ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three issues pertaining to the presentation of minds in comics and graphic narratives: the mimetic aspect of the image, the problem of free indirect discourse (FID), and the interaction between visual focalisation and verbal narration in first-person narration. It discusses several examples that all portray characters in action within social environments. The showing of the characters and their actions from panel to panel creates a sense of a continuing tale, and establishes what Alan Palmer calls a characters' 'frame'. Study of the cognitive construction of consciousness, especially with regard to behaviourist fictional narrative and contextual character portrayal, can be helpful in understanding the presentation of minds in comics. Recent narratological work on fictional minds is important in pointing out the often unjustified privileging of 'intrinsic' character portrayal in classical narratological approaches, based on modernist figural literary narratives of inner speech, at the expense of reported speech and thought or the showing of a mind in action.
