Troubling the sequential image: The poetry comics of Bianca Stone

Abstract

Bianca Stone’s poetry comics often cast narrative and common panel transitions aside to centre the lyricism and playfulness of text and image, while retaining some ‘hallmarks’ of comics such as the speech bubble and pictorial sequence. Stone’s Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours is one of the few single-authored collections of poetry comics currently in print. In addition to her poetry comics, Stone has collaborated with poets to create illustrated texts. Notably, her collaboration with the poet and translator Anne Carson produced a new translation of Antigone (Antigonick), which moves beyond a strictly illustrated text without becoming a full-fledged graphic novel. Most recently, Stone ‘illustrated’ a Gertrude Stein poem to make a children’s book, A Little Called Pauline; she notes that this book would be challenging to read to children since images are a further abstraction of an already abstract text. Like much of Stone’s work, A Little Called Pauline defies a direct adaptation of the text. Despite all her work in the field, Stone’s comics remain largely unstudied. By examining three of her books, this article will illuminate Stone’s important, ongoing, role in the world of comics hybridity and rightfully place her in the rich history of dynamic creators who beg us to reimagine the comics medium and its definitions. To better understand her techniques, we consider her work using existing ideas about comics from a variety of creators and scholars. As we explored Stone’s work, we found that poetry comics is a rich genre, often opposing traditional definitions of comics, that could benefit from more study by comics scholars.