Comix exist between visual art and literature, creating narrative through both image and text. However, looking closely at scholarship and comix themselves it is clear this relationship is not always equal. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel drives its narrative forward through allusions and comparisons to high modernist texts, reinforcing its relationship to literature. In Here, Richard MacGuire focuses on the visual, portraying the same perspective of a single room across millennia. Critic Douglas Wolk believes L’Ascension du haut mal by David B. did not become popular in the US because of the level of emotional development in the visual design. Clearly the interaction of word and image is enacted in a variety of ways.
More striking is the way preferences for art or literature play out in the scholarship and proto-canonization of comix in the academy. Bart Beaty aligns comix with visual art, while other English-speaking critics tend to define the medium in terms of books, such as the edited collection The Language of Comics: Word and Image. Beaty is strongly influenced by Franco-Belgian criticism, which suggests that the differing cultural expectations of and reactions to comix might be considered in terms of the culture’s relation to art and literature. However, we cannot discount the idea that the desire to compare comix to another medium is motivated by placing comix in a more easily understood context. This is what Laurence Grove does in Comics in French: The European Bande Dessinee in Context, by considering both cinema and the novel as cousins of the French BD. This paper asks if this contextualizing is the most productive way to understand comix, or if the development of theories unique to comix, such as those of Thierry Groensteen and Benoit Peeters, will best help us in parsing their meanings and techniques.
About the presenterCatherine Ann Winters-Michaud
Catherine Winters-Michaud earned her Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island in May 2020. Her dissertation, “The Mark of the Vanishing Reading: Interdiegetic Interaction in Multimodal Narrative,” argues that, though books and literature are changing, these changes focus on what needs books can fulfill, and that the reader is not an endangered species, threatened by changes in the media landscape, but is evolving and chooses to read print books when those books best fulfill their needs. Her research focuses on multimodal contemporary American literature and includes novels, comics, and other narrative literature. Catherine received her MA from Simmons College in Boston.