Woock, Elizabeth Allyn. Medieval Spaces in Comics: Affect and Ideology. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-66493-9.
Analyzing historic space in comics positions the reader at the crossroads between aesthetics, poetics, ideology, and politics. Rather than a dive into literary criticism, this book attempts to clarify the production of space in the comics format and offer an interpretation of what that medieval space means for the contemporary reader, especially as these comics to mediate an understanding of history from the classroom to the comics con. This book’s five different explorations into space will interest medievalists, comics studies scholars, political scientists, teachers, and folks who work on affect, space, and poetics.
On a technical note, 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.
What excites me most about this book, personally, is the attempt to engage with comics studies in comics format, through the illustrated methods and conclusions sections (sample below). The attempt to incorporate an argumentative research comics directly into a classical academic monograph is a powerful tool in my communication toolbox, and a process which I hope to improve and expand on more in the future.
You can access the book on the Springer Nature website now (the copyright says 2025 but the book is available at the end of 2024). The book (digital or hardback, paperback coming soon) can be purchased through the publisher’s website, on Amazon, or through your favorite book retailer. You can email me directly at elizabethallyn . woock (at) upol . cz if you would like a digital copy for review. Over 30 pages are previewed in Google Books.
