ABSTRACT
It is in the nature of narratology to seek what is most universal, conventional, and general about narratives, and attempt to describe and analyse these features as effectively as possible. Yet, the relationship between what is general and what is unique, variable, or contra-standard in storytelling has also been one of the defining tensions throughout the history of this field. Thus, the impetus towards the generalisable has been regularly counterbalanced by paying attention to the ways in which individual artists and works of art explore, question, and modify common practices and invent new forms of storytelling. As narratology has reached outside the traditional object domain of text-based literary story, it has increasingly started to pay attention to the ways in which narrative transmission is media-related and how the qualities of the medium affect the way in which stories can be told. The range of potentially relevant contexts for studying comics in humanities and social sciences is, in principle then, infinite.
