Starting in 2026, I will helm the Narrative Space in Comics and Graphic Novels basic research project, a three-year Standard Project funded by the Czech Science Foundation (GACR). I am very happy to have an opportunity to collaborate with the amazing Geraint D’Arcy (University of East Anglia), who has kindly agreed to share his expertise in film, theater, and comics-based research. In a nutshell, the Narrative Space in Comics and Graphic Novels project has an ambitious goal to co-author a comprehensive overview of the state of the art (and predictions of future developments) of how space is staged, understood, and co-created. Here’s the formal abstract:
While both fans and scholars are accustomed to approaching characters and story with a critical eye, this book proposes both methods and reasons to look at the space – background, setting, frames, and reader space – of comics to better grasp the narrative. More than just a decorative background, this project argues that space plays an essential narrative role and communicates an epistemological stance in comic books. Comics Studies as a field has focused on examining the history of the format, creating narratological analyses of the fictional storytelling, describing the physical nature of comics production and the realities of the comics industry, and incorporating cultural studies or film studies theories into the study of comics and graphic novels, but these have been insufficient regarding narrative space. This project uses comic-based research methodology, phenomenological analysis of space, and narratology to study graphic spaces in comic books and their role in narrative, arguing for a new theoretical framework which is unique to the comics format.
Project goals: Narrative space is a key affordance of the comics format, but it has too long been reduced to discussions of storyworld or dismissed as mere artistic decoration; the focus has been on traditional, text-centric narratological concepts of space. This project aims to resolve the inadequacy of text- focused narratological approaches to comics by building interdisciplinary, comics-centered theoretical frameworks for analyzing graphic narrative space in comics. Towards this goal to rewrite the field’s understanding of narrative space in this literary format, this project seeks to:
- map epistemic variance in narrative space to include previously ignored indigenous and non-Western comics,
- standardize the approach to heteroglossia and polyphony in the production of narrative space,
- establish the role of visual space in layering narrative time in comics,
- and addressing narrative space in the new materiality of digital comics and AI generated comics.
The innovations of this three-year project will prepare theoretical frameworks for Comics Studies, Media Studies, and Literary Studies to address narrative space in contemporary phenomena such as memes, webtoons, virtual reality augmented and interactive comics, and AI-generated (synthetic) comics.
We will collect our findings into a comprehensive monograph – hopefully with a catchy title, just give us some time to think of one! – at the end of the project cycle.