While the coexistence of images and text towards a shared purpose is now an established part of our digital landscape, often in conjunction with animation, interaction and sound, scholarly forms are still dominated by the textual. But meaningful juxtapositions of media as sequential art offer an opportunity for scholarly reflection, as works such as Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland and Robert Berry’s Ulysses Seen remind us. Often, the comic form is still associated with simplicity or beginners. Series of graphic scholarship spawn titles like McLuhan for Beginners that suggest comics are only a tool for transitioning to “real” monographs. But of course, McLuhan himself used experimental forms in his scholarship: The Medium is the Massage has more in common with graphic novels than it does with his text-heavier volumes. Taking the graphic novel as a scholarly text and transforming it into digital can make things even more interesting. The digital editions of graphic novels, including the CD version (with animations, billed as “interactive literature”) of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, the many layers of Art Spiegelman’s Meta Maus, and the work of Scott McCloud in his Understanding Comics trilogy add another dimension to the form. Comic books evolving online are already texts of study for the digitally-minded humanities, but can they also offer inspiration for rethinking our own forms of communication?
Contents
“Introduction,” A Salter and R Whitson
“Comics and Materiality,” A Kashtan
“Graphic Images of YHWH: Exploring the Bounds of Sexual Objectification in Ezekiel 16,” BJ Parker
“Digital Collaborative Scholarship Through Comics,” G Kannenberg and R Berry
“Comic Books Unbound,” F Howes
“Lecture and Authority in Educational Comics: Introducing Foucault and Derrida For Beginners,” A Humphrey
“Is this a Comic?” J Helms
“Behind the Scenes of the First Comics Dissertation,” N Sousanis
“Sequential Rhetoric: Using Freire and Quintillian to Teach Students to Read and Create Comics” R Watkins and T Lindsley