Reading comics for the field of International Relations: Theory, method and the Bosnian War
Introducing comics Definitions and distinctions
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| Introducing comics Definitions and distinctions There is general agreement within comics scholarship that what defines comics as a medium is the use of both text and drawn images and that there has to be more than one of the latter the freestanding editorial cartoon is thus not a comic. There are examples of works recognized as comics that rely exclusively on visuals except fora title or caption, and while drawing is the main form of expression, photographs are occasionally incorporated. The format comics are published within include the comics magazines in the American tradition of Superman and Spiderman and the European album like Tintin and Asterix. Comics also come in the form of newspaper strips and stories brought by magazines like Harper’s (Sacco, 2012). They have appeared within regular books (see, e.g., Hedges and Sacco, 2012; Turnipseed, 2003), and moving beyond paper, comics Hansen 585 drawn in a digital format are now recognized as having distinct features (Eisner, 2008: 167–172). In terms of audience, comics have a history of being primarily intended for children and adolescents, but there are also genres that explicitly address adults, including war comics, pornography and, more recently, graphic novels and memoirs. Two main theoretical approaches dominate the study of comics the semiotic and the cultural-sociological. Each is concerned with different aspects of comics, namely, the way comics operate as a distinct sign-system and the social, economic and cultural relations within which they are produced and consumed. Based in the semiotic tradition, Groensteen (2007: 18) defines comics as interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the double characteristic of being separated … and which are plastically and semantically over-determined by the fact of their coexistence in praesentia’. Groensteen further adds that there has to be horizontally as well as vertically arranged images. Comics are composed primarily by drawn images, and the technical unit, market and aesthetic reference for the comic is the page (Groensteen, 2007: 20). In principle, a comic can be as short as one page if it has horizontally and vertically aligned sequential images. Coming from a cultural-sociological perspective, Gabilliet (2010: xvi) suggests expanding this definition to include all narratives that are characterized by the possibility of interaction between the visual and the textual, where the visual does not function simply as adjuvant to the written but rather as an indispensable component to the formulation of the narrative. This expansion allows, for example, for the inclusion of the comic strip that only features horizontal alignment when first published. This is the format of many newspaper comics, such as Doonesbury and Peanuts, and as Gabilliet’s detailed historical analysis of American comics shows, such strips have played an important role in the genesis of the comics magazine (Gabilliet, Comics have distinct cultural-sociological histories and semiotic traits that set them aside from other cultural media and fields of study already engaged by IR scholars, including literature, film, television and photography. There are three distinctive ways in which comics communicate. First, drawing is the primary form of expression for comics, which sets them apart from photography and film. Photography makes an imprint of something that existed, whereas comics operate through drawings that are always a mediation of the real, even when cast in a realistic style. Comics artists have the possibility of drawing imagined places and scenes, and leaving questions of what is legally permitted aside, the only limitation on representation is thus comics artists imagination. In contrast to cinema, where staging is budget-dependent, the setting of comics is in principle cost-neutral. The ability of comics to inspire movies, for example, in the science fiction genre, is thus well known Second, comics include both images and text, yet do not prioritize between the two, something that differentiates them from both novels and from illustrated stories, where drawings are secondary to the text. As will be laid out in more detail in the following, text in comics is itself visual. Third, comics consist of multiple images with a particular sequentiality. This sets them aside from photographs, which can operate in singularity. Both comics and film (cinematic and television) involve multiple images, but their sequentiality differs. Comics consist of freestanding images arranged in a horizontal and usually also in a vertical sequence. Even when comics move slowly, with detail and continuity from image to image, they lack the illusionist power of the filmic’ and their connections, far from producing a continuity that mimics reality, 586 European Journal of International Relations 23(3) offer the reader a story that is full of holes, which appear as gaps in the meaning (Groensteen, 2007: 10). These gaps have significance for the way that comics can articulate political discourse. Download 1.29 Mb. Share with your friends:
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