animé par Laurence Petit (EMMA)

While comics scholars have examined the visual storytelling techniques and devices of comics – including page-layout, the use of repeated images, the gutter, the angle of vision, and others – the referencing or inclusion of different media has largely been ignored. I set out to explore how comics narration physically and conceptually moves between and across media boundaries, evoking different modes of representation to promote unique expressions and configurations of meaning.
Starting from the understanding that comics stand to be viewed productively not so much as a single, mixed, or even hybrid medium set in more than one semiotic mode, but as an “inherently intermedial form” (Kimmich 88), I will draw from several examples to examine the impact on reading of the interaction of different media and their conceptual and physical fusion in comics. I adopt an intermedial approach to examine intermediality in several comics. Focusing on how comics narration exists within a larger past and present media landscape, my presentation will be guided by the following questions: What type of reading do comics encourage? If, as I believe, comics’ intermedial storytelling practices asks readers to simultaneously draw from their knowledge of, and real-world experience with, other media, and delve deeper into the storyworld and the experiences of its characters, do those intermedial practices create a narrative situation that challenges popular theorizations of comics literacy?

References
Kimmich, Matt. “Disorienting Visualisations: Adapting Paul Auster’s City of Glass.” SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, vol.21, 2008. pp.87-104.

Short Bio
Nancy Pedri is Professor of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, where she has taught since 2006. She is an award-winning author and has published extensively in the fields of comics studies and word and image studies, including photography in literature. Her latest monographs on comics, Experiencing Visual Storyworlds: Focalization in Comics with Silke Horstkotte (Ohio State UP) and A Concise Dictionary of Comics (UP of Mississippi) were published in 2022.