Answering foundational questions like what is a comic and how do comics work in original and imaginative ways, this book adapts established, formalist approaches to explaining the experience of reading comics. Taking stock of a multitude of case studies and examples,The Comics Formdemonstrates that any object can be read as a comic so long as it displays a set of relevant formal features. Drawing from the worlds of art criticism and literary studies to put forward innovative new ways of thinking and talking about comics, this book challenges certain terminology and such theorizing terms as 'narrate' which have historically been employed somewhat loosely.
In unpacking the way in which sequenced images work,The Comics Formintroduces tools of analysis such as discourse and diegesis; details further qualities of visual representation such as resemblance, custom norms, style, simplification, exaggeration, style modes, transparency and specification, perspective and framing, focalization and ocularization; and applies formal art analysis to comics images. This book also examines the conclusions readers draw from the way certain images are presented and what they trigger, and offers clear definitions of the roles and features of text-narrators, image-narrators, and image-text narrators in both non-linguistic images and word-images.
Chris Gavaleris Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, USA. He is also the author of
On the Origina of Superheroes: From the Big Bang to Action Comics No. 1(2015) and
Superhero Comics(2017) and
Creating Comics(2021), both publishing by Bloomsbury. Since 2021, he has been series editor of Bloomsbury Comics Studies.
The Comics Formis a thoughtful excavation of the definitions that are central to the study of comics and sequenced images. Exacting and clear, Chris Gavaler's book unpacks critical conversations about how the lines, panels, and pages of comics mlsI
![The Comics Form: The Art of Sequenced Images [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/7/6/3/2_7194364.jpg "The Comics Form: The Art of Sequenced Images [Paperback]")