Posts categorized under ‘The Comics Grid’

Peter Wilkins offers an analysis of robots’ desire for aesthetic experience as a critique of instrumental reason in Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto, a reworking of the classic “Greatest Robot on Earth” story by Osamu Tezuka.

Drawing on the idea of the ‘crossover,’ Christophe Dony analyses how visual echoes in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival problematise the spatio-temporal continuum.

Nicolas Labarre examines how Blutch employs shifting and contradictory conventions in Mitchum (2005), exploring their possible connections with film and “art and illusion” as discussed by Gombrich.

In this article James Baker explains how James Gillray (1756-1815) engraved the classic image of revolutionary madness. Baker compares and discusses how Gillray and Cruikshank represented madness.

Jonathan Evans discusses how the Haruhi Suzumiya story ‘Endless Eight’ demonstrates the play of repetition and variation that is at the heart of adaptation and also of the fan experience.

Guided by the concept of “the pregnant moment”, Tiago Canário analyses the relationship between time and space in Brazilian comics author Rafael Coutinho’s 11-page story, “Branca de Neve”.

When it was first published, DK2 received many unfavourable reviews both for its apparently sloppy aesthetic and its ambiguous ideology. Here Pepo Pérez argues that DK2 is a coherent work where form and content mirror each other.

Jesse Prevoo examines Ed Brubaker and Warren Pleece’s “Deadenders: Stealing the Sun” following the concept of reading as signification as explored by narratology, reception theory and Scott McCloud.

Renata Pascoal explains how comics illustrate basic concepts of architecture. Pascoal analyses the contrast between two different forms of conceiving architectural representation as employed by Franquin and Martin: the satirical and the realistic.

Nicolas Labarre examines how the EC comics version of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” makes the house appear at once perfect and impossible to live in. The story was a particularly fruitful source for a comic adaptation, since complex interactions between space and time are inscribed in the very structure of the medium.

Janine Utell’s reading of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home reveals the complex ways the character of Joan serves as a conduit for facilitating multiple intimacies in the situation created by Bechdel’s father’s death.

Comics scholarship often privileges the study of works that challenge the formal limitations of the medium. This article by Nicolas Pillai is a small move in the other direction. Looking at a series of meta-textual panels from The Batman Adventures, Pillai considers self-reflection and medium specificity in this licensed children’s comic.

James Baker analyses an apparently simple cartoon by Mel Calman: a man watching a blank TV that weeps oil. Baker describes the context in which Calman tells an economic story, with a few minimalist pencil traces, the artist provides a good example of the evocative power of this often neglected genre, the cartoon.

Using the case of Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat Michael Hill looks at the use of the regular grid structure in the page layout design of comics.

Human geography scholar Jason Dittmer analyses the basis of a comparison made by Dylan Horrocks between comics and maps in the light of two different conceptions of time-space: Einstein’s and Bergson’s.

Ernesto Priego looks back at the work of Charlie Athanas in Shatter (1986), one of the earliest examples of comics fully produced with computer tools. Priego suggests that Sterling’s definition of cyberpunk (also from 1986) can describe what would become a new aesthetics for computer-enabled comics making.

Roberto Bartual explores the relationships between two different types of spatial-temporal maps: the comics grid and a house plan, as suggested by the work of the Chicago-based architect/comic book artist Jimenez Lai.

The relationship between the traces of the past as they remain in the present can be described in relationship to the palimpsest. Kathleen Dunley explores briefly the notion of erasure and revision by investigating a strip from Ben Katchor’s Cheap Novelties.

Michael Hill provides an introduction to Rumiko Takahashi’s celebrated series Ranma 1/2. By looking at shifts and changes in manga genre and gender reception that led to the creation of new subgenres and cross gender audiences, this post offers a starting point for further research on the representation of gender and sex in the popular narratives from Japan.

This post examines some aspects of the British diachronic illustrative tradition in connection with Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland (2007). In this post, James Baker argues how what binds together the bugaboos of Talbot, Tenniel and the Georgian satirists is how they speak to the idea of foreign threat.

Janine Utell explores the narrative strategies at work in Robert Berry’s comics adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ulysses “Seen.” A emphasis on perspective and focalization, using ideas from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Berry’s visual vocabulary, reveals Joyce’s concerns with the relationship between intimacy and storytelling.

Nicolas Labarre examines the sudden irruption of rain within Kazuo Kamimura’s Lorsque nous vivions ensemble (同棲時代, 2009). Labarre describes the sequence depicting rain falling as a narrative and graphical shock that transcends the romantic cliché and verges on Immanuel Kant’s notion of the sublime.

Tony Venezia looks at Ghost of Hoppers by Jaime Hernandez as a gothic text. Reading an episode in which long-standing Love and Rockets character Maggie loses her way in familiar surroundings reveals the uncanny qualities of spatial disorientation and dis-ease at work in the text.