Comics Theorist

Comics studies (also comic art studies, sequential art studies or graphic narrative studies) is an academic field that focuses on comics and sequential art. Although comics and graphic novels have been generally dismissed as less relevant pop culture texts, scholars in fields such as semiotics, aesthetics, sociology, composition studies and cultural studies are now re-considering comics and graphic novels as complex texts deserving of serious scholarly study.

Not to be confused with the technical aspects of comics creation, comics studies exists only with the creation of comics theory—which approaches comics critically as an art—and the writing of comics historiography (the study of the history of comics).Benoît Crucifix
"Redrawing Comics into the Graphic Novel: Comics Historiography, Canonization, and Authors' Histories of the Medium"
"Whither comics studies?" panel, International conference of the French Association for American Studies, Toulouse (France), May 24–27, 2016. Comics theory has significant overlap with the philosophy of comics, i.e., the study of the ontology, epistemology and aesthetics of comics, the relationship between comics and other art forms, and the relationship between text and image in comics.

Comics studies is also interrelated with comics criticism, the analysis and evaluation of comics and the comics medium.

Theorizing comics

Although there has been the occasional investigation of comics as a valid art form, specifically in Gilbert Seldes' ''The 7 Lively Arts'' (1924), Martin Sheridan's ''Comics and Their Creators'' (1942), and David Kunzle's ''The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825'' (1973), contemporary Anglophone comics studies in North America can be said to have burst onto the academic scene with both Will Eisner's ''Comics and Sequential Art'' in 1985 and Scott McCloud's '' Understanding Comics'' in 1993. Continental comics studies can trace its roots back to the pioneering work of semioticians such as Roland Barthes (particularly his 1964 essay "Rhetoric of the Image", published in English in the anthology ''Image—Music—Text'') and Umberto Eco (particularly his 1964 book ''Apocalittici e integrati''). These works were the first attempts at a general system of comics semiotics.

More recently, analysis of comics have begun to be undertaken by cognitive scientists, the most prominent being Neil Cohn, who has used tools from linguistics to detail the theoretical structure of comics' underlying "visual language", and has also used psychological experimentation from cognitive neuroscience to test these theories in actual comprehension. This work has suggested similarities between the way that the brain processes language and the way it processes sequential images. Cohn's theories are not universally accepted, with other scholars like Thierry Groensteen, Hannah Miodrag, and Barbara Postema offering alternative understandings.

Defining comics

Similar to the problems of defining literature and film, no consensus has been reached on a definition of the comics medium, and attempted definitions and descriptions have fallen prey to numerous exceptions. Theorists such as Rodolphe Töpffer, R. C. Harvey, Will Eisner, David Carrier, Alain Rey, and Lawrence Grove emphasize the combination of text and images, though there are prominent examples of pantomime comics throughout its history. Other critics, such as Thierry Groensteen and Scott McCloud, have emphasized the primacy of sequences of images. Towards the close of the 20th century, different cultures' discoveries of each other's comics traditions, the rediscovery of forgotten early comics forms, and the rise of new forms made defining comics a more complicated task.

Composition studies

In the field of composition studies, an interest in comics and graphic novels is growing, partially due to the work of comics theorists but also due to composition studies' growing focus on multimodality and visual rhetoric. Composition studies theorists are looking at comics as sophisticated texts, and sites of complex literacy.

Gunther Kress defines multimodality as "the use of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event, together with the particular way in which these mode are combined" or, more simply as "any text whose meanings are realized through more than one semiotic code".

Kristie S. Fleckenstein sees the relationship between image and text as "mutually constitutive, mutually infused"—a relationship she names "imageword". Fleckenstein sees "imageword" as offering "a double vision of writing-reading based on hefusion of image and word, a double vision of literacy".

Dale Jacobs sees the reading of comics as a form of "multimodal literacy or multiliteracy, rather than as a debased form of print literacy". According to Jacobs, comics can help educators to move "toward attending to multimodal literacies" that "shift our focus from print only to multiple modalities". He encourages educators to embrace a pedagogy that will give students skills to effectively negotiate these multiple modalities.

Comics historiography

Comics historiography (the study of the history of comics) studies the historical process through which comics became an autonomous art medium and an integral part of culture. An area of study is premodern sequential art; some scholars such as Scott McCloud consider Egyptian paintings and pre-Columbian American picture manuscripts to be the very first form of comics and sequential art. Another area of study is the 20th-century emergence of the subculture of comics readers and comicphilia, the passionate interest in comic books. (A person with a passionate interest in comics is informally called a comicphile or comics buff.)

The first attempts at comics historiography began in the United States in the 1940s with the work of Thomas Craven, Martin Sheridan, and Coulton Waugh. It was not until the mid-1960s, with the publication of Jules Feiffer's ''The Great Comic Book Heroes'', that the field began to take root. Historiography became an accepted practice in the 1970s with the work of Maurice Horn, Jim Steranko, Ron Goulart, Bill Blackbeard, and Martin Williams. The late 1990s saw a wave of books celebrating American comics' centennial. Other notable writers on these topics include Will Jacobs, Gerard Jones, Rick Marschall, and R. C. Harvey.

Educational institutions

Comics studies is becoming increasingly more common at academic institutions across the world. Some notable examples include: Ohio State University, University of Florida, University of Toronto at Mississauga, and University of California Santa Cruz, among others. In Britain, growing interest in comics has led to the establishment of a center for comics studies, the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies (SCCS) at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Beside formal programs and degrees, it is common to see individual courses dedicated to comics and graphic novels in many educational institutions.

Sol M. Davidson's New York University thesis, ''Culture and the Comic Strips'', earned him the first PhD in comics in 1959, while in France, Jean-Christophe Menu was awarded a Doctorate in Art and Art Sciences in 2011 from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne after defending his thesis ''The Comics and its Double: Language and Frontiers of Comics: Practical, Theoretical and Editorial Prospects''.

In 2012, the University of Oregon offered the first Comics and Cartoon Studies minor in the United States. This Comic Studies program is currently directed by Benjamin Saunders.

Teesside University began offering a BA in Comics and Graphic Novels in 2014, as well as an MA in Comics from 2018. They have since appointed a team of renowned comics practitioners including Fionnuala Doran, Julian Lawrence, Con Chrisoulis, Nigel Kitching and Tara McInerney.

The University of Lancaster started offering a PhD degree in comics studies in 2015. The same year French comics studies scholar Benoît Peeters (a student of Roland Barthes) was appointed as the UK's first ever comics professor at Lancaster University.

Learned societies

In addition to its presence in academic institutions, comics have also been studied in interdisciplinary learned society. The first US association dedicated to supporting the study of graphic narrative and sequential art was the Comics Studies Society (CSS), launched in 2014 at ICAF. Its main focuses are "promoting the critical study of comics, improving comics teaching, and engaging in open and ongoing conversations about the comics world".

CSS also publishes the journal INKS (since 2017), organizes the Annual Conference of the Comics Studies Society (since 2018) and awards comics studies, books and articles with five annual prizes: the CSS Article Prize, the Hillary Chute Award for Best Graduate Student Paper, the Gilbert Seldes Prize for Public Scholarship, the Charles Hatfield Book Prize, and the CSS Prize for Edited Book Collections.

Other anglophone societies that can be mentioned are British Consortium of Comics Scholars (BCCS, created in 2012 by Paul Davies), Scottish Centre for Comics Studies (SCCS) and Canadian Society for the Study of Comics (CSSC, created in October 2010 by Sylvain Rheault).

The CSSC, also known as Société Canadienne pour l'Étude de la Bande Dessinée (SCEBC), is a bilingual community of academics focused in Canadian scholars but open for international associates. Among other activities, CSSC/SCEBD organizes an academic conference during Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

Scholarly publications

Some notable academic journals specifically dedicated to comics studies are listed below in alphabetical order:

*''CuCo, Cuadernos de cómic'' (published by the Editorial de Universidad de Alcalá)
*''European Comic Art''
*''ImageTexT'' (a peer reviewed, open-access journal that began in the spring of 2004 and is based at the University of Florida)
*''Image and Narrative'' (stylized as ''Image Narrative'', a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology)
*''Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society'' (published by the Ohio State University Press)
*'' International Journal of Comic Art''
*''Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics''
*''Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios sobre la Historieta''
*''Studies in Comics''
*''SANE: Sequential Art Narrative in Education'' (based at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln)
*''The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship'' (first published in January 2011; an open-access, researcher-led, peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Open Library of Humanities)

Conferences

Although presentations dedicated to comics are commonplace at conferences in many fields, entire conferences dedicated to this subject are becoming more common. There have been conferences at SAIC (International Comic Arts Forum, 2009), MMU (The International Bande Dessinée Society Conference), UTS (Sequential Art Studies Conference), Georgetown, Ohio State (Festival of Cartoon Art),"Regularly Held Conferences"
and Bowling Green (Comics in Popular Culture conference), and there is a yearly conference at University of Florida (Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels). Additionally, there is an annual Michigan State University Comics Forum, which brings together academics and professionals working in the industry. Notable regularly held movable conferences include the Comic Art and Comics Area of the Popular Culture Association of America and the conference of the International Society for Humor Studies.

The International Comic Arts Forum (ICAF), begun in 1995 at Georgetown University, has been described as one of the earliest academic initiatives for the study of comics. The German Gesellschaft für Comicforschung (ComFor, Society for Comics Studies) has organized yearly academic conferences since 2006. The Comics Arts Conference