Abstract: Few works have been adapted to comics as frequently as the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. This research comic, illustrated fluidly in the styles of the comics being examined, proposes to focus on the function of mirroring (Carroll 1990) complicated within Lim’s framework (2007) for analysing intersemiosis in a multimodal text throughout a range of adaptations of Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” (1893). Featured in over forty comic book adaptations, this comic will consider adaptations from 1944 to 1974, and will reflect on the earlier illustrations of “The Black Cat” by Aubrey Beardsley (1895-96) and Harry Clarke (1919). Mirroring plays a different role in the composition of a horror comic than it does in film, and this is reflected in the page layout, the visual composition which communicates mirroring, and the multimodal reading of mirroring. While mirroring initially acts as an amplifier to the reveal of the wife’s body in final illustration, mirroring expands to other parts of the narration as the emphasis shifts to the horror of the character’s unhealthy psychological state (the murder of the wife being only a secondary focal point of this), and as the mode of horror shifts to accommodate the fears and anxiety of the time, mirroring, through the choices in adapting “The Black Cat”, provides a tidy case study of the history of horror comics as the adaptations move through late nineteenth century moral anxieties, to the era of psychoanalysis, to the emotive, atmospheric gore of 1970s horror comics.
Abstract: Comics, Culture, and Religion: Faith Imagined (edited by Kees de Groot, 2024), and Christianity and Comics: Stories We Tell about Heaven and Hell (Blair Davis, 2024) offer two approaches to innovating the study of religion, readerships, culture, and comics. While Davis creates a well-anchored overview of religious content in comics from the 1940s onwards, de Groot’s anthology opens the door to sociological and ethnographic interpretations of this line of inquiry. While both are strong separately, they each offer frameworks which can fill the other’s gaps when read together.
Abstract: In Céline Keller’s Who is Afraid of Degrowth?, the publicly accessible debate on degrowth is curated and restaged in a comic format. Keller’s illustrations not only visualize the conversations as they happen across a range of platforms—from snappy, heated retorts on “X,” to long scholarly treatises, memes, and infographics floating around the web—but contextualizes them within the network of references and influences. Moreover, drawing on Victor Fei Lim’s framework for multimodal discourse analysis, Keller’s own stance within the debate becomes clear through the illustrations and her staging of the mise en scene and the mise en page (to apply Geraint D’Arcy’s terms, 2020). This review examines how Keller not only indexes the argument for and against debate, but inserts her own arguments through the visual plane, showing how Who is Afraid of Degrowth? imagines an alternative to the current patterns of public discourse.
Abstract: This book proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing and discussing narrative space in comics. Building on Mieke Bal’s phenomenological approach to cultural analysis (2002), Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1996), and Geraint D’Arcy’s use of the mise en scène to describe space in the comics format (2020), this book layers in a nuanced approach to the depiction of medieval environments through affect theory and poetics to interrogate the staging of ideas which are associated with the medieval period. Considering the action, setting, and story – as well as affect, atmosphere, and mood – medieval space is contextualized as an ethically complex poetic image. This book also explores the communicative possibilities of the comics format, and seeks to show rather than just tell the methodologies of space in comics-based research through illustrating key sections of the text.
Abstract: When adapting a classic, foreign text to a comic-book format,1 a multimodal translation takes place, which is further complicated by the influence of transcultural borrowing in the creation of a graphic plane to depict the text. An adaptation of Franz Kafka’s unfinished 1926 novel The Castle, with its ambiguous visual descriptions and even more ambiguous implications, introduces additional layers of complexity to the transcultural interpretation of the text as a globally acclaimed narrative that is known differently around the world. In the case of comic-book adaptations of The Castle, these graphics use medievalisms generated both from the translated text and through the artists’ own invention. The choices made in the English translation of the text create a historicizing lens which is spread to previously non-medievalist elements in the adaptations, creating new interpretations of the original text.
Abstract: As comics-based research (CBR) gains wider use, methodological and practical guides have been developed to aid scholars in the creation of research comics. Similar support has not yet appeared for the other key element of scholarly publication: peer review. This article aims to build on the current best practices of CBR methodology to outline an easy-to-use tool which can bridge the gap between research comics and the non-CBR specialists who are called upon to evaluate them. While a peer reviewer may possess the expertise to evaluate the scientific validity of the research claims or results communicated logocentrically, they may feel unprepared to opine on the equally important visual plane due to the perceived subjectivity of graphics as pure art. The Form that Functions Rubric for Research Comics proposed in this article offers clear steps to move through the visual plane, neutral terminology to verbalize essential features of the visual plane, and several examples of the application of this rubric on existing research comics. By empowering reviewers and readers to approach the visual plane as a component of the scholarly argument rather than an aesthetic flourish, the peer review process of research comics can become more ethical and rigorous.
Abstract: This research comic explores the “authenticity strategy” of comics journalists’ embodiment as a character within their own reporting and the often co-occurring authenticity strategy of visual realism to emphasize the “truthiness” of the journalist’s account. Examining the journalistic comics of Joe Sacco, George Butler, and Olivier Kugler, among others, this study identifies some of the reasons legitimating the practice of including an embodied journalist. We suggest that these strategies are primarily influenced by expectations of storytelling in comics format and the visual rhetoric of the genre. The concepts of visual authenticity in comics are drawn from Elisabeth El Rafaie (2012) and Wibke Weber and Hans-Martin Rall’s study of visual strategies in reporting in comics journalism (2017; also Weber 2020). We place these strategies into the context of fictionality and storytelling, through Mari Hatavara and Jarmila Mildorf’s framework of fictionality and vicarious storytelling (2017), understood as storytelling in the comics format through the work of Jan Baetens (2018). This research comic concludes with a reflection on working strategies which can use the reporter-character in comics journalism to add transparency about the journalistic process and the constructed nature of reporting and publishing. We consider the verbal/audio approach to recording and reporting presented by CREADOC, the documentary school in Angoulême, France, and its possible application to comics journalism
“The Graphic ‘I’ in Research Comics,” INKS The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, Vol 7 No. 2 (2023): 150–167.
Abstract: As academic comics become more common in journals and more researchers are sharing methodologies for the production of academic comics, the appearance of the researcher’s avatar in the illustrated article has become an accepted part of the practice. These comics show the researcher as an author, an illustrator, and even a narrative character in a graphic narrative. The practice of illustrating comics-based research has not yet codified how to transmediate academic writing norms into sequential art, or what best practice to apply in embodying the researcher on the page. Through a survey of recently published guides to creating academic comics and research comics, this study proposes several reasons for intentionally including the embodied researcher and suggests conditions when the embodied researcher might best be excluded.
Abstract: This comic is the result of a practice-based approach to comics studies and comics-based research methodology. The aim was to explore the dynamics which occur when the author is visualized, or ’embodied,’ on the graphic plane in a non-fiction or essayistic comic. The comic considers the use of the embodied author in data visualization, citation, form that functions, and possible interpretations by the reader. The results of this exploration are expanded to a full study in the essay “The Graphic ‘I’ in Research Comics” in this volume.
Abstract: The current versions of Red Sonja offer a dynamic lens through which to examine how female comic fans today negotiate presence in public spaces through the act of cosplay. The contemporary cosplayer of Red Sonja, or a medievalist barbarian clad in an armored bikini, presents confidence that the display of the female body no longer needs to be censored, nor to women need to be protected from sexual exploitation, that femininity is a natural asset to be capitalized on, and that the subject of the image is also the empowered artist responsible for the creation of the image. While “earlier feminist demands for equal rights, collective activism, and the eradication of gender inequality are taken into account and then displaced by the postfeminist ideals of individualism, choice, and empowerment,” these larger trends can be seen even in comics fandom. There are other popular choices of female warriors exist, but the portrayal of Red Sonja, specifically in her chainmaille bikini, still holds substantial value within the fandom, thanks to, and not in spite, of the medievalism of the design and the potentially post-feminist cosplay of the character.
Abstract: This article in comics form looks at an under-investigated phenomenon of nun characters appearing in contemporary comics as a unified trope. Appearing with a strong degree of uniformity, these stock characters share a unique costume, weaponry, repeated storylines, and most importantly, are couched in medievalism. To explain the development of these characteristics, which can seem wholly contemporary, the comic looks back at the textual and visual representation of nun and religious female characters —such as saints— from their early medieval origins, through their visual recodification in the Victorian era, up to applications of the nun character in the twentieth century. Examining this issue from different perspectives, this article argues that despite the presence of nuns in the contemporary world, the stock character in comics is dependent on some degree of medievalization, and maps these characteristics as they evolved over time, finding that, thanks to the medievalization itself, nun stock characters present a unique model of superheroine in comics.
OLDER PUBLICATIONS:
“Permission for Brutality.” Antae Journal Vol. 7 No. 1 (2020): 56–71.
“Antimendicancy in Central Europe and bishop Robert of Olomouc in historiography.” Mediaevalia Historica Bohemica Vol. 18 No. 2. (2015): 69–93.
“Nuns Having Fun: Popular Graphic Representations of a Historical Issue,” In Where Is History Today? New Ways of Representing the Past. Eds Ian Christie and Marcel Arbeit, (Palacky University Press, 2015).
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS:
(Taking a break from conferences in 2025 in order to focus on grant writing.)
Possessing and staging the comics world. 2024. Conference Paper. Framing the Unreal: Exploring Graphic/Visual Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ca’ Foscari University and the International Comparative Literature Association Standing Research Committee on Comics Studies & Graphic Narrative. Venice, Italy. 11-15.11.2024
Soundscapes that flash forward, flash back. 2024. Conference Paper. The Fifteenth Annual International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference: Comics and Technologies. University of East Anglia. Norwich, UK. 10-12.07.2024
Considering the Publication Cycle of Research Comics. 2024. Conference Paper. Third International Conference of Scuola Democratica. Cagliari, Italy. 03.–06.06.2024.
Saving the Day at Kalamazoo: Finding Comics for Medievalist Research and Teaching. Workshop. 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies. Kalamazoo, USA. 09.–11.05.2024.
Better Teaching through Comics. 2023. Conference Paper. Better Living Through Comics The 2023 Joint Conference of the International Graphic Novel & Comics and the International Bande Dessinée Society. Cambridge, UK. 03.–07.07.2023
Peer review for research comics. 2023. 9th Ethnography and Qualitative Research Conference. Trento, Italy. 07.–10.06. 2023.
Covens, Convents, and Medievalist Girl Gangs. 2023. Conference Paper. Nextcomic festival 2023 “Fr / Enemy mine – Enmity and Friendship in comics,” Linz, Austria, 10.–13.03.2023.
Medieval warfare as aesthetic hyperobject in comics. 2023. Conference Paper. Historiographics: Framing the Past in Comics International Conference, Americahaus, Munich, Germany, 15.–17.06.2023.
The Bikini that Wouldn’t Die. 2023. Conference Paper. Comics Forum 2023: Reboots & Remediations, Leeds Central Library, UK, 09.–10.11.2023.
The Planet of Knights on Shining Space Dragons. 2023. Conference Paper. The Medieval in Cyberspace, Kent State University at Trumbull, Ohio, USA, 26.–2810.2023.
Fabricated Historicity in Graphic Appropriations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Classics. 2022. Conference Paper. 53rd Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA, 10.–13.03.2022.
What Hides Behind Authenticity in Medievalist Comics. 2022. Conference Paper. International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference, Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Ireland, 29.06–01.07.2022.
Medievalist Built Spaces in Sequential Art. 2021. Conference Paper. Medievalism Today: 36th Annual Conference on Medievalism, Delta College, Michigan, USA, 04.–06.11.2021.
Race War and Weapons of Mass Destruction: How Monstress Imagines a Post-apocalyptic Dark Ages. 2021. Conference Paper. Conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 11.–14.11.2021
The Graphic ‘I’ in Academic Comics. 2021. Conference Paper. Comfor Annual Conference 2021: “Coherence In Comics,” Universität Salzburg, Austria, 14.–16.10.2021.
Nuns, Witches, Wenches and the Medievalist World. 2019. Conference Paper. Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels, Comics and Bande Dessineés, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK, 24.–28.06.2019.
Propaganda repeats itself: Medievalism in Alt-right comics. 2019. Conference Paper. Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels, Comics and Bande Dessineés, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland, 16.-–18.07.2019.
History As The Cloak Of Subversion – A Transnational, Transgenerational Conversation. 2018. Conference Paper. Retro! Time, Memory, Nostalgia: The Ninth International Graphic Novel And Comics Conference. Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, UK. 27.–29.06.2018.
Medievalism Made Me Do It: The Feedback Loop of Brutality in Comics. 2018. Conference Paper. EUPOP, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic 24.–26.07.2018.
The Transmission of Medievalism in American and Czech Underground Comics. 2017. Conference Paper. 28th Annual Conference on American Literature, Boston, MA, USA 25.–28.05.2017.