ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces graphic forms and practice as 'meaningful postcolonial work'. It then looks to a field of research that has broadly employed two distinct approaches to think about comics: first, in terms of (visual/verbal) textualities and next, in relation to (social/popular) cultures. Early structural and semiotic studies of graphic language systems and grammars, image-semiologies, and comics-narratologies, primarily in French scholarship, designated comics as complex, encoded texts and located them within a theoretical paradigm of 'meaningful' structures. Comics codes were then made problematic and characterized variously as ideological, deep, or (de)constructive by later Marxist, psychoanalytic, or postmodern/poststructuralist revisions within a continuing critical tradition. It then discusses the study of postcolonial transnational comic acknowledges a turn towards the examination of disparate practices, representational and socio-economic, derived from transformed colonial institutions that are then linked to 'contemporary notions of the global'.
