Reading Comics Through The Body

Embodiment and Materiality in the Making and Reading of Comics
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-3-032-06873-6
Verlag: Springer

Buch, Englisch, 252 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 630 g

Reihe: Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

This book is about what happens to comics theory when we privilege the relationship between materiality and the body in the analysis of comics. Focusing on how these factors relate to making, technological reproduction and the experience of reading comics, it aims to establish a new theoretical model for comics studies.
Through a close consideration of how technologies of reproduction translate material and embodied traces into the surface of comics, the book argues that tactile and haptic encounters with these surfaces can organise the narrative structure of comics and affect the experience of reading them. The book aims to establish that comics can be thought of as networked sites of embodied encounter in which embodied responses become a register of meaning.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brookes, Gareth

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Semiotik
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Kommunikationswissenschaften
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Populärkultur
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction.- 2. Practice Overview.- Part I.- 3. Material and the Body.- 4. Time and Touch.- 5. The Performance of Reading.- Part II.- 6. The Role of the Haptic and Indexical in Iconic Solidarity and Braiding.- 7. The Indexical in Visual Metaphor - A Critique of Elisabeth El Refaie's System for Analysing Metaphor.- 8. Reconsidering Metalepsis in Comics - Theorising the Relationship Between Storyworld and the Drawn Trace.- 9. Close Reading- Materiality and Embodied Trace in Superhero, Manga and Children's Comics.- 10. Conclusion.

Über Autor(innen)

Gareth Brookes is a graphic novelist, comics scholar and lecturer in Illustration Animation at Kingston University, UK. He has published four graphic novels, one of which, (2013, Myriad Editions), was included in the Sélection Officielle 2018 45e Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême. He has contributed scholarship to the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and Studies in Comics. In 2025 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford University.