ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests a sterile concern with the technical aspects of a medium that is beloved above all for its unruliness and uninhibited imagination. The effort to catalogue formal resources has, moreover, often been coupled with a search for definitions, and definitional debates have escalated into skirmishes over origins, with starting points determined on the basis of the presence (or absence) of certain components. Belgian communications theorist Philippe Marion proposes a (plural) poetics of comics that would acknowledge its intersection with other cultural traditions, but that would nonetheless investigate the phenomenon of "mediagenie": the inter-penetration between an expressive project and the potential of the medium in other words, the nitty-gritty of pages, panels, and graphic lines. British cinema and comics historian Hugo Frey, Baetens argues that the advent of the graphic novel has introduced more complex word/image relationships to comics, "not just irony but also unreliable storytelling, multiple storytelling, and self reflectivity".
