drawing serves as a tool to extend the presenter’s thinking and uncover new connections. Even as drawings are made in response to research, the research journey is in turn driven by the demands of the drawings. This exploration of process will set up the hands-on exercises to quickly get participants thinking in comics.

Author

• Nick Sousanis, San Francisco State University