HOW TO STUDY COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS: A GRAPHIC INTRODUCTION TO COMICS STUDIES ENRIQUE DEL REY CABERO, MICHAEL GOODRUM & JOSEAN MORLESÍN MELLADO HOW TO STUDY COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS: A GRAPHIC INTRODUCTION TO COMICS STUDIES ENRIQUE DEL REY CABERO, MICHAEL GOODRUM & JOSEAN MORLESÍN MELLADO How to Study Comics & Graphic Novels: A Graphic Introduction to Comics Studies Text by Enrique del Rey Cabero and Michael Goodrum Illustrations and design by Josean Morlesín Mellado Published in 2021 by the Oxford Comics Network, based at TORCH The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. Oxford Comics Network: https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/comics Twitter: @TORCHComicsOx Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TORCHComics/ TORCH The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities: https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk Twitter: @TORCHOxford Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/TORCHOxford This Guide and its content are published under the following Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) ISBN: 978-1-8383792-0-9 Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank Marie Trinchant for editing and revising this guide so thoroughly, as well as Chris Paul and Sarah Jacobs for proofreading it. TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 FOREWORD 7 INTRODUCTION 8 COMICS VS. GRAPHIC NOVELS 10 THE LANGUAGE 14 WORDS & IMAGES 18 PRODUCTION OF COMICS 20 COMICS 24 DISTRIBUTION 28 APPROACHES TO TRADITIONS METHODS STUDYING COMICS 32 FURTHER 34 AN INTERVIEW WITH 40 ABOUT READING NICK SOUSANIS THE AUTHORS FOREWORD If you’ve ever designed a module on comics before, you’ll know how difficult it is to decide where to begin. Do students need to understand the history before comics theory? Or do you need to talk about comics form before everything else? And where do institutions, politics and readers come in? It’s a bit like when a student comes to your office and asks what they need to read in order to start writing an essay on graphic novels. What’s the first book or article they need to consult? There’s no one right way to start studying comics, but there are plenty of wrong ways (trust me – I’ve tried ‘em), and it’s to the credit of Enrique, Michael, and Josean that the reader is captivated as soon as they turn the first page of How to Study Comics & Graphic Novels: A Graphic Introduction to Comics Studies. Josean’s art deserves plaudits for its subtle colour palate and an unobtrusive line that’s as graceful as it is simple. And it’s definitely not the case that the words do the heavy lifting while the pictures provide ornamentation. The layout on page 13 is a great example of the expressivity of Josean’s style: the arrangement of panels pays homage to the work of Chris Ware as well as providing a visual glossary of the options that creators have at their disposal when opening up channels for readers to follow across the page. Gems like this are scattered throughout, such as the paralleling of the opening book and the toppling tree on page 24, or the polyptych on page 20 where the cave painting in prehistoric times becomes the protocomic studied in the present. (And if you want to know what a polyptych is, you can find out on page 11!) Another one of the visual charms offered by this guide is the use of Oxford as a backdrop. On their way to the library, the characters run past The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), not just a recognisable landmark but the home of this project. Where the scholarly conversation surrounding comics is concerned, TORCH and the Oxford Comics Network have played host to many speakers and conferences in recent years, and How to Study Comics & Graphic Novels: A Graphic Introduction to Comics Studies emerges from those interactions. It’s important that there’s no lone narrator to this guide, since there’s no single way of doing comics studies, and there’s still plenty of debate about the ways that academics approach comics and graphic novels. It’s a triumph of compression that it incorporates such diverse approaches! 5 Like the best essays in comics form, it knows when to keep quiet (figuratively speaking) and show the reader how comics operate, instead of just telling them. The economy of the artwork extends to the writing – there are no panels overburdened with long descriptions, or speech balloons that squeeze the characters out of sight. The guide keeps things concise, and its explanations are all the more vivid for that concision. This, after all, is where the Further Reading comes in: if you’ve enjoyed this guide and are keen to explore Comics Studies further, the authors have compiled the roadmap you need to begin your journey. But the best thing about Enrique, Michael, and Josean’s introduction to analysing comics? I don’t need to worry what to do when a student arrives at my office, wanting to write an essay about comics but unsure where to start. Now I can give them How to Study Comics & Graphic Novels: A Graphic Introduction to Comics Studies! Paul Williams Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture. University of Exeter. 6 iNTRODUCTiON contrary to historical prejudices that classify the medium as light reading, or exclusively addressed to a young audience, comics have diversified their form, style, authorship and readership during the twenty-first century. ENrique del rey cabero, Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Exeter. in fact, looking at audiences through and politics much of the twentieth in age, background, gender, century shows an audience than you for comics far might more diverse imagine. michael goodrum, senior lecturer in modern history at canterbury christ church university. on the contrary, as we As sometimes it will see through these someone very is assumed that comics pages, comics are a rightly said: are transparent, complex medium. easy to read. “understanding comics is serious business”* josean morlesín mellAdo, lecturer at the university of the basque country, spain. *McCloud, S. (1994). understanding comics: the invisible art. new york: william morrow, p. 197. you want to from comics traditions study comics but from how comics and genres around the world are uncertain about are produced and read to their distribution methods. where and how to start? to the various approaches in this GUiDE we will to studying them. cover some of the main aspects to take into account when reading comics. 7 so, in order to study comics... SQUEAK SQUEAK well, not everyone agrees with the use of ‘graphic novels’. many creators are against this term as they consider it just a marketing strategy. Some consider the graphic novel as a movement: Auteur comics with complex themes for adult readers. in theory, the form is without genre or style constraints but in practice, according to critics who adopt this stance, the graphic novel is chiefly concerned with realism, non- fiction, social themes and (auto)biography. both definitions of can you have a graphic can it be published in a the graphic novel pose novel of any genre serial format? problems: can a graphic (even action-adventure (canonical graphic novel be for children? or superheroes)? novels such as watchmen were first published in series) 8 if only comics wait comics or researchers got a pound graphic novels? for every time they were asked that question! but it cannot be denied that the idea of it can be said ‘graphic novels’ has helped that there are two main comics reach a larger ways of understanding audience. the concept. others consider the graphic novel as a format: long, self-contained comics (as opposed to serialised ones), arising in the 1980s as part of a larger project of ‘legitimisation’ of the medium. the graphic novel adopted such an approach regards the novel as a privileged cultural form perhaps one-shot publication so as to overlooking the fact that it ONCE had similar problems in achieving consciously break with the cultural recognition. traditional seriality of comics, to imitate the format of the novel A STORY with a clear dostoyevsky and narrative arc that reaches and dickens also jane austen’s its conclusion by published their works northanger abbey the final page. in serial form, is, in many ways, a novel for instance. about contemporary attitudes to novels. 9 now let’s explore some of the main elements of... the panel is generally identified a single panel can but usually panels are arranged as the basic unit and it helps the occupy the whole page on the page or double-page reader to focus on a particular (splash page). spread with other panels. space of the page. panels of various sizes can be CREATORScreators need to decide arranged in multiple ways along what to depict in each panel, a the page, producing an infinite process that is known number of different as the breakdown. page layouts. 10 regular groupings, where all panels are equal in size grids( ), can be used, with the possibility of joining some panels within the same structure. some artists also decide to give more importance to each tier (which also has a long tradition on its own, especially in the press, as we can see with the comic strips in the Sunday papers). panels are or an but sometimes often separated empty space the images extend by borders (gutter). to the edge of the page (bleed). and authors the panels may even choose can also be linked by a to eliminate panels continuous background altogether. (super panels or polyptychs). 11 unlike cinema, in comics images on a page or double page are always accessible and this creates a tension that is very particular to the medium.