{"title":"Contemplating Covid through Understanding Comics: Conveying Meaning with Panel Transitions in Covid-themed Comics","authors":"Antonija Cavcic","doi":"10.1353/ink.2022.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ink.2022.0030","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:During the dreary initial lockdown in 2020, illustrators and instructors at the Arts Students League in New York put out an open call for submissions for a comics anthology as they could see the toll the quarantine and pandemic were having on their students. What started out as an invitation to artists to share their personal pandemic experiences through comics, This Quarantine Life (2020) soon became both a platform for seventy-six artists-in-quarantine from all over the world to showcase their work and a means of catharsis through comics. Within these single-page submissions were complex yet compact graphic narratives, which relied on careful and efficient manipulation of panel conventions. This article discusses the findings of an analysis of the use of panel conventions in This Quarantine Life. In doing so, I illustrate how among all of Scott McCloud's panel transitions, non-sequitur and aspect-to-aspect panel transitions can effectively convey complex emotions and meaning even within rigid space restrictions. Furthermore, I argue that the relative prevalence of these panel transitions in the anthology reflects a kind of fragile, fractured, yet highly contemplative frame of mind that many were in during periods of isolation and uncertainty in the early stages of the pandemic.","PeriodicalId":392545,"journal":{"name":"Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125449047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Weirder than That\": Understanding Comics at Thirty","authors":"Hillary L. Chute","doi":"10.1353/ink.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ink.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay suggests a reevaluation of the famous schematics of Understanding Comics, arguing that the book, known for its definitions, is as invested in the \"weirdness\" and mystery of comics as it is in treating comics scientifically. It locates a productive investment in weirdness in McCloud's treatment of time in comics, and lauds his own flexible visual style as well as his attention to style in others' work.","PeriodicalId":392545,"journal":{"name":"Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122682630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Alchemy and Control","authors":"Caitlin Cass","doi":"10.1353/ink.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ink.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Understanding Comics excels at establishing a vocabulary to discuss comics, but McCloud's forceful language misses the mark in the chapter about process. McCloud's \"six steps\" of the artistic path are overly prescriptive. His depiction of this \"innate\" path deemphasizes improvisation and uncertainty, which Charles Schulz and Lynda Barry describe as foundational in their creative processes.","PeriodicalId":392545,"journal":{"name":"Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124216259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What We Do in the Gutters: Or, If Not Transitions, What?","authors":"Paul Fisher Davies","doi":"10.1353/ink.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ink.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:McCloud's transitions model of making sense of comics was inspirational in Understanding Comics, giving shape to comics' \"invisible art\" and co-opting an interest in gaps of the sort used in reception theory to lend comics a creative, engaged literariness that had previously been disregarded. However, the categories of transitions have been subject to some questioning—from the expansion offered by Abel and Madden, through the challenge of abstraction (Molotiu and Groensteen) and the difficulty of applying the model consistently to actual texts, though many have tried, including the What Were Comics? project. What can we do instead of transitions? What other categories might be proposed, and what general principles might we follow in suggesting how comics might use sequence and strategies other than what is drawn in the panels, and what lies between? This article outlines the ways in which comics theorists in the wake of McCloud have built upon and offered alternatives to his groundbreaking transitions model of meaning-making in comics.","PeriodicalId":392545,"journal":{"name":"Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121668982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Understanding McCloud: (En)Countering Closure in the Context of Trauma","authors":"Harriet Hustis","doi":"10.1353/ink.2022.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ink.2022.0032","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:As Professor of English and Director of the Honors & Scholars Program at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), I have twice selected Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) as a foundational text in my upper-level, undergraduate seminars on Storytelling & Graphic Narrative. In particular, I have found that it is essential to teach students—and particularly English majors specializing in literary analysis—to resist McCloud's assertion that reading comics is often, if not always, about formulating a sense of \"closure.\"","PeriodicalId":392545,"journal":{"name":"Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126476781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Image over Text: \"Visual Emphasis\" and Understanding Comics","authors":"Ken Parille","doi":"10.1353/ink.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ink.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Beginning with its definition of comics, McCloud's Understanding Comics focuses on the medium's visual nature. Though the book offers a brief taxonomy of the word–picture relationship within panels, its emphasis on the image leads McCloud to overlook important ways that text can function on a comics page. Some of the book's most influential ideas, especially its theories of closure, panel transitions, and reader–character identification, are constrained, and at times undermined, by their visual emphasis. This essay argues that paying greater attention to text productively complicates McCloud's theories and expands our ideas about the comics reading process.","PeriodicalId":392545,"journal":{"name":"Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115578978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unaframed: A Short Visual Essay","authors":"M. d'Alessandro","doi":"10.1353/ink.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ink.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In the wake of comics studies, many scholars have been digging and delving into the medium’s multifarious facets. Whether by assessing an origin, explaining the grammar, tracing its cultural relevance, or exploring any other molecular aspect, researchers found themselves with a basket full of microsemiotics: dead bits of a dissected language – is comics a language? This is debated too! (Cohn 2012, 2020). My argument is that comics are an amphibious entity, always living in-between categories: images and words, time and space, sequential and simultaneous, seriality and novels (and more). This fact assesses the need of a transdisciplinary (e.g., Barbieri 1991, Pintor 2017, Di Paola 2019), or multimodal approach to the subject. McCloud’s legacy, as per Understanding Comics, is that comics are first and foremost a flexible, complex, and open language. This was well understood by Nick Sousanis in his Unflattening (2015): a visual essay exploring the relationship between images and words. Entwining both worlds in a visual dance that embraces complexity, Sousanis allows richness to emerge: the more vantage points, the deeper the understanding. Drawing from semiotics, cognition, media studies and my own experience as a comics creator, in this hybrid essay I discuss the necessary transdisciplinary lenses that this elusive amphibian needs to be seen. From above.","PeriodicalId":392545,"journal":{"name":"Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123744501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Three Ideas","authors":"K. Polak","doi":"10.1353/ink.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ink.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This two-page comic explores the nexus I found between Scott McCloud’s concepts of closure and iconicity. These concepts have had an immense impact on both my scholarship and my creative work, and my short comic links how they create a more complicated understanding of both sympathy and empathy in a hybridized form. I always found the gutter a compelling site of inquiry, as it metaphorically represents both the collaborative space McCloud propounds and also an epistemological crisis—the gutter is a space of not-knowing, and so is only knowable through a projection which may not bear any relation to the intention of the artist and writer. Furthermore, with whom we are prompted to—and choose—to identify with often prompts a moral crisis. We are as likely to see our reflection in the face of a murderer as a saint in comics, and McCloud’s discussion of iconicity suggests that this creates a more morally complex universe in comics than initially appears.","PeriodicalId":392545,"journal":{"name":"Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124363366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Someone Else's Icon: Complicating Comics and Identification","authors":"Misha Grifka Wander","doi":"10.1353/ink.2022.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ink.2022.0029","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Scott McCloud's conception of iconicity has gone a long way toward explaining the power of simplified comic art. He argues that simplified images help readers see themselves in the characters, because they are broad enough representations of people to cover a broad span of humanity. Therefore, readers' investment isn't only emotional investment, but self-identification. However, while this concept explains much of comic art, there are notable exceptions. Artists choose which features to preserve when simplifying the appearance of a character. In McCloud's example, the icon retains the features which the broadest range of people might relate to—two eyes, a simple mouth, dark hair. But not all simplified art does this. For instance, comic characters with unrealistically large breasts have them not as a way to encourage iden-tification, but to encourage objectif cation. They are there not to represent women as people, but the concept of female sex objects. Iconicity also goes astray when racial signifiers are brought into play—the perennial argument about whether manga characters are white or Japanese is a result of this. In this essay, I will complicate McCloud's ideas about iconicity, arguing that while the core idea holds, there are critical flaws that should be re-examined.","PeriodicalId":392545,"journal":{"name":"Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128912885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reader Participation in Comics (Through Walking my Dog)","authors":"Christopher Malone","doi":"10.1353/ink.2022.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ink.2022.0031","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This comic essay compares how Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud and Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers by Marcos Mateu-Mestre approach the concept of audience participation in comics. It summarizes how both books engage audiences, and by using a visual storytelling method that invites the audience to follow along, it demonstrates through the comic itself how visual composition causes the reader to become a willing participant in the story being told. It concludes by testing what happens when these methods aren't used, and validates how the approach by Framed Ink creates a more satisfying experience for the reader.","PeriodicalId":392545,"journal":{"name":"Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130455533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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