ABSTRACT
A number of comics scholars, such as Scott McCloud and Charles Hatfield, advocate for reader response criticism as an integral component of Comics Studies. In light of recent scholarship on the postcolonial, transnational, and translational facets of comics production, circulation, consumption, and evaluation, this chapter advocates for a reexamination of the relationships, orientations, and subject positions alternately engendered by or precluded through encounters with comics. The unique series of inscription techniques—writing, drawing, gridding, etc.—comprises simultaneously the medial specificity that marks comics as such and the medial plurality that threatens a unilateral approach to reading comics. After a discussion of graphic orientations, the chapter examines the value of disorienting literacies by presenting two case studies: "Egypt's first graphic novel," Metro, and the Lebanese comics journal Samandal. Physical reorientations of the reader both within and without linguistic translation occur in the Lebanese trilingual comics journal, Samandal.
