3
Introduction
The term “comics” has come to be used, within the Anglophone industry,
as a non-count noun that collectively refers to the drawn strip medium’s
various subcategories. It subsumes, but is not reducible to: children’s
comic books, which ﬁrst took oﬀ when newspaper strips were sectioned
into supplements, and which were increasingly aimed at a juvenile audience
from the early twentieth century; classic genre serials, popularly
associated with the superhero Golden Age that kicked oﬀ in the 1930s;
the unruly underground comix of the 1960s counterculture; adult graphic
novels, which began to gain cultural currency in the 1980s; and a host
of other subsets of format, content, and target audience that continue to
develop and expand. It is broadly agreed that the form began to cohere
into what is currently recognized as comics in the early nineteenth century,
particularly with the work of Swiss teacher Rodolphe Töpﬀer (Chute
2008: 455, Beaty 2007: 21).
The coalescing of the conventions and practices by which we now identify
the form was, of course, a gradual process, and the modern medium
can count the likes of eighteenth-century satirical caricatures, such as
William Hogarth’s series, and the strip narratives that appeared in popular
prints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as its antecedents. Some
critics go so far as to include such artifacts as the Bayeux Tapestry and
cave paintings under the banner of comics (McCloud 2000: 201), though
most concur that “this kind of historical extrapolation is dubious in its
logic, and often used to ‘justify’ comics by association with more culturally-respected
forms” (Sabin 1993: 13). Despite eﬀorts to argue otherwise,
there is simply no traceable lineage from today’s Beano back to medieval
stained glass windows.1
Though the form itself has a long history, comics scholarship has been
slower to develop, only emerging as a coherent discipline within Anglophone
academia over the past twenty to thirty years. (European comics
criticism, particularly in Francophone circles where comics, not incidentally,
enjoy a better popular reputation, predates Anglophone scholarship
by several decades [McQuillan 2005: 7–13].) Throughout its evolution, the
ﬁeld has been pervaded by the sort of “justiﬁcatory” strategies that lead
critics into dating the medium’s genesis at the very dawn of civilization,
Introduction4
or adopting the plural form as a universal label so as to avoid the lighthearted,
jokey connotations of the singular “comic.” Comics scholarship
has been riddled with “status anxiety” (Hatﬁeld 2005: xii), and it may well
be the case that the comics form is widely perceived as inherently lowbrow,
more readily associated, in the popular imagination, with The Beano
and men in tights than with (to pick some diverse examples at random)
the politically engaged New Journalism of Sue Coe, dark and dreamlike
defamiliarization of Peter Blegvad, or the Tarkovsky-esque narrative stylings
of Lorenzo Mattotti. However, the “belaboured alternately defensive
and celebratory prose” (Chute 2006: 1,018) with which comics scholars
have often attempted to combat this poor repute does little to improve the
standing of either the medium or scholarly interest in it. Comics critics too
often extol the virtues of the form to the hilt, “championing [their] interest
in comics with the aggressive attitudes of the fan [becoming] carried away
into exaggerated statements of faith, if only to overcome a certain embarrassment
[they] may still feel [themselves]” (Eco cited in Christiansen
& Magnussen 2000: 20).2
Critics have tended to overreact to perceived
slights against the medium, often at the expense of responding analytically
to the exigencies of the corpus itself. There is a growing sense that
“it’s probably time to let go of that strain of earnest defensiveness” (Wolk
2007: 67), but the formal approaches to comics dominating current criticism
remain the result of this very stance, and this book seeks to address
the problems endemic in this defensively inspired formalist framework.
The origins of comics scholarship partially lie with the ascendency of
cultural studies (Sabin 1993: 92, Christiansen & Magnussen 2000: 18, Heer
& Worcester 2009: xi). The ﬁeld has consequently been imbued with democratic
leanings, strongly bound up with a suspicion of both the distinction
between high and low culture, at the bottom of which heap comics
traditionally ended up, and the authority of academic institutions historically
implicated in maintaining that hierarchy. But the Anglophone ﬁeld
is also widely acknowledged to have received its jumpstart from practitioner-theorists
(Baetens 2001: 147, Whitlock 2006: 966, Lent 2010: 23).
It was “non-scholarly researchers – critics, practitioners, journalists, and
avocational researchers – whose work, in fact, laid much of the groundwork
on which scholars now stand” (Troutman 2010: 437). This legacy
has had signiﬁcant implications for the ﬁeld. Current scholarship owes
much to these trailblazers and their work provides an immensely valuable
basis for academic study, but it has tended to be “removed from the scholarly
traditions with which it might best intersect” (Groensteen 2006: viii).
Introduction 5
Though this seminal work cannot be dismissed, it has often been theoretically
unsophisticated. Comics scholarship continues to wrestle with the
task of balancing due deference to this practice-oriented strain of commentary
with a duty to correct its theoretical errors and omissions.
It has been suggested that, particularly within the arena of the Bowling
Green State University hub and Journal of Popular Culture, a counterculture
atmosphere is fostered where “results can be described more as a
celebration of popular culture than as methodological and theoretical new
thinking” (Christiansen & Magnussen 2000: 20). These practices “reﬂect
the conscious and conscientious ambivalence the Popular Culture Association
historically bears to the academy in general” (Troutman 2010: 437),
and within the ﬁeld of comics studies this feeds into the parallel propensity
of practitioner-critics to sidestep the theoretical traditions and discourses
that might usefully inform their otherwise insightful observations
and commentary. The result of this twin inheritance is “a kind of hesitancy
or even resistance on the part of comics scholars to participate fully in
the modes of academic writing and research” (Troutman 2010: 433). Even
academic proponents of the ﬁeld can neglect the relevant source theory,
abandoning scholarly rigor in favor of respectful repetition. The state of
Anglophone comics criticism’s consolidation period resonates strongly
with James Elkins’s recent assessment of visual studies: “As a new ﬁeld,
visual culture has a nature [sic] propensity to search for founding texts and
ideas, but theorists and critics can do themselves a disfavor by anchoring
their work to those authors and ideas, especially where the directions of
the new scholarship diverge from their sources” (Elkins 2003: 101).
Comics scholars’ adoption and perpetuation of popular generalizations,
suppositions, and suggestions that the academic has a professional
duty to engage with and challenge (in a way the expert pundit does not)
does little to assist the ongoing sophistication of the ﬁeld as a demanding
discipline.
Given comics’ struggle against blanket dismissal beside elite cultural
forms, it is perhaps understandable that critics are reluctant to embrace
what might be charged with being another kind of intellectual snobbery.
The cross-pollination of the ﬁeld with practitioners and academics does
not foster the kind of discourse that conscientiously speaks to and positions
itself within ongoing scholarly practices. Art Spiegelman notes, of
reactions to his own commentary on his work, that “academics were happier
with idiot-savant cartoonists,” suggesting burgeoning scholarship
enables an exclusion as “only now that this jargon has been perfected, is it
Introduction6
possible for everybody who’s not in the club to be an idiot-savant, because
they’re never going to understand the framing device which the criticism
is” (cited in Witek 2008: 218). Ivan Brunetti makes similar reference to academics
“condescendingly” bracketing oﬀ “practitioners” under that dissociating
label (2006: 7), implicitly protesting the colonization of the ﬁeld
by scholastically minded latecomers. Scholarly critics’ capitulation to this
sort of inverted snobbery, facilitated by cultural studies’ open, democratic
agenda, and exacerbated by an underlying fear that “everyone else thinks
what they do is kind of trashy and disreputable” (Wolk 2007: 67), can work
to derail scrupulous academic vigilance. It too often results in “an argument
delivered from the defensive couch, a discourse addressed not to an
audience of informed and sympathetic colleagues but to an imperfectly
imagined hangman’s jury of deans, intra- and extra-disciplinary experts,
the editors and readers of the Comics Journal, and the people who write
book reviews on Amazon.com, all of these divergent discursive expectations
and often contradictory intellectual goals” (Witek 2008: 219).
The novelist and essayist Curtis White points out that “from a philosopher’s
perspective, one of the sure signs that there’s no thinking going on
[in a particular discourse] is that there is never a context for what they do.
They are never thinking in the context of other thinkers. They are never
reading, considering, interpreting what someone else has thought as a
point of departure for what they think. It’s all ex nihilo, as if ideas just
burst in your head like an aneurysm” (White 2007: 79).
This charge resonates with the situation Elkins alludes to within visual
studies, where critics use foundational works as a springboard without
dealing with the wider established theory that could inform it. Within
Anglophone comics criticism, the core ex nihilo text from which much
subsequent theory has issued is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics
(1993). McCloud is widely cited as the founding father of the ﬁeld, and
though it is sometimes acknowledged that he is a distinctly “second-rate
theoretician” (Baetens 2003: np), reverent allegiance to his seminal primer
has more consistently seen it “elevate[d] [. . .] to the status of holy writ”
(Harvey 2009: 25). McCloud himself defends his uncontextualized speculations,
stating “my academic aspirations stemmed from a conviction that
not every work of theory could be built on other works of theory. I was
convinced that useful discourse often started with direct observation,
logic and a horde of semi-educated guesses” (cited in Witek 2008: 219).
Convinced as McCloud may be, and inﬂuential as Understanding Comics
has proven, given the staggering multi-disciplinarity of comics studies, it
Introduction 7
is vital that critics are responsive to relevant scholarly contexts if they are
to engage in genuinely new thinking. The diversity of approaches to comics
(variously treated as cultural, educational, literary, political, geographical,
or socio-historical artifacts) means that robust, constructive theory
must address itself to an established set of issues and questions it seeks to
further and enrich, or risk instituting an enthusiastic but under-informed
celebration of comics as the standard critical practice.
In the spirit of countering this tendency, this book anchors itself in
literary and linguistic theory, addressing the sometimes over-general use
comics criticism makes of these discourses. This is an arena in which the
defensiveness that drives so much critical work on comics is most ripe.
The comics form is (usually) a mixed one, so the characteristics of words
and images, and the ways they operate in conjunction, are pertinent issues
for anyone concerned with its structural mechanisms. But the usage of
semiotic theory to illuminate these issues is shot through with an anxiety
about the relative status of images versus words. Comics criticism participates
in a historic rivalry between art forms, or “war of signs” (Mitchell
1986: 47), that has seen their relative attributes, virtues, and capabilities
long debated. Comics critics are frequently keen to champion the eﬃcacy
and worth of images. A perceived “privileged status often accorded to narratives
in linguistic media” (Walsh 2006: 860) leads to earnest insistence
that “pictorial language seems as capable as words of communicating
ideas” (Beronä 2001: 19); that “drawing, as a system, is not necessarily less
true than other systems of representation” (Chute 2006: 1,017); and that
before literacy extended beyond the privileged (read “elitist”) classes, “pictures
were an eﬀective way to communicate information” (Versaci 2008:
7). Notwithstanding the shortcomings of an approach to an art form that
views words and images as functionalist vessels for information, anxiety
about the value of images leads critics into dubious theoretical territory.
Understandably keen to state the parity of words and images, critics too
often overstate this equal validity as outright equivalence.
This practice runs throughout the critical literature. It is variously stated
that the distinction between words and images is “an arbitrary separation”
(Eisner 1985: 13); that “from the point of view of semiotics theory, images
and words are equivalent entities [. . .] perceived in much the same way”
(Varnum & Gibbons 2001: xi); and that snobbery about visual narrative
forms such as comics is “reinforced by assumptions about essential ‘differences’
between communication by text and communication by images”
(Hatﬁeld 2005: 32), with those artfully placed scare quotes seeking to
Introduction8
unsettle any such assumptions the reader might be harboring. One does
not need an extensive knowledge of semiotic theory in order to question
this ﬂattening of distinctions, but Anglophone critics typically invoke it in
a very generalized way, positing all signifying practices as broadly similar
instances of signs standing in for things, ordered by codes and conventions.
In order to catch all semiological practices within a general science
of signs (this general science was a hypothetical postulate for Ferdinand
de Saussure [1983: 16] and had still not transpired according to Barthes,
writing in the 1960s [1967: 9], or Mitchell, in the 1980s [1986: 54]; both
these latter critics see semiotics’ linguistic basis as a stumbling block to
wider application), the initial linguistic model can only be invoked in a
rather generalized, even vague, way in order to be applicable to the diverse
modes of language, images, and the comics form. Such vagueness leads to
an advancement of neither semiotic theory itself, nor the discipline that
purports to utilize it. The distinction lies in the details, but heeding these
speciﬁcities little serves the assertions of communicative parity that are
routinely made via claims that any diﬀerence between visual and verbal is
spurious to begin with.
Diﬀerences do exist and they are crucial to understanding the distinct
ways words and images are deployed and perceived within comics. To
begin with, language is built from a limited set of discrete minimal units,
while visual signiﬁcation, as I will go on to demonstrate, is continuous and
inﬁnitely gradated. Language is based around “a ﬁnite number of characters
[. . .] and the gaps between them are empty; there are no intermediate
characters between “a” and “d” that have any function in the system,
whereas the dense system provides for the introduction of an inﬁnite
number of meaningful new marks into the symbol” (Mitchell 1986: 68).
That is to say, the distinctions between language’s limited set of distinctive
sounds are binary either/or distinctions: there is no functional midpoint
between “cat” and “cad,” though the lines and curves that make up a drawing
of a cat may be adjusted in myriad subtle ways with no deﬁnitive cutoﬀ
point determining when that sign has become a diﬀerent sign. Language
is founded on the principle of double articulation with a small ﬁxed number
of phonemes (distinctive phonic units) that make up a limited pool of
morphemes (minimal signiﬁcant units, for example, basic words such as
“like” or “lady,” or semantic fragments such as “un-” that can be combined
to form more complex words such as “unladylike”), which can then be
combined in inﬁnite variation to create phrases, sentences, and texts.
It is not possible to ﬁnd minimally signiﬁcant units within visual images:
Introduction 9
The image is syntactically and semantically dense in that no mark may be isolated
as a unique, distinctive character (like a letter of an alphabet) [. . . .] Its
meaning depends rather on its relations with all the other marks in the dense,
continuous ﬁeld. A particular spot of paint might be read as the highlight on
Mona Lisa’s nose, but that spot achieves its signiﬁcance in the speciﬁc system
of pictorial relations to which it belongs, not as a uniquely diﬀerentiated character
that might be transferred to some other canvas. (Mitchell 1986: 66)
Umberto Eco posits a comparable example of a semicircle and dot that, in
a drawing of a human face, might represent a smile and eye, while the exact
same forms within a depiction of a bowl of fruit might signify a banana
and grape seed (Eco 1976: 215). Unlike the morpheme “lady,” which contributes
the same signiﬁcance to the larger units “ladylike” and “unladylike”
(or even phrases such as “green with envy” or “green around the gills,”
whose ﬁgurative signiﬁcance is latent in the usual meaning of “green,” and
is drawn out and anchored by its context), the continuous and dense ﬁeld
of visual images proves much more manipulable.
Linguistic signs are, furthermore, arbitrary. The relationship between
signiﬁer and signiﬁed is purely conventional, based on knowledge. Visual
signs are (certainly more often) motivated, with some logical relationship
existing between a sign’s form and its signiﬁcance. Pictures look like the
thing they represent, and though there are codes regulating the relationship
between signiﬁer and signiﬁed, it is not always necessary to have prior
knowledge of a particular sign in order to work out what it represents in
the way that it is with arbitrary words, whose signiﬁer-signiﬁed association
must simply be learnt. This enables a degree of freedom for images,
whose potential deducibility, stemming from that motivated relationship
between form and meaning, means signs need not be preexistent and
already familiar in order to be functional. We may be able to interpret a
visual form we have never seen before, but we cannot work out the meaning
of a verbal signiﬁer whose signiﬁcance we have not already learnt: we
can deduce the signiﬁcance of “unladylike” only if we are already familiar
with each of its arbitrary constituent units. As such, visual signiﬁcation is
less constrained than language by a preexistent langue—the abstract differential
system of language that all instances of parole (particular utterances)
are obliged to comply with in order to be functionally meaningful.
Whereas individual words have an abstract, conventional meaning that
recurs when they are used in diﬀerent contexts, the spot of paint on the
Mona Lisa’s nose, or Eco’s semicircle, are imbued with signiﬁcance by
Introduction10
their place within a particular context—and before then, do not have a
ﬁxed signiﬁcance. As has been asserted of cinema, visual signiﬁcation “is
parole and not langue” (Mitchell 2009: 119).
The key distinctions this book maintains are: arbitrariness and motivation;
diﬀering levels of constraint by a preexistent langue; double articulation
and constitution in minimal units, as distinct from continuity and
density. It will also touch on the issues of language’s dual graphic-phonic
form and the radical heterogeneity of visual signiﬁcation, which subsumes
an array of diﬀerent codes such as size, color, texture, and location, very
diﬀerent to language’s ﬁnite pool of like units. This rather cursory summary
will be ﬂeshed out in the ensuing discussion, through which a more
attentive use of source theory will help demonstrate not only that these
diﬀerences exist, but that they are pertinent to our understanding of how
each semiotic mode generates the speciﬁc eﬀects it does. Supportive close
readings from a range of texts illustrate the ways in which an understanding
of the mixed medium’s operations in fact depends on addressing the
diﬀerent ways words and images work. The texts used are drawn from
a range of comics formats and periods. The emphasis will be on more
recent and, in particular, more “arty” or experimental comics, but these
have been selected purely as they best clarify the points raised about comics’
formal makeup, which apply to comics in general and not only the
formally innovative texts that best facilitate an explication of these points.
The ongoing anxiety about the supposed hierarchy of words and images
means that comics are habitually defended against the benchmark of language
and literature. If images—or even the comics form itself—can be
argued to work just like verbal language, then comics must be as good as
“proper books.” As such, “the dominant thread in the scholarly study of
comic books has always been the literary and textual” (Beaty 2007: 8).3
It
has become near automatic to class comics as a literary form (Meskin 2009:
219, Wolk 2007: 14, Chute 2008), a kind of writing (Raeburn 2004: 17, Hatﬁeld
2005: 33), or, most habitually, as a language itself.4
The defensive root
of this tendency, and extent to which it has become a mechanical move,
are both exempliﬁed by Charles Hatﬁeld’s self-defeating claims (made on
the very same page) that “recent insistence on comics-as-reading seems
designed to counter a long-lived tradition of professional writing that
links comics with illiteracy” and that, nevertheless, “my bedrock claim
[is] that comic art is a form of writing” (Hatﬁeld 2005: 33). Comics criticism
has coalesced around the critical models of language, reading, and
literature. However, the dominant usage of these models is theoretically
Introduction 11
impoverished. Semiotics is used to obliterate pertinent distinctions and
ideas of literariness imprecisely synonymized with narrative. Both critical
models are invoked in service of aggrandizing the visual mode and comics
form to the perceived privileged position of the verbal. Though not convinced
these discourses are the only—or even best—available, and without
room to fully espouse the possibility of using cinema as a closer structural
kin (which has, at any rate, frequently been addressed elsewhere),
this book expressly challenges the speciﬁc use that is routinely made of
linguistic and literary theory, seeking an adjusted critical framework that
is better attuned to the speciﬁcities of the visual and verbal modes. The
aim is to minimize the defensiveness that can so often be found underpinning
the dominant approach to comics’ formal structure, and also to
challenge the deleterious habit of using “language” as the “vernacular” “for
what should properly be called ‘symbol systems’” (Mitchell 1994: 349). In
doing this, the revised framework does not aspire to “rehabilitate” comics
beside the supposedly hallowed benchmark of other semiotic modes
or art forms, but instead aims at incorporating the more consistent and
established critical standards of adjacent scholarly disciplines.
The book tackles three particular problematic aspects of the linguistic
model as it is currently used. Each section in turn is further subdivided,
examining these three core issues from diﬀerent but related angles. Part
One addresses “Language in Comics,” and is deliberately skewed towards
linguistic content in an attempt to redress a common insistence that comics
visual content must always—deﬁnitively—control the narrative and
dominate the text. It is common for critics to assert that there must necessarily
be “a preponderance of image over text” (Kunzle 1973: 2), and to
suggest that where words undertake too much of the narrative burden,
the very classiﬁcation of a work is compromised. So keen can critics be
to champion the power, eﬃcacy, and importance of the visual, that they
display an “almost universal” fear that words might somehow take over or
conquer comics’ images, an anxiety Dylan Horrocks terms “logophobia”
(2001: 5). It is not diﬃcult to ﬁnd examples refuting the notion that words
are always the ancillary extra to primary images within comics, but this
section particularly aims to show how we lose out on an appreciation of
literary language in comics if we refuse to recognize its potential centrality.
Comics frequently incorporate highly literary writing, and Part One,
focusing on three diﬀerent authors in turn, looks at how those speciﬁc
features of language (its arbitrariness, constitution in minimal units, and
constraint by the langue) in fact enable the precise literary tricks these
Introduction12
texts accomplish. This section also looks at how text is read in comics,
considering the verbally generated eﬀects garnered by fragmenting text
across comics’ delimited panels, subframes, and speech balloons, and
arranging these over a two-dimensional page surface. The purpose of
this ﬁrst part is to examine linguistic content, highlighting language’s distinct
semiotic features, but also showing how the comics form can deploy
words in its own speciﬁc ways.
Part Two operates under the banner “Comics as Language,” addressing
two key aspects of the postulation that the medium’s practices and
devices are structured like a verbal symbol system. Typically, claims that
comics possess a comparable “grammar, syntax and punctuation” (Sabin
1993: 9, Kunzle 1990: 349) are not quantiﬁed or explained. Such statements
are so pervasive as to have attained the veneer of accepted fact, though
attempts to enumerate how the features of comics replicate these linguistic
properties vary immensely.5
The ﬁrst chapter in this section deals with
the suggestion that, because visual and verbal interact, they become an
inextricable blend that can therefore be framed as a uniﬁed language in
itself; a suggestion I refute, by showing that distinctions between the two
modes and their operations persist, even when they are drawn into collaborative
play. The next two chapters address the question of sequentiality
and the proposition that panels are semiotic units whose signiﬁeds are
units of story time, which are articulated in texts like linguistic units in
longer phrases. I do not extensively address the elliptical nature of stories
told through sequences of panels here, because the issue of how story
content is delivered seems more a question of narrative theory than one of
language or symbol system. Rather than the marshaling of story content,
these chapters instead discuss the privileging of sequentiality within the
current critical framework. This emphasis proves to be a mistaken move,
for what truly distinguishes comics from other narratives is the simultaneity
of narrative segments on the two-dimensional page, which is incidental
in prose and does not occur with ﬁlm’s temporally progressing shots.
Rather than the structural deﬁnition it is often claimed to be, sequentiality
can be better explained as a kind of realism principle, a tendency, not an
absolute, which can be altered, reinvented, or even discarded, in ways language
can be seen to resist.
The third and ﬁnal part considers the framing of visual signiﬁcation in
terms of language. “Images as Language” in part addresses comics’ images
and cartooning speciﬁcally, following on from and furthering the discussion
of comics as a kind of language. It also provides parallel arguments
Introduction 13
to those made in Part One, examining visual signiﬁcation’s continuousness,
motivation, and ﬂexibility, and showing how these features are as
instrumental to its operations as language’s contrasting characteristics are
shown to be. A challenge is also raised to the very idea of a semiotic, language-based
approach to images by examining the aesthetic visual style of
comics artwork. By adopting the methodology of the art-historian’s formal
analysis, it can be implicitly demonstrated that semiotics does not provide
an eﬀective framework for analyzing visual art beyond its functional and
reductive “message.” Part Three also considers how comics systematically
organize smaller constituent units into a coherent, larger whole, expanding
on the issue of comics as language, but speciﬁcally looking at the page
as a delimited unit, and thus at the possible linguistic structures organizing
the page as an integrated image. While something must be conceded
to the idea that some aspects of comics function as a symbol system, ultimately
it will be shown that, as this system is motivated and non-minimal,
it diﬀers in crucial ways from verbal language.
The central thrust of this book is to demonstrate via close analysis of
both texts and source theory the precise diﬀerences between the visual
and verbal modes, which are habitually swept aside, seemingly for defensive
reasons. It aims to show that adjusting the language-based model
is necessary to make it appropriate for assessing visual images. Such an
adjustment renders semiotics a useful tool for explicating the mechanics
of the mixed medium, in terms of both its use of words and images, and
its own devices and signifying practices. I focus on formalism because it
is precisely in the conception of comics’ formal structures that the ﬁeld’s
greatest critical weak spots lie, more so than the plethora of sociological/
political/historical/readership-centered approaches to comics that have
developed in conjunction. Of course, strong theorizations of comics do
exist, and the challenges raised here should not be read as an outright
dismissal of the decades of diverse scholarship that have presaged the rise
of the ﬁeld as a recognized academic discipline. But, particularly where
formalist approaches are concerned, critical standards remain distinctly
patchy and there exists a real problem with adequately distinguishing
between conceptually sound criticism and less carefully considered oﬀerings.
This diﬃculty needs to be addressed as comics criticism becomes
ever more widely recognized within academia, if the ﬁeld is to shake oﬀ
any last vestiges of that denigrated status with which so many critics have
been concerned. I do not aim to dismiss so much as alter and augment
existing conceptions of comics’ structure and workings, to yield a modiﬁed
Introduction14
framework that is more theoretically precise and more closely attuned
to the scholarly discourses that inform it. The defensive reaction against
the art form’s “poor relation” status that has often sought to aggrandize
both visual images and the comics form, if it is indeed necessary in the
ﬁrst place (is the Sistine Chapel ceiling really considered inferior to Great
Expectations?), is ill-served by a vague and generalized use of theory that
does little to bolster the perceived seriousness of either the art form or its
study. As a discipline, comics criticism is gaining ground in the academic
sphere, in both prevalence and esteem. It is therefore all the more imperative
that the ﬁeld’s proponents ﬁnally abandon those core tenets that characterized
the discipline’s awkward adolescence, ensuring comics studies
is instituted not as a vague and general pulp of piecemeal theory, celebratory
criticism, and a denial of hierarchies that is extrapolated to a lack of
discernment, but as a more consistently serious and rigorous discipline
whose only necessary defense is that it self-evidently merits inclusion.