ABSTRACT
Comics are an “infinitely flexible [narrative] medium” (Mitchell, “Public Conversation” 20). Indeed, comics from a variety of genres—graphic memoir, fictional comics, graphic pathographies, graphic journalism, and educational comics—often combine different visual media in the service of storytelling (Pedri). The “hybridity arising out of the encounter with the techniques of contemporary art” (Groensteen 6) fosters what W. Hallet, writing about multimodal novels, calls a “multisemiotic reading” (168) or what comics scholars H. Chute and P. Jagoda call a “ludic engagement produced by a range of forms both ‘old’ and ‘new’” (1). These reproduced images engage readerly movements that not only extend across media, styles, and visuals, but also across worlds: they function as material archives whose meanings are generated within and beyond the narrative world.
This chapter will be structured according to three types of images that most often present in comics: infographics, maps, and photographs. Sections will consider how these popular visuals have been theorized by art historians and visual culture theorists to assess how they gain in meaning within the narrative structure of comics. Findings from visual and multimodal narratology (Mikkonen; Ryan; Thon) and social approaches to images (Mitchell; Rose) will guide my analysis of examples from a variety of comics genres to present readers with a broad yet critical survey of how comics can create bridges between media, visuals, and worlds.
In positioning cartooning in relation to infographics, maps, and photographs, the aims of the chapter are twofold: to explore the narrative salience of different types of images in several comics genres and to demonstrate that these visuals are often used to bridge physical and imagined worlds within the fictional world, but also between the fictional world and the real world. By foregrounding bridging processes, the chapter stresses how all visuals in comics are closely intertwined, drawing readers into the narrative world and also out into the real world. When different types of images are reproduced in comics, readers are urged to consider both the particular image and its fictional context as well as the image type’s social histories to reach meaning.
