There is a type of picture book in which this dramatic leaning is very noticeable: those books which have adapted elements of the comic strip. The adaptation of comic book elements in these books is particularly interesting in relation to the idea, already mentioned, that a form of picture book is evolving in which the pictures and words join together to tell the story. Like picture books, the comics use pictures and text to tell their story, but they have grown out of the tradition of caricature and cartoon, rather than out of the novel and folktale as picture books did, so the emphasis on the art as the primary giver of information is natural.

Picture books and comics together represent a unique means of telling a story, a form of print narrative that is in many ways more dramatic than literary. Although they physically appear as books, they imitate dramatic performance, and the drawings become the counterparts of what would be presented in the staging of a theater or film production. (1995: 5)

Spaulding resorts to the terminology of film studies and calls these hybrid forms 'storyboard books', thus conceptually bridging the gulf between picture books, comics, film and theatre performances. What ties these visual narrative media together is an increasing reliance on showing: as Dancygier argues, even in prose a strong tendency towards visualisation and 'acting out' scenes can be detected, but this becomes much stronger in the context of visual narrative media, ranging from a balance in traditional picture books to pure performance in staged plays. This is how Spaulding comments on the transformation: "Traditional narrative forms tend to give the audience a sense of detachment, of reading something which has already concluded, while the dramatic forms gives [*sic*] a sense of immediacy, of watching a situation unfold as it is is [*sic*] happening" (1995: 15). Generally speaking, comics take the exact middle ground on this scale, wedding traditional narration with dramatisation – literally and figuratively – but more often than not leaning towards the latter. Readers who encounter comics for the first time tend to treat them as heavily illustrated prose texts and forget that they are also stage plays in a sense. The comics historian Robert Petersen, for example, believes that the "rise of the graphic narrative in Europe parallels the rise in popular melodrama, and it is in this direction that we find some important similarities" (2011: xvi). He goes on to argue that "graphic narratives rely on representing things in a way that is predicated on our cognition of how we make sense of our known world. In this respect, the visual elements in a graphic narrative are like objects on stage: they are animated with potential signification, adopting meanings beyond what they may simply represent in the everyday world" (2011: xvii). Writing about the hybridisation of picture books and comics, Spaulding offers the following observation: "Staging/Design is very important to any dramatic production, since it provides mood and flavor; in picture books the staging is an important part of the basic narrative. The author/ artist, as playwright, also becomes director and cameraman, set designer and casting director, location manager and even costumer" (1995: 37). In the following part we look at how cognitive theories and stage metaphors help to make sense of a medium that often combines retrospective verbal narration with the immediacy of dramatisation.

# **4 Cognitive Approaches to Comics**

# **4.1 Synopsis**

In part 1 I used the term 'synopsis' to refer to Wolfgang Iser's notion that readers generate meaning by 'seeing things together', which is guided by textual structures that activate previous themes or gestalten that have become part of the horizon. I developed this idea further by adding conceptual integration theory in part 3, which elaborates on the possible mappings between spaces. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner identify at least fifteen vital relations (cf. 2003: 101) that become compressed in the blend. In both cases 'synopsis' is a metaphor for cognitive operations that are happening in front of the mind's eye. If we now turn to the architecture of a typical comics page, we find a conceptual illustration and materialisation of this reading model: the fragmented pieces of the narrative – the panels – are separated from each other by a blank space in between – the gutter – that requires readers to cognitively bridge the gulf. Even without any knowledge of gestalt psychology or blending, all comics scholars are challenged to explain how readers are supposed to make sense of this "mosaic art" (Nodelman 2012: 438). As a visualisation of an otherwise cognitive process the medium's layout also illustrates Iser's theme and horizon structure, in the sense that the panel(s) attended to by the readers form the present theme and the others around it the horizon. As the 'wandering viewpoint' of readers moves on to the next panel, the previous one becomes part of the background: the "theme of one moment becomes the horizon against which the next segment takes on its actuality" (1980: 198; see also Dewey 2005: 199, 211). The figure-ground relationship is very strong in comics and we shall return to this idea again later in this part.

One has to be careful, though, not to take this comparison too literally. Iser's idea of reading is clearly not concerned with the integration of one sentence – or panel, for that matter – after the other into the ongoing story, but with the question of how the foregrounded elements and revelations of the present moment or scene relate to what individual readers have experienced so far as central to their understanding of the narrative. Iser's approach is holistic and his theory of gestalt-forming rests on translinear integration, which is going to be an important argument against the existing linear conceptualisations of reading comics. Strictly speaking, meaning is not based on a correspondence between textual elements, but mappings between mental spaces that have been activated and set up for mutual illumination by these narrative structures. One could also say that readers relate their current impressions, experiences and ideas to previous ones and begin to see larger patterns. At the same time, the panels on a double page of a comic are physically present as material/narrative anchors and remain so until readers turn the page.

A focus on cognitive approaches is not meant to discredit the "responseinviting structures, which impel the reader to grasp the text" (Iser 1980: 34), since they are central to reader-response criticism's understanding of narratives as blueprints or musical scores. The same principle is foundational to a number of cognitive (literary) theories. Catherine Emmott speaks of "long-distance links" (2004: 11) that connect contextual frames across entire narratives and Barbara Dancygier explains the role of narrative anchors as prompts for blending (cf. 2012: 42, 50). These are metonymic links that may evoke entire frames with a single word or image, sometimes using no more than a pronoun or a symbol. There is a whole spectrum of possibilities for blending in comics that ranges from literal synopsis – studying the section of the mosaic that a double page has to offer as a narrative unit, to the more elaborate conceptual integration of mental spaces that is triggered by textual structures. In comics these prompts take the form of verbal and/or visual signs, often in combination.

Comics studies already has two widely established concepts that resemble aspects of conceptual integration, which are Scott McCloud's 'closure' (cf. 1994: 63–74) and Thierry Groensteen's 'braiding' (cf. 2007: 145–9, 158). The first covers meaning-making processes on the micro-structural level of consecutive panels, while the second looks at translinear relations. Groensteen argues that the 'iconic solidarity' (cf. 2007: 17–20) between panels establishes links across the entire network and helps to activate and foreground stored memories of previous scenes that are scrutinised and re-contextualised in light of new revelations. It seems that he based his key concept of iconic solidarity and the polysyntactic function of the gutter on Iser's *The Act of Reading* (cf. 2007: 114, 175). Importantly, the "moving viewpoint" (Iser 1980: 16) does not coincide with any of the textual structures or perspectives that are presented sequentially – but also concurrently, in the case of comics – to the readers (cf. Iser 1980: 35; see also 21, 47, 96).

Groensteen's concept of 'overdetermination' (cf. 2007: 29) resembles Iser's notion of foregrounding, as it ascribes a privileged spot to an element of the composition, which may result from the position of the panel on the page, its salience (e.g. size, shape), or its importance to the scene or the entire network (iconic solidarity). The gaps have a grammatical function in the narrative and invite both sequential and translinear blending, for which the groundwork can be found in Iser's theory: "an 'overdetermined text' causes the reader to engage in an active

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process of composition, because it is he who has to structure the meaning potential arising out of the multifarious connections between the semantic levels of the text" (Iser 1980: 49). This process relies on a silent understanding between creators and readers that narratives can be meaningfully reconstructed (cf. Groensteen 2013: 19). At the same time, this does not mean that readers have to detect and actively pursue every single possible connection while reading, but to pick up the most important drift of a scene, based on its foregrounded and repeated elements.

Iser's retroactive effect, the process by which previously formed gestalten are "constantly evoked in a new context and so modified by new correlates that instigate a restructuring of past syntheses" (1980: 111), is a purely cognitive operation. In this case, a character may appear in a very different light in the present scene, which challenges readers to reconcile this realisation with his or her previous behaviour. Contrary to computational models of cognition, this does not involve filling the slots of mental models and thus updating files, but holding two specific social interactions involving the same character in working memory, exploring potential correspondences and obvious differences and actively working on a reconciliation of the two on a higher level of understanding (cf. Pfister 2000: 172). This can result in a tentative new gestalt or blend, but it could also mean that readers have to operate with two competing explanations for a certain amount of time. The fragmentation of a single character into several versions of itself is not unusual in autobiographical writing, where we usually encounter different younger selves that may resist easy blending or what Dancygier calls 'viewpoint compression'. Chapter 4 is concerned with the question of how these two theories of reading comics – McCloud's and Groensteen's – compare to the cognitive approaches I introduced in the third part. The fragmentation of the comics narrative and the tensions between the disparate elements have to be extended, however, to the relation between words and images, which also become blended into a unified perceptual whole.

Comics scholars, who – judging from their bibliographies – have never heard of conceptual integration theory, use very similar terms and concepts to describe how reading takes place in this medium. Here is an example from Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith and Paul Levitz's *The Power of Comics*: "The chief task of comic book creators is to reduce the imagined story to images encapsulated in panels. The reader must then work at blending those panels into a narrative experience" (2015: 153). In most cases, panels are not snapshots, single moments or atomistic building blocks of comics narratives, but already blends themselves. They contain compressed vital relations for which Duncan, Smith and Levitz, following Will Eisner, use the term "encapsulation" (2015: 108; see also Eisner 2006: 39). Readers, then, have to find ways to further re-blend them into larger units – a process that Iser calls gestalt-forming. However, the blends within single panels may be intricately layered and highly compressed, which means that readers have to 'unpack' them first. In this sense, compression and decompression are both creative and receptive processes. Political cartoons, for example, often showcase a high degree of compression that challenges readers to identify and understand the whole network of mappings.

Charles Hatfield, to name a second example, describes the work of Jack Kirby in the following manner: "The power of drawings […] stems from the tension between reading the image as a single moment and reading it as a synchronous compression of an extended length of time" (2012: 47; see also Baetens & Frey 2015: 166). According to Hatfield and other scholars (cf. e.g. Mikkonen 2017: 55), there is a fundamental ambiguity about the intensity of temporal compression in comics panels. Hatfield introduces the term 'synchronism' for the compression of time in *Alternative Comics* (cf. 2005: 54), where he discusses so-called 'splash pages'. These are panels that cover entire pages and are typical of superhero comics. They foreground epic confrontations between the eponymous heroes and their arch enemies. Again referring to Kirby, he states that, although his "crowded spreads seem to capture discrete and explosive moments of action, in fact they represent extended spans of time in synoptic fashion" (2005: 54). Not surprisingly, many comics scholars, but especially the narratologists among them, are fascinated by the representation of time in the medium, which results in exceptionally long chapters on temporal structures (cf. e.g. McCloud 1994: 94–117; Schüwer 2008: 209–302; Mikkonen 2017: 33–70). In the context of reader-response criticism, however, the technicalities of representing and measuring time and space play a less significant role, as an exact reconstruction of events is not required for a successful transaction with a narrative. Yet, the ambiguity of comics panels as temporal blends is not the only challenge that narratologists have to face.

Not only does the direct transfer of analytical categories and procedures from film studies and other narrative media pose a problem (cf. Mikkonen 2017: 2), but the medium itself ostentatiously foregrounds the need for active readers' participation. Martin Schüwer is an interesting case in point, as he sees a clear connection between time, memory and readers' reception of a narrative text (cf. 2008: 242, 244), but he is reluctant to compromise his narratological approach. Therefore, he has to circumvent readers' involvement by introducing a 'memory of the comic' that resembles what Iser calls 'textual structures', Dancygier 'narrative anchors' and Groensteen 'braiding' (cf. 2008: 241). These prompts are so specific, Schüwer claims, that readers only have to follow the given instructions (cf.

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2008: 242), which encourage them to become analysts of the narrative and verify what the text strongly suggests (cf. 2008: 244). Acknowledging that McCloud's theory of closure has a strong cognitive orientation (cf. 2008: 275), he comments that blending in these cases is straightforward, as the textual structures only allow for a single resolution (cf. 2008: 276).

Kai Mikkonen seems to be more sceptical about the power of narratology to explain how reading works. He distinguishes narratology from "the proper interpretation of narrative texts and works" and demotes it to a specific stage in the reading process, especially when "the aim of analysis is to relate the narrative text to particular contexts of meaning" (2017: 9). Even within the narrow field of academic studies, he only grants it limited usefulness: "As a heuristic tool in comics scholarship, narratology can be conceptualised as a kind of preliminary stage of interpretation that directs our attention to the narrative features in a given work and helps to analyse and clarify the significance of those features" (2007: 11). He attributes its limited relevance to its predominantly generic orientation: "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" (2017: 277). Having put narratology in its place, he then follows a traditional path, largely naming his chapters after such classical categories as time, narration, focalisation or characterisation (cf. 2017: v-vi). From a cognitive studies point of view, the most interesting chapter seems to be "Character as a Means of Narrative Continuity" (cf. 2017: 90–108), as it is concerned with characters as narrative anchors to counteract the fragmentation of comics narration. At first, Mikkonen stresses their importance as centres of attention and even refers to Alan Palmer's concept of 'aspectuality' later in the book (cf. e.g. 2017: 120). Since Palmer's well-founded criticism of classical narratology (cf. e.g. 2004: 28) is incompatible with Mikkonen's approach, the latter has to defend the particularisation of textual analysis as being motivated by the medium's multimodality:

The point in thus focusing on and isolating the question of the synthetic role of the character, i.e. their continuity-building function, from other considerations pertaining to characters, such as focalisation, characterisation (characters' person-like qualities), or the representation of speech and thought, is to better cover the visual and multimodal means of connectivity employed in comics … (2017: 91)

In the end, Mikkonen simply claims that characters are easy to identify and they propel the action, which he needs for an explanation of 'continuity editing', especially "*match on action*", in the comics medium: "Thus, the character's (or characters') activity creates a visual bridge between the gaps – that is, the shots – and conveys a sense of continuity in the scene. The effectiveness of this technique relies on its ability to suggest a simultaneous sense of temporal and spatial coherence" (2017: 93). This unites three of (comics) narratology's fundamental shortcomings: characters are made to serve a function in (visual) plot development; narratological categories from other media (e.g. editing, shots) are directly imported without sufficiently discussing whether this is appropriate or not and the readers' role is reduced to the passive acceptance of continuity editing's supreme capacity for presenting action in a transparent way. Concerning the last point: I cannot shake the impression that many comics theories are still heavily invested in the superhero genre, for which continuous action plays a much larger role than in autobiographical work.

Mikkonen uses the very first scene of Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples's epic science fiction tale *Saga* (2012) as his main example, which he begins to describe in the following way:

The first panels of the first scene, which depict the birth of the couple's daughter Hazel, then confirm that the story is about these two characters [they are also on the cover]. Both Alana and Marko are shown in close-up images that focus on their emotional states and intimate relationship. The first panel is an extreme close-up of Alana, who is clearly suffering, while the second panel, an establishing image, shows her lying on a table with someone between her legs, helping in what is evidently a childbirth scene. The two characters' emotional engagement with one another is then portrayed by an image and reverse image sequence where we first see the horned man Marko looking tenderly at Alana and commending the winged woman for her beauty, and then see Alana, suffering labour pains, looking less fondly back at him and responding with a sarcastic comment … (2017: 92)

What does not become sufficiently clear in all of this is that they are a mixedrace couple on the run who are persecuted for miscegenation. Marko has to assist in the birth of his daughter Hazel as they cannot go to a hospital without being imprisoned or worse. Mikkonen, however, uses the scene to explain 'continuity editing' in comics, which is fine in a study on comics narratology, but it also illustrates the limitations he addresses at the beginning of the book. Both monographs, Schüwer's and Mikkonen's, are excellent in what they set out to do, contributing to transmedial narratology in significant ways and revising concepts from classical narratology and film studies for this hybrid medium, but they also showcase how little they have to say about the cognitive processes that lead readers from textual prompts via tentative gestalt-forming to a complete reading (cf. Mikkonen 2017: 34–5).

My understanding of a cognitive approach to comics is broad and inclusive. In *Contemporary Comics Storytelling* (2013) Karin Kukkonen claims that "cognitive

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approaches […] are virtually nonexistent in comics studies" (2013a: 5), but this has to be seen from the perspective of cognitive literary studies and Theory of Mind in particular. From a reader-response or cognitive linguistics point of view there have been quite a number of attempts to apply cognitive approaches to comics (cf. Stamenković & Tasić 2014: 157). As I am going to demonstrate in greater detail, the link between McCloud's 'closure' and Iser's model is gestalt psychology, whereas the conceptual foundation of braiding in Groensteen's *The System of Comics* seems to come directly from Iser (cf. 2007: 114). In this sense, and despite the otherwise semiotic orientation of Groensteen's books (cf. 2013: 30, 55), I consider comics studies as already permeated by a cognitive orientation, even if the links have not been made sufficiently clear and the theories are not based directly on cognitive sciences.

Kukkonen acknowledges this common ground later in her book (cf. 2013a: 14, 27–8, 36–8) and traces her cognitive approach back to "hermeneutics, close reading, and rhetoric" (2013a: 7). Like Iser and Rosenblatt she conceptualises reading as a back and forth between the clues that the text provides (cf. 2013a: 13) and the readers' "processes of meaning-making" (2013a: 7; see also 14, 27), thus opposing the idea of the inherent meaning of signs (cf. 2013a: 23). All the widely used textbooks and theories in comics studies propose some form of aesthetic reading or cognitive approach to comics, even though the connections are not always made explicit. Duncan, Smith and Levitz dedicate a whole chapter to "Experiencing the Story" (2015: 137–62), in which they emphasise the active role of the reader, who is faced with a fragmented narrative that has to be puzzled together. They are among the few who also acknowledge the affective responses of readers alongside their cognitive involvement (cf. 2015: 140).

A necessary qualification to my sweeping claim that the popular approaches to comics are essentially cognitive, has to be that they frequently single out aspects of the theories I have presented thus far without looking at the larger picture. They may contain passing references to reader-response criticism or Wolfgang Iser (cf. Groensteen 2007: 114; Hatfield 2005: xiii-xiv), a traditional schema approach to comics (cf. Lefèvre 2000), a grounding in Theory of Mind (cf. Kukkonen 2013a; 2013b), a focus on embodiment (cf. Kukkonen 2013a; 2013b; Baetens & Frey 2015: 174–6) or the suggestion that blending theory may be a suitable approach to comics (cf. Forceville 2016; Stamenković & Tasić 2014; Oakley 1998). In addition to that, comics scholars sometimes describe the reading process in such a way that it closely resembles blending theory. Dietrich Grünewald's concept of 'reading synthetically' (cf. Grünewald 2000: 41) is a good example. This correspondence is probably due to Wolfgang Kemp's application of gestalt psychology and reader-response criticism to art history (cf. Grünewald 2000: 42, 101–2; Kemp 1989). A number of teaching materials and academic studies in the Anglophone world directly reference Louise M. Rosenblatt in the context of reading picture books or comics in the classroom (cf. e.g. Arizpe et al. 2014: 37, Bakis 2014: 4), but this is not further explored in light of recent developments in cognitive studies.

In this study I have persistently highlighted the links that connect John Dewey with Louise M. Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, the tradition of teaching literature in the classroom, experiential approaches within cognitive literary studies, such as Monika Fludernik's natural narratology and Caracciolo's enactivism, and ultimately cognitive linguistics and blending. What connects most these seemingly diverse theories is a commitment to experientiality and embodied cognition, which is mirrored in Kukkonen's reading of comics (cf. 2013a: 7). Therefore, the experiential basis of blending phenomena needs to be addressed again. This serves to connect cognitive linguistics with the visual depiction of characters in specific scenes (contextual frames) and anticipates the centrality of embodiment in autobiographical studies (cf. Smith & Watson 2010: 49–54). Kukkonen argues that "a lot of the meaning readers get from textual elements does not depend on their competence in a code, but on more basic cognitive processes" (2013a: 18; see also 13, 20–1), by which she means "that a good part of our meaning-making is indeed grounded in our bodily experience of the world" (2013b: 9). I am less sure about the notion of "embodied simulations" (Kukkonen 2015: 54) and more inclined to believe that we learn to read social contexts, body postures and facial expressions based on personal experiences and social interactions in the enactivist sense (cf. Kukkonen 2013b: 15–16).

I am going to combine an exploration of embodiment in comics with a study of cartooning and Rodolphe Töpffer's views on his craft to arrive at a more differentiated understanding which aspects of comics narration are easily recognisable and which require readers' active involvement. In many situations characters' experiences are transparent and easily accessible, which means that we can read them 'like a book'. Foregrounding, repetition and especially contextualisation grant readers access to characters' thoughts and feelings without requiring a degree in psychology. Still, there are always nuances, ambiguous emotional states and larger thematic concerns that are easily overlooked or dismissed in a quick read-through, which is why the opportunity to return to the text, reread parts of it and negotiate its meaning in groups is so central to educational settings. The experiences of characters in specific contexts and the readers' aesthetic responses take precedence over efferent reading. In a similar fashion, Groensteen criticises the reduction of reading to the extraction of facts, and of narratives to plot points: it is not enough, he argues, "to find the intelligibility of

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the story in order to follow the episodes", as it "constitutes a formidable reduction of the work to the sphere of the action and of the event, a mutilation that retains only the actantial chain, which is only interested in what happens to the protagonists" (2007: 137).

Yet, before any of these aspects can be duly addressed, a basic clarification of terms is required to counteract a certain confusion over what comics are (cf. e.g. Pointner 2013: 27–9, 32–3, 39; Ludwig 2015: 299; Kuty 2015: 173). This has been provoked by the intrusion of so-called 'graphic novels' into the institutions of book culture (cf. Ditschke 2009; Hausmanninger 2013) and aggravated by misguided academic attempts to drive a wedge between comics with an ISBN number and those without (cf. Baetens & Frey 2015; Hescher 2016; for the distinction: de Vos 2005: 30). Since then, graphic novels have dominated the discourse about comics in educational settings (cf. e.g. Hallet 2012a; Elsner 2013), with the notable exception of Christian Ludwig and Frank Erik Pointner's *Teaching Comics in the Foreign Language Classroom* (2013). In the next chapter I want to elaborate on the claim that graphic novels are a separate genre or medium and mark the next evolutionary step in the transformation of pulp fiction into respectable literature. These considerations may seem unnecessarily cerebral; yet, without clarifying the subject matter of this study, all other observations would lose some of their relevance.

For most of this part I follow Charles Hatfield's concept of four structural tensions that readers have to face and overcome when engaging with comic books (cf. 2005: 32–67). Not only does Hatfield reference Iser's *The Act of Reading* directly (cf. 2005: xiii), but he also makes a strong case in favour of reader-response criticism: "The reader's responsibility for negotiating meaning can never be forgotten" (2005: xiv). He or she is faced with a "patchwork of different images, shapes, and symbols", which "presents the reader with a surfeit of interpretative options" (2005: xiv). Thus, Hatfield's tensions can be brought in line with Iser's basic mechanism of meaning-making: "Between segments and cuts there is an empty space, giving rise to a whole network of possible connections which will endow each segment or picture with its determinate meaning" (1980: 196). Both Iser's concept of mutual illumination as well as Fauconnier and Turner's global insight are predicated on the idea that we can reach a higher level of understanding through the integration of frames whose structures are not easily compatible. In this sense, Hatfield's tensions can be said to show a certain resemblance to John Dewey's notion of defamiliarisation:

Without internal tension there would be a fluid rush to a straightaway mark; there would be nothing that could be called development and fulfillment. The existence of resistance defines the place of intelligence in the production of an object of fine art. The difficulties to be overcome in bringing about the proper reciprocal adaptation of parts constitute what in intellectual work are problems. As in activity dealing with predominantly intellectual matters, the material that constitutes a problem has to be converted into a means for its solution. It cannot be sidestepped. (2005: 143)

Hatfield's tensions provide a helpful and sufficiently systematic approach to comics, which foregrounds the contrast between words and images, panels and series/sequences, panels and networks (braiding) as well as the meaning and the materiality of books. This covers all the essential elements or building blocks of comics, but, more significantly, they are introduced as relations rather than isolated features. I am going to integrate my arguments concerning a cognitive approach to comics within these four sub-sections.

Since cartooning represents the most prominent visual element of comics, it plays a significant role in all four tensions. To establish the necessary groundwork for a discussion of Hatfield, a separate chapter is dedicated to the most popular drawing style in comics. Here I want to highlight two important connections: the one is the close tie between comics and political cartooning in terms of "amplification through simplification" (McCloud 1994: 30/4). The other concerns the art of blending, which is central to newspaper cartoons, where double-scope networks are a widespread phenomenon. This provides a useful background when discussing the narrativity of images and the potential to compress a story into a single picture. Other important aspects of comics narratology, such as narration, focalisation, characterisation, or empathy, are addressed in the immediate context of understanding autobiographical comics. This also includes the more specific aspects of Dancygier's theory that I introduced in part 3. Instead of discussing all the individual problems comics narratology is still facing (cf. e.g. Mikkonen 2017: 9, 11), I prefer to limit myself to one genre only and explore how narratological theories can or cannot help to elucidate its specific structures.

The final chapter is dedicated to a case study of the first chapter of *Blankets*, which serves to establish an integrated approach that combines all the relevant elements I present piecemeal throughout this part. It should become obvious how the textual structures set up a network of clues that invite certain types of blends. I chose Craig Thompson's *Blankets* (2003) as my prime example and source of illustrations for a number of reasons. The first is my ultimate concern with autobiographical writing in the comics medium, so it makes sense to stay within that premise and not expand the discussion to other genres. Up to this point I have tried to keep the arguments as universally applicable as possible to literary studies and the teaching of literary texts in the classroom. However, it is time to become more specific and lay the groundwork for the final part. Secondly, *Blankets* is a modern classic and widely available. Despite their spectacular rise as the new darlings of book culture, comics are still prone to go out of print and may no longer be available. Thirdly, this autobiography introduces a variety of interesting tensions. It combines easy accessibility and sophisticated storytelling. It has a mostly covert verbal narrator, which automatically leads to a strong focus on visual storytelling. Many passages rely on an exaggerated cartoon style and others on a more restrained form of self-expression. The book presents an almost generic coming-of-age story against a very specific cultural background of religious fundamentalism and combines a simple, relatable narrative of falling in love for the first time with a more complex meditation on art, love/ sexuality and religion. *Blankets* can be both brutally honest and "outrageously beautiful" (Wolk 2007: 209) in its renderings of the past. It weds self-indulgent, seemingly unreflected nostalgia for a particular time in Thompson's life with a new orientation towards the future. For better or worse, it tells a very personal, autobiographical story with a creative license that is made possible by the label 'illustrated novel'. Furthermore, the narrative represents an interesting merger of two sub-genres of autobiographical writing, the coming-of-age narrative and the portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man. Fourthly, it highlights the often problematic, but unavoidable practice of suggesting layers of complexity for the protagonist, while reducing other characters to stereotypes. In Alison Bechdel's *Fun Home* and Art Spiegelman's *MAUS* fathers play an essential role, so they are granted more space and complexity than is usually the case in autobiographical writing. Douglas Wolk, who is otherwise highly appreciative of Thompson's work (cf. 2007: 208), cannot help but observe that "he barely gives anyone else in the book credit for being a whole person" (2007: 208). It is therefore necessary to read against the grain and develop enough critical distance to notice how *Blankets* manipulates readers into accepting the victimisation of the protagonist as a grave injustice and siding with him for the rest of the narrative. Thompson reduces the verbal narrator, who is predestined to comment on the events from a distance, to a bare minimum and lets the scenes play out as they supposedly happened, thus foregrounding the experiences of his teenage selves. Wolk even diagnoses a lack of empathy (cf. 2007: 209), but I would explain Craig's myopic view as a faithful rendering of adolescent self-absorption. His love interest Raina is rarely depicted as a real person, but very much as the target of his juvenile adoration:

*Blankets* is almost as starry-eyed and self-important as Thompson apparently was at the time. He never gives her anything like interiority or suggests that she might have had any significance other than being a perfect, stainless Celia for his work. That lack of empathy extends to almost all the other characters in the book, who tend to be either saintly or despicable – the latter category includes a long list of hard-line Christians who terrorized Thompson in his youth and adolescence. (Wolk 2007: 209)

This may sound unfair, but there is a grain of truth in Wolk's observations that cannot be easily dismissed. Consequently, a reading of this text requires a complimentary focus on Raina's situation in life. Chapters III-VII of *Blankets* provide readers with enough information on her chaotic family life to establish a different perspective, but this has to be actively encouraged, as students are tempted to side with Craig. Many other characters are more or less silenced and rarely get a chance to demonstrate their basic humanity. They play roles in Thompson's re-enactment of his childhood and teenage years, but the director/ playwright decides what these roles are. Craig's father, for example, is reduced to a monstrous antagonist in chapter I and rarely reaches more complexity than that of a Christian fundamentalist. Only towards the end of the narrative does he show some redeeming qualities. Accordingly, Craig's salvation is predicated on transcending his upbringing instead of attempting any form of reconciliation. Again, Wolk is very astute in his commentary: "In *Blankets*, he casts himself as a confused young hero, achieving his solipsistic victory by casting off the people and ideology that threaten to bring him down" (2007: 213).

I have frequently referred to Werner Delanoy's essay on teaching *Dead Poets Society* in the classroom (cf. 1996), which is a great illustration of how hard it is to read against the grain of a powerful narrative. I have to address this point again in part 5, but for the moment it is enough to realise that there is an ethical issue concerning the biographical writing that autobiographies automatically entail. Very often even the closest friends and relatives become secondary characters in order to stress the protagonist's uniqueness, pitiful isolation and heroic struggle against all odds. These tensions turn *Blankets* into an interesting reading text for older students, as the basic storyline that everyone manages to follow can then be complemented with activities that take the students back to specific scenes and invite a more detailed reading of the text. And, arriving at my final argument, readers of this study, who are introduced to comics for the very first time, may find it easier to have a single text as the main point of reference instead of being confronted with a mass of widely different styles and sub-genres, which become more relevant in the final part.

# **4.2 Definitions**

Throughout this study I have referred to comics as a narrative medium, despite the fact that both of these terms have been contested. While there may be a widely established consensus that comics tell stories (cf. Stein & Thon 2015: 6–8;

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Thon 2015: 67; Baetens & Frey 2015: 7–8; Duncan, Smith & Levitz 2015: xi-xiii; Eisner 2006: 5, 127; Kukkonen 2013b: 49; Groensteen 2013: 5; 2007: 8–12; Wolk 2007: 11; Hatfield 2005: x, xiv), Stephan Packard is correct in pointing out that this may not always be the case (cf. 2013; 2016). Groensteen, for example, discusses "abstract comics" (2013: 9–10), named after an anthology published by Fantagraphics, but one could also add visual poems to this category of nonnarrative comics (cf. 2013: 30–3). Within the context of a philological subject and for the purposes of teaching comics in the classroom this simplification is still warranted, as comics are specifically chosen as narrative texts. However, reading comics as literature comes with its own problems, as classical, post-classical and transmedial narratologists have turned their attention to the medium, often applying concepts, terminologies and analytical tools that do not quite fit (cf. Mikkonen 2017: 2). Mikkonen's monograph (cf. 2017), but also Jan-Noël Thon's publications (cf. e.g. 2014; 2015) bear witness to this ongoing struggle with and negotiation of existing concepts and tools for the purposes of narratological enquiry.

Concerning the second term, it is essential to differentiate between comics as a medium and different artistic forms or formats of publishing content, which are comic strips, comic books and graphic novels in most cases (cf. Fingeroth 2008: 4), but one could also include (Franco-Belgian) albums and web comics. While the choice of medium is concerned with the (multi)modality of the narrative, the semiotic codes that are used and their conventionalised combinations and potential tensions, the form(at) is closely associated with questions of mediality and materiality, the artistic ambition of creator(s), the practises of cultural industries and the established publishing formats that dominate the market place. This affects everything from length (four panels vs. 400 pages) via creative possibilities to the limitations set by editors, publishers and readers' expectations, just to name a few obvious factors.

Karin Kukkonen's definition of comics acknowledges the institutional contexts of creation, production, distribution and reception that play an important role in establishing and naturalising a medium: "comics are a medium that communicates through images, words, and sequence. A medium is constituted in three ways: (i) it is a mode of communication, (ii) it relies on a particular set of technologies, and (iii) it is anchored in society through a number of institutions" (2013b: 4). From my point of view, 'medium' is a conventionalised and widely recognised type of storytelling, which privileges the mode of communication (i) over technologies (ii) and institutions (iii). For other academic disciplines, such as media studies, these priorities may vary. Since the focus of this book is on educational settings, the classification of comics as a narrative medium – alongside prose, film, (stage) performance, radio plays etc. (cf. Nünning & Surkamp 2010: 49) – is justifiable, as these are experienced as distinct ways of telling stories. At the same time, comics literacy can and should be expanded to include concerns that are usually associated with critical media literacy, as the business side of comics creation has a major impact on the types of narratives students are likely to encounter.

Genre, in contradistinction, constitutes a framework that affects content more than anything else. I use the term to refer to autobiography, which can take many forms (e.g. comic strip, comic book, graphic novel) and find expression in different media (e.g. comics, paintings, prose, film, installation art). These three terms – medium, form(at) and genre – are often used interchangeably or become redefined with every new publication. In *Reading Graphic Novels: Genre and Narration*, for example, Achim Hescher sets out to clarify the terminology:

… the basic terms 'format,' 'medium,' and 'mode,' which have been so heterogeneously employed, need to be (re)defined. First, I take comics to signify a medium rather than a genre. As a second step, I shall set up a general, prototypical, genre classification in which graphic novels figure as a (twice removed) subgroup of graphic narratives, the counterpart to verbal narratives […]. With this, I shall consolidate the graphic novel as a genre, that is a historical text group. (2016: 4)

Hescher is eager to promote the 'graphic novel' as a more sophisticated way of storytelling, for which he employs the term 'genre' to set it apart as an evolutionary step: "All things reconsidered, it is impossible to ignore the ties of what was sold as graphic novels with the comics and book market, but this is only one side to the coin. On the other side, I see art works that differ absolutely or by degrees from traditional or merely lengthy comic books" (2016: 18). He is willing to acknowledge that 'comics' as a medium is a neutral term (cf. McCloud 1994: 6) and that all forms belong to it, but then he favours one publication format – the graphic novel – over another – the comic book. He seems to identify what I would call a genre – superheroes – with a specific form of publication, which may, in fact, contain any kind of content. Hescher goes on to list the 'superhero novel' as a subgenre of the graphic novel (cf. 2016: 51), which introduces two further complications: while the 'graphic novel' is defined via formal criteria, the subgenres are based on their content. This makes the term too imprecise for the kind of systematic classification he aspires to. Furthermore, when comic books are republished as graphic novels, their content does not change. Many of the classics from the 1980s, like Art Spiegelman's *MAUS*, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's *Watchmen* or Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Lynn Varley's *The Dark Knight Returns*, were serialised at first. This runs counter to the establishment

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of a canon based on seven levels of complexity that are supposed to distinguish graphic novels from comic books (cf. Hescher 2016: 56).

According to Danny Fingeroth's classification of American comics (cf. 2008: 4), there are three major types or publication formats, which are comic strip, comic book and graphic novel (cf. Duncan, Smith & Levitz 2015: xiii-xv; Groensteen 2013: 5; Kukkonen 2013a: 10; Stein & Thon 2015: 12). In the Franco-Belgian tradition, the main format is the 'album', while the internet provides completely new possibilities in terms of digital production, digital delivery and digital comics (cf. McCloud 2000: 22). McCloud associates the last type with 'the infinite canvas' (cf. 2000: 200–42), a liberation from the restrictions of the page, and technological innovations in terms of storytelling, which may then constitute a different format altogether. For a general readership, however, the most noticeable change has been the appearance of graphic novels in regular book shops.

The alleged inventor of the term 'graphic novel', Will Eisner, calls it "a form of comic book" (2006: 141), while Gail de Vos succinctly defines it as a comic narrative with an ISBN number (cf. de Vos 2005: 30). According to this logic, neither the medium nor the format determines the quality of the outcome. Since the days when comics first entered book culture in the form of 'graphic novels', with Art Spiegelman's *MAUS* as a trailblazer, they have witnessed a steady rise in appreciation, often at the price of concealing their lowly background. Hescher has to ennoble *MAUS* retrospectively as being "among the first graphic novels, *avant la lettre*" (2016: 81) to fit his narrative of steady progress. For this type of enculturation to work, it was easier for some 'Guardians of the Gutenberg Galaxy' – teachers, librarians, journalists, publishers, academics etc. – to conceive of the development as an evolutionary step that now separates graphic novels from their primitive ancestors:

Readers, reviewers, publishers, and booksellers (in store and online) have maintained the currency of the graphic novel and continue to use the concept as useful shorthand for either adult readership comic books or single volume comics the qualities (content or artwork) of which distinguish them as exceptional when compared to regularly serialized titles or more generic material (superheroes, sci-fi, or fantasy). (Baetens & Frey 2015: 3)

I would like to explore this transition from fandom to book culture a little further by turning to Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey's *The Graphic Novel: An Introduction*, which is a prominent attempt to establish the graphic novel's unique status *against* a background of comics production. A first important strategy is to use the singular 'the graphic novel', as if it were a clearly identifiable entity, and then ascribe human-like characteristics and a will of its own to it: "the graphic novel has a strong preference for the book format" (Baetens & Frey 2015: 13) and "the oneshot formula" (2015: 14). When Baetens and Frey observe that "the graphic novel can appear in different print formats" (2015: 154), they seem to acknowledge the fact that many artists publish their books in instalments first, for example to garner some compensation for their work, which may take years to complete. However, what they ultimately attempt to do is to sever the graphic novel as a separate art form from any material restrictions. This claim is made explicit when they call it "a medium" (2015: 7), which suggests that it also constitutes a different mode of communication, relies on different technologies than comics and is produced, distributed and reviewed in different institutional settings, if we follow Kukkonen's criteria again. While the third point is a valid observation from within book culture, the first two are impossible to argue.

The 'graphic novel' was – first of all – a marketing term and – due to its enormous success – has led to a "publishing phenomenon" (Baetens & Frey 2015: 2) that has transformed the business. There is no doubt that the successful re-branding of comics has opened the door for many artists to risk longer, more sophisticated titles, reach a broader audience, experiment with the form and even find a home at one of the major book-publishing houses, but Baetens and Frey propose essentialist differences that do not exist. It is not the graphic novel as an independent art form that shapes book publication, but book culture that offers new possibilities to comics creators.

I have traced the publication history of David Hine's *Strange Embrace* in an article on remediation (cf. 2016) to highlight the close ties between creation, production, marketing, distribution and reception, but also the transformation of a somewhat obscure comic into a graphic novel. Its most recent republication materialised on Russell Willis's digital comics store *Sequential*. It is interesting to observe how closely Willis ties artistic achievement to the marketability of graphic novels: "We see an opportunity to create an app that brings together material designed for adult sensibilities and through that creates a sophisticated brand for graphic novels and sequential art that is separate from the geek market" (Gravett 2013, n. p.). Willis deliberately contrasts his curated canon of exceptional works of art with the alleged rubbish of mainstream superhero comics, thus appealing to a readership that would feel uncomfortable with this type of association: "The brand image for graphic novels that a *Persepolis* or a *Maus* creates is damaged every time those titles are stood next to a man with his underpants over his trousers" (Gravett 2013, n.g.). The graphic novel is branded as a hot commodity and its cultural capital is increased by erasing its roots and natural affiliation, elevating it to the status of 'proper' literature.

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Baetens and Frey persistently ascribe their own ideas and predilections to the supposedly independent agency of a publication format: "the graphic novel has tried to distinguish itself from comics, more specifically from the superhero comics" (2015: 10) by turning to "autobiography, reportage, and historical narrative" (2015: 20). This close association of the graphic novel with a dominant genre, in this case autobiography (cf. 2015: 12), leads to an unwarranted transfer of narrative characteristics from the dominant genre to the publication format, which mirrors the uneasy relationship between the medium of comics and superhero adventures. They observe that, in a graphic novel, "the narrator is much more present, both verbally and visually, than in the case of a comic book" (2015: 10) and that it is more "disposed toward realism" (2015: 10). Both claims may apply to autobiographical texts, but not to graphic novels in general.

Baetens and Frey's attempts to establish the graphic novel as a separate medium often sound like a sales pitch to literary snobs: "the graphic novel has escaped the cultural exclusion of much of the comics universe and has gained great respect" (2015: 2). At the same time, they make half-hearted attempts to assure their readers that they "do *not* take an elitist stance against the comic book tradition, including the underground comix" (2015: 3). Yet, when they praise the graphic novel's artistic superiority, it is difficult to believe them:

The difference between comic books and graphic novels is *often* (it would be silly to deny it) but *not always* the difference between the collective and Taylorized way of working in the cultural industry […] on the one hand, and the personal and subjective mode of the individual artist who manages to pervade all possible aspects of his/her creation, on the other hand. (2015: 18)

The problem is not that Baetens and Frey notice differences in quality between comics, which clearly exist, but that they tie the debate to publication formats and cultural capital. They are not deterred by the fact that leading artists, such as Art Spiegelman (cf. 2015: 1–2), or eminent critics, such as Charles Hatfield (cf. 2015: 18–19), find fault with this simplistic distinction: "Hatfield represents, in a very convincing and coherent way, the suspicion toward any too strong or sharp division between comics and the graphic novel" (2015: 18). However, they judge it "a little counterintuitive for a critical community (comics scholarship, visual studies, and cultural studies) to reject a concept and an idea that is being so widely used" (2015: 19). Their dismissal of academic reservations seems to be driven by the fear of "being left behind by practice and letting journalists, publishers, and booksellers make all the running" (2015: 19). This is an astonishing argument coming from an Oxford University Press title directed at undergraduate students.

Having established a working definition and categorisation of comics, it is now time to look at approaches that include this narrative medium within larger frameworks. In his book *Comics and Sequential Art* Will Eisner addresses "the unique aesthetics of Sequential Art as a means of creative expression, a distinct discipline, an art and literary form that deals with the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea" (2006: 5). Unfortunately, Eisner uses the terms 'comics' and 'sequential art' interchangeably, despite the fact that his title suggests otherwise. When he describes comic books as "a successful cross-breeding of illustration and prose" (2006: 8), this definition may not even apply to all comics, not to mention sequential art in general. However, for a history of comics and a plausible separation from related art forms, it becomes necessary to draw a clear line between picture stories or sequential art, on the one hand, and the unique features of comics, on the other.

Robert S. Petersen's *Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives* (2011) is based on a distinction between what he calls 'graphic narratives' and comics as a particular type within this family of related art forms. While narrative paintings, woodcut novels or picture books compress scenes into distinct images, comics decompress and dramatise them across several panels. This is how Petersen describes Trajan's Column: "As in the Parthenon frieze, the long composition contains clear visual nuclei that define units of action that make it possible to identify distinct narrative scenes, but the overall effect is of the unstoppable march of Roman armies toward victory" (2011: 15). By condensing whole battles into single 'visual nuclei' and then stringing moments of triumph together, Trajan's Column offers a (clearly biased) summary of events, but it lacks all the necessary details and human interactions of drama that I consider to be typical of narrative comics. Using McCloud's terminology (cf. 1994: 70–4), which is much better suited to distinguish comics from related art forms, the vital difference lies in the exclusive focus on scene-to-scene transitions in picture stories, whereas comics also require action-to-action transitions. For this reason I find all definitions of comics that are based on Eisner's imprecise, as they equally confuse 'comics' with 'sequential art' (cf. Duncan, Smith & Levitz 2015: xiii; McCloud 1994: 9/5). An unfortunate consequence of this widespread confusion is that the history of comics is supposed to begin thousands of years ago (cf. McCloud 1994: 10–21), while, strictly speaking, this can only be true of 'sequential art'. I find Amy Spaulding's argument convincing that the increasing hybridisation between picture books and comics in the second half of the twentieth century was accompanied by a development away from double spreads as self-enclosed narrative units towards a dramatisation of scenes (cf. 1995: 5, 15). Like Spaulding and Dietrich Grünewald (cf. 2000: 17–27), Groensteen

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foregrounds similarities between comics and the performing arts (cf. 2013: 84), which is again mirrored in Eisner's observation that writing for comics is "closest in requirements to playwriting" (2006: 122). Surprisingly, this is a very different definition compared to the one he offers earlier in his book, "a successful crossbreeding of illustration and prose" (2006: 8). My preferred umbrella term for comics, films and stage performances is visual narrative media, in which a story is 'acted out' through a sequence of scenes in which characters develop on a personal level through interactions with their social environments.

To sum up, all graphic novels are comics. Since they are published in book form, they tend to be longer, more involved and self-contained narratives. In most cases they are neither 'graphic', in the sense of violent or sexually explicit, nor novels (cf. Chaney 2011: 4–5). When comics entered book culture, some stakeholders in the business, such as publishers, journalists, librarians, teachers and academics, chose to classify these 'graphic novels' as a completely new phenomenon. This was largely motivated by mistaking the medium for its most prominent genre – superhero comics. As a consequence, graphic novels were conceptualised as an evolved 'genre' that had surpassed its primitive ancestry in every conceivable way. This led to further complications by confusing media (e.g. comics), formats (e.g. graphic novel), genres (e.g. life writing) and subgenres (e.g. cancer memoir). My claim is that the great divide between comics and graphic novels has more to do with cultural capital, marketing strategies and – in some cases – a lack of historical awareness. I return to these questions at the beginning of part 5.

# **4.3 Cartooning**

The standard representational style of drawing in comics is called "cartooning" (McCloud 1994: 42/1; see also Wolk 2007: 118–25). It resembles a minimalist approach to representation that builds on the principle of "amplification through simplification" (McCloud 1994: 30/4). The cartoonist removes all the details that are not absolutely necessary, which is often the background (cf. Duncan, Smith & Levitz 2015: 122) once it has been established, and emphasises – or even exaggerates – those elements that are deemed vital (cf. Petersen 2011: xxi). This art of reduction foregrounds the key characteristics that are meant to be noticed by readers (cf. Töpffer 1965: 6–7). Duncan, Smith and Levitz argue that comics are "reductive in creation and additive in reading" (2015: 112; see also 138; McCloud 1994: 85), as artists strongly rely on readers' ability to perceive holistically – as a gestalt – what only exists in a fragmentary fashion on the page.

Conceptual metonymy is not only a key aspect of cognitive linguistics, but one of the core principles of cartooning (cf. Duncan, Smith & Levitz 2015: 112– 3; Eisner 2006: 42–3). Duncan, Smith and Levitz highlight the fact that comics as a medium relies entirely on the readers' ability to reconstruct complete images from mere fragments: "The comic book form cannot truly show the world of the story, but can only suggest it by employing the device of synecdoche, using a part of something to represent the whole of the thing. All images on the comic book page stand for more reality than they can depict" (2015: 144). In the case of emotions, comics artists use conceptual metonymies in the sense that "gestures, postures, and facial expressions associated with an emotion can be used to represent that emotion" (2015: 113). Thus, for every close-up on a character's body – head, hand, leg etc. – we imagine an entire body interacting with the environment and for every facial expression, body posture and gesture we are able to tentatively ascribe an inner life to a character. Pascal Lefèvre describes the principle of cartooning in the following manner:

… efficient handmade pictures will leave out unnecessary details and capture salient characteristics of represented objects in ways that reflect general perceptual mechanisms and processes – e.g., through simplicity of shape, orderly grouping, clear overlapping, distinction between figure and ground, and strategic deformations of objects […]. Stylized images may be less visually analogous to reality than filmed images, but they can very effectively capture the essence of an object or a person. Each image delivers a specific view on reality, in the process expressing a philosophy or visual ontology … (2011: 15–16)

Ray Morris argues that this foregrounding is not limited to physical features, but includes the revelation of characters' personalities. Although he refers to political cartoons and caricature, there is a clear connection in terms of underlying principles:

Caricaturists are often representational artists, although only in a broad sense; they do not seek to show politicians literally, as the camera claims to show them. They sometimes claim to substitute inner for outer appearance, revealing by exaggeration and distortion the "true" character of the person portrayed. In doing so, they implicitly claim access to inside knowledge and a position that the person skimming their cartoons in the daily paper lacks. (1993: 196)

This compression, condensation and amplification equally affects the political context, which has to be represented and commented upon in a single image. Cartooning necessitates different types of blending, for which Ernst Gombrich uses two different concepts: 'condensation' and 'combination' (cf. Morris 1993: 200; Gombrich 1963: 130). These are so essential to an understanding of how blending and cartooning interact that I quote Ray Morris's explanations of the terms at some length.

Gombrich's (1978) study of "The Cartoonist's Armoury" emphasized two key processes that characterized this kind of art. *Condensation* involved the compression of a complex phenomenon into a single image that is purported to capture its essence graphically. Inflation has many aspects and causes; in cartoons it may be condensed into a huge and threatening monster that towers over the President or Prime Minister. […] Cartoons, thus, condense the complex to the simple, the unique to the archetype, the enduring to the climactic.

*Combination* refers to the blending of elements and ideas from different domains into a new composite that remains clearly identifiable as something that contains each of its constituents.  The cartoonist may blend the real with the mythical, material with moral elements, or may associate politics with another field of activity such as war, courtship, sports, or housekeeping. Combination does not simply present another activity as a metaphor for politics, however, by pointing out how the relationship between two politicians parallels that between a cat and a dog. It also adds a strong element of metonymy, identifying each politician with the respective animal beyond that particular relationship and context. (1993: 200)

Condensation stays within the same domain and offers a stereotype that compresses, for example, the public persona of a politician into a single caricature, or employs a symbol that captures the essential qualities of something. Combination, however, sets up different domains as potential input spaces for blending, especially in the form of visual metaphor. Although Morris's explanation is not ideal, he seems to realise that there is more to these blends than a traditional metaphor: the new signifier clearly belongs to two separate worlds, which produces contradictions and inconsistencies, but at the same time the blend generates emergent structures that provide new and startling insights. Otherwise, the cartoon would not work as a powerful commentary on contemporary politics. What Morris describes here are double-scope networks (cf. Fauconnier & Turner 2003: 131–5). This is not surprising as the logic of blending and the circumstances of political cartooning cannot produce anything else, provided that Fauconnier and Turner's theory is correct. Based on Erving Goffman's work Morris adds 'domestication' as a third principle: "abstract ideas and distant, unfamiliar persons or events are converted into something close, familiar, and concrete. It translates what is novel and hard to understand into the commonplace by highlighting mutual elements and masking unique ones and by focusing on repetitive patterns to minimize novelty and mental adjustment" (Morris 1993: 201). By blending Saddam Hussein and Hitler, US propaganda made the political agenda of Iraq's former leader both equally recognizable and horrific (cf. 1993: 201). Fauconnier and Turner's concern is more with human scale (cf. 2003: 322–4) than with domestication, but the same principles are at work in both cases.

The relevance of political cartooning to the study of comics is easily explained: due to a limitation to a single image and the necessity to allude to and comment upon complex political circumstances, cartoonists have to refrain from any pretence to realism. Cartoons transcend time and space, set up complex input spaces and blends (cf. Fludernik 2015) and demand a high degree of active involvement. When Elisabeth El Refaie describes one of the political cartoons she analysed for her study, she realises that there is more involved than a simple visual metaphor, which is the emergent meaning of a blend:

Rather than being produced by a simple replacement of an expected visual element with an unexpected one, the metaphor seems to emerge from the composition of several verbal and visual signs, which, through their particular relation to one another, together produce the idea of Kurdish refugees as a foreign army 'occupying' Europe. (2003: 80)

In another article she describes a depiction of George W. Bush as a toddler with a box of matches as a visual metaphor in which target and source have become fused: "In formal terms, this can be described as a monomodal metaphor of the pictorial variety, or, more specifically, as a *hybrid* […] or *fusion* […] metaphor, where the target and the source are visually amalgamated into one spatially bounded object" (2009: 177–8). Visual metaphors of this type are clearly doublescope blends that are ubiquitous in political cartooning, where widely diverging fields of experience are often fused to create startling effects.

Political cartoons rely almost exclusively on caricature, conceptual metonymy, metaphor, symbolism and the conceptual integration of otherwise incompatible domains. They are a test case of how much information can be condensed into a single representation without confusing the average reader. El Refaie conducted a study on cartoon reading amongst teenagers, for which she interviewed "25 young people between the ages of sixteen and nineteen in Bradford, a city with a large British Asian population" (2009: 183). Regarding her test subjects, she comments that "the young people's readings of the cartoons and the multimodal metaphors they contained reflected their very different interests and preoccupations, as well as perhaps a degree of unfamiliarity with cartoon conventions" (2009: 185; see also 192). These readers obviously did not match the usual target group for political cartoons, which have to rely on extensive political knowledge and active participation on the readers' part. You have to be 'in the know' to

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recognise the more subtle details. El Refaie comments that "this lack of political background knowledge and familiarity with common cultural symbols did not prevent the vast majority of […] respondents from understanding that the fork in the road represented a choice of future actions according to the 'source-pathgoal' schema" (2009: 187). Thus, image schemas based on direct bodily experience of the world are more intuitively accessible than mental models exclusively shaped through education. This returns us to the question of embodied cognition, enactivism and experientiality.

In "How to Do Things with Words and Gestures in Comics" Ofer Fein and Asa Kasher argue that readers not only have a type of 'folk psychology' at their disposal, but also something along the lines of a "*folk pragmatics*" (1996: 794), which allows them to handle everyday social encounters, but also to make sense of characters' interactions in fiction. Since the conventions differ somewhat between narrative media, they prefer the term "*comics pragmatics*" (1996: 794) to capture the complex interplay of visual and verbal clues: "comics most often show a speech act in a relatively rich context of utterance. In the pictures of a comic strip, one sees a character, an utterance, an immediate setting and the broader context of the short story" (1996: 794). In their study Fein and Kasher show interest in how comics allow locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts to be performed as a combination of speech and gestures, with a special focus on the potential of gestures to communicate these functions independently. They try to confirm their impression that "in figurative art a gesture that accompanies a speech act is related to the force and not to the propositional content of the speech act" (1996: 796), which means that the dialogue and the context establish the communicative function, but that the gestures modulate the intensity of the proposition. As a first step, they identified the meanings of several recurring gestures and their prototypical realisations by looking at their use in a number of *Asterix* comics. Then they isolated prototypical gestures by taking out the context, the words in the speech balloons and the backgrounds. They also recreated the gestures with actors and then showed a mixture of photos and comics panels to test subjects, who had to write some possible accompanying lines and identify the meaning by picking a word from a list. The results were conclusive:

Most people had no difficulty in interpreting the comics gestures, and their interpretation was close to the original meaning of those gestures, as identified in the first part of this study of examining *Asterix* books. This finding becomes even more impressive when one takes into account the fact that the utterance and the background were erased from the comics drawings, and no contextual information (like the plot, character's personality, etc.) was given to the subjects. (1996: 806)

This suggests that the postures of comics narration – independent of any other clues – either are close enough to real life to be immediately recognisable or they have reached a level of standardisation that they function as easily identifiable signs. While test subjects proposed a variety of utterances for each example, which can be explained through the absence of context and reflects the ability of gestures to reinforce different speech acts, the level of accuracy was still high. This study suggests that readers do not need elaborate simulations to read the emotions of characters, as the postures and gestures of cartoon characters – even without contextual clues – are sufficient for readers to recognise how they feel. Yet, the controversy within Theory of Mind between theory theory and simulation theory cannot be solved that easily by looking at some *Asterix* albums. We have to extend the exploration of how emotions are depicted in a wider range of comics and ultimately turn to Rodolphe Töpffer's approach to cartooning for more clarification.

In "The Telling Face in Comic Strip and Graphic Novel" Ed Tan relies on Paul Ekman's research on basic emotions and the metonymic relation between emotions and facial expressions to begin a discussion of how we determine the inner lives of characters based on their outward appearance (cf. 2001: 32–3). Tan argues that facial expressions tend to be exaggerated and stereotypical in comic strips – he uses Hergé's *The Calculus Affair* as his prime example – which makes them "relatively clear-cut and straightforward" (2001: 35). He even claims that "comic strip characters look like personifications of the basic emotions, comparable to emblematic personifications of the passions of the soul in seventeenth century literature and art" (2001: 37). Contrary to real life, where we rarely find basic emotions in their purest forms, comic strips operate with prototypical, stereotypical or 'idealised' forms, which "condense subjective experience into readily recognisable highlights":

This exaggeration of feeling, together with a complete absence of awareness and control, also lends a quality of childishness to characters. Emotionality, quick shifts of one emotion to another, e.g. from joy to utter sadness, and a lack of moderation through display rules are characteristic of infants and young children. In addition, readers may associate uncontrolled emotional expression with moral purity. It is the villains that feign emotions that they do not have, or try to transform ones they do have. (2001: 38)

One of the essential questions in this context is what Tan means by 'basic emotions' and 'real life'. He insinuates that the characters have a childlike quality in the sense that small children have not internalised display rules yet and are more prone to express their feelings in an uncontrolled manner as 'pure emotions'. When Tan speaks of 'highlights' he means that what the comics depict

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in terms of facial expressions are fleeting, exaggerated forms at the height of emotional impact. In this sense, comic strips rely on the most easily recognisable expressions of emotions in real life, not the most realistic ones. This also has to do with the fact that emotions are processes with distinct phases that are difficult to capture in a single frame. Bart Eerden has shown that the emotions of characters in animated films are easier to read, as filmmakers can work with a gradual development and intensification (cf. 2009: 253). That is why comics artists often choose fleeting moments of intense emotional outbursts as a standard way of metonymically evoking specific feelings in a reliable way. They are also more likely to use coloured backgrounds to signal characters' emotional states (cf. 2009: 259).

Tan goes on to compare his findings to Art Spiegelman's handling of facial expressions in *MAUS*. Following Ekman (cf. 2007: 13), he conceives of emotions as processes, so the interesting question arises which moment the artist chooses to metonymically stand for the feeling. Spiegelman refrains from the pure display of excessive emotion in favour of a more subdued after-effect, e.g. when Vladek gets really angry when Françoise, Art's wife, picks up a hitch hiker: "It is indignation or rather sulking that we witness, instead of anger" (Tan 2001: 39). In *MAUS* Spiegelman's deliberate choice of a "loose drawing style with its coarse lines" leads to an "ambiguity of facial expression" that "invites the readers to use their imagination and delve deeper into the character's appraisal of the situation" (2001: 40). The characters' mask-like faces also prohibit excessive displays of raw emotions, which challenges readers to rely more on contextual clues. Tan's conclusion is the following:

Most importantly for our present concerns, in *Maus* the characters' emotions are not basic emotions in the first place, at least in comparison to the ones in *Tintin*, but perhaps also in a more absolute sense. To be sure, the novel does portray fear, anger, surprise, sadness, and some happiness too. But the emotions that matter most for the theme of the novel Vladek, Anja, Art and others seem to have, may be related to basic emotions, but not as blends [here: combining primary into secondary emotions]. It would be more accurate to say that they are much more specific than basic emotions. There is no ready-made action tendency, an affect program as in a basic emotion. In defeat, we can be numb or apathetic, we may withdraw or deny what happened, and more. Moreover, the appraisal is more spun out, complex, and specific. It seems we face a remarkable paradox: the subjectivity of the characters that the picture lends limited access to is much more profound, intricate and multi-faceted than that of the character who's [*sic*] – emotional – thoughts can be read from the drawn face. (2001: 44)

This takes us back over 150 years to 'the father of modern comics', Rodolphe Töpffer, who forwarded exactly this theory. Ellen P. Wiese credits Töpffer as the person who began to dramatise visual narratives, which marked "the transition from illustration in the Hogarthian sense to composition of an entire story in pictorial terms" (1965: xvii; see also Gombrich 2014: 284–9; McCloud 1994: 17/3; Duncan, Smith & Levitz 2015: 8–10). In defence of Hogarth it has to be said that he turned the gaps in between the pictures of a series into productive sites of inferencing and meaning-making (cf. Kemp 1989: 64), which represents an important step in the development of visual narratives. Still, the images are highly compressed and have to capture whole contexts or stages of a development in just one composition (cf. 1989: 65), which means that the gaps in between the scenes are still substantial. Wolfgang Kemp introduces an important distinction between serial visual narratives that string together highlights or turning points of a narrative (cf. 1989: 66) and those that show the aftermath of dramatic changes that take place in between the panels (cf. 1989: 67, 72–3, 76–7). The second type actively draws attention to the gaps, as the narrative sequence does not work at all without the viewer's active gestalt-forming.

Töpffer referred to his picture-stories as "drama-in-sketches" (1965: 10), which is a significant departure from previous visual narratives, as the scenes had to be 'acted out' over several panels instead of condensed into a single image. This decompression of the essence of a scene into an ongoing development in which the turning points become embedded in a continuous narrative is an important step in the evolution of storytelling in pictures. It introduces more context, the mundane and everyday, just like the novel did in its infancy, which makes character development possible and allows for a less teleological drive towards fixed points, maybe even allowing for doubts, failures and alternative routes not taken. The necessity to narrativise his characters' pedestrian adventures and to make their emotions and experiences visually accessible came with its own challenges. Wiese explains Töpffer's ambitions as an attempt to develop an "intelligible grammar of physiognomic expression" that managed to "convey precise information to the observer" (1965: xviii). However, Töpffer was not interested in the minute details of facial expressions, but rather in a holistic approach that would manage to capture a whole message in one easily recognisable general impression. Wiese summarises Töpffer's artistic vision in the following manner:

It is a great waste of time, says Töpffer, to polish up a vocabulary of classic noses, foreheads, and ears, all drawn after the plaster casts on the shelves of art schools. We do not read a set of features by itemizing them: we note the pattern of their relationships. Begin by conceiving a face in its entirety and dash it down as fast as possible; put another beside it and perhaps a third; then ask yourself which one you would care to invite to dinner. (1965: xviii)

Thus, the essential qualities of characters were to be communicated through configurations of facial features and poses (cf. 1965: 33) that gained their meaning from the contrast with other configurations rather than their intrinsic meaning (cf. 1965: xix-xx). This Saussurean notion *avant la lettre* was necessary to differentiate his own approach from the widespread physiognomic theories that attached precise meanings to specific traits (cf. 1965: xx). Töpffer's signs are not arbitrary, though, because they appear as involuntary "symptoms" or "reflexes" (1965: xxii) on people's faces in concrete situations and tied to specific emotional states. This corresponds to the legibility of basic emotions.

The most important distinction that Töpffer makes, however, is between permanent and non-permanent signs. Since he rejects traditional physiognomy and phrenology (cf. Töpffer 1965: 15–17), he believes that permanent signs, the bodily features of people, do not signify anything. They are just genetic variations without meaning. The non-permanent signs, however, facial expressions and body postures during brief moments of intense emotions, are both systematic and easily recognisable: "Non-permanent signs depict all the soul's evanescent or accidental emotions and anxieties, like laughter, rage, melancholy, scorn, surprise, etc. – all that we include in the general term *feelings*" (1965: 17; see also 22). These have a strong physiological and metonymic tie to the emotions that produce them and are thus reliable signs of the inner lives of humans that would otherwise be very hard to capture in visual terms.

This focus on moments of intense emotions makes Töpffer's sign language melodramatic, but more accessible, as it is based on human experience. He claims that it "possesses extreme clarity" (1965: 3), which allows us to link Töpffer's approach to the concept of embodiment, cartooning and Tan's discussion of *Tintin*. Combined with a specific context – the single sign within a configuration of signs and the entire configuration within a specific situation – Töpffer's visualised body language is intended to be instantly recognisable. Readers do not have to learn this code, as it is a more systematic elaboration of what is already out there in the social sphere. Since certain configurations consistently appear together, the single sign can evoke metonymically both the other signs and the emotional state associated with it. In other words, a particular posture of a character may invite readers to expect a particular facial expression, a certain mood and maybe even a reason for the state the character is in. In contrast to this artful arrangement, we often struggle to read the more subdued signs in everyday social encounters: "every minute of the day we are obliged to correct mistakes in our interpretation of faces, mistakes which result from the unreliable nature of the permanent expressive signs" (1965: 19). It should be apparent how Töpffer's alternative to the stereotypes of traditional physiognomy runs the risk of turning into a fairly stereotypical and rigid system itself (cf. Wiese 1965: xxvii). Töpffer's approach invites a direct connection to present-day research in conceptual visual and multimodal metaphors, which raise the question whether stereotypical depictions of emotions are directly grounded in embodied experiences or have become purely symbolic and a rudimentary language on their own (cf. Forceville 2005: 71).

A visual or multimodal metaphor (cf. Forceville & Urios-Aparisi 2009) often combines target and source within the same frame, in most cases in the form of a blend. In Charles Forceville's contribution to the volume *Multimodal Metaphor*, entitled "Non-Verbal and Multimodal Metaphor in a Cognitivist Framework: Agendas for Research", he lists nine basic modes that can be combined in multiple ways: "(1) pictorial signs; (2) written signs; (3) spoken signs; (4) gestures; (5) sounds; (6) music (7) smells; (8) tastes; (9) touch" (2009: 23; see also Forceville & Urios-Aparisi 2009: 4). This could suggest that we have to interpret these modes independently and then combine them to understand the underlying meaning, but Francisco Yus suggests the exact opposite in his own contribution to the same volume:

In this chapter, on the contrary, it is claimed that the comprehension of verbal, visual and multimodal metaphors involves similar mental procedures. Although the perception of images differs from linguistic decoding, reaching an interpretation of metaphors entails similar adjustments of conceptual information of texts and images and multimodal combinations, regardless of the modal quality of the input. (2009: 147)

In other words, we recognise the conceptual metaphor holistically without analysing the contributing modes and their interrelations in detail. For example, we can rely on the redundancy of the text to grant us access to a metaphor through a single mode or on our familiarity with the metaphor itself to which we have already metonymically attached various entailments in different modes. Our mental network of the conceptual metaphor anger is a hot fluid in a container, to which we shall return presently, may already come with representations in different modes.

For an analysis of comics, the most obvious combination is pictorial with written signs, for which Miloš Tasić and Dušan Stamenković propose an equally obvious typology, involving "image-dominant" (2015: 119), "text-dominant" (2015: 120) and "complementary" (2015: 121) combinations. They even present an example from Thompson's *Blankets* (2007: 360/4 → Fig. 1):

**Fig. 1:** *Blankets* (360/4). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

Here, we find monomodal metaphors for both the verbal and the visual track and then a combination of the two in which the text is integrated in such a way that it becomes spatially meaningful to the multimodal metaphor as a whole.

The depiction of anger often includes literal rendering of the cognitive metaphor anger is a hot fluid in a container (cf. Forceville 2005: 71; Kövecses 2010: 123–6). Since specific conceptual metaphors are incapable of covering every aspect of an emotion, there have to be more source domains that allow for very different mappings: fire, insanity, a caged animal, wild animal behaviour, trespassing etc. (cf. Forceville 2005: 72). The more important observation concerning the present circumstances is the metonymic principle that "the physiological and expressive responses of an emotion stand for the emotion" (2005: 72). What has to be explored is whether these signs form a language that is precise and stereotypical enough to immediately indicate the corresponding emotions.

Charles Forceville analysed the depiction of anger in an Asterix album (cf. 2005) to see whether the visual indicators could be grouped and systematically studied as "pertinent signs" (2005: 75) that reliably and directly indicated this particular emotion. This work was continued by Bart Eerden, who offers a comparison between depictions of anger in Asterix comics and their animated film adaptations (cf. 2009), and Forceville himself in the more specific context of pictorial runes (cf. 2011). These are indexical signs that point towards an inner state to which they are metonymically linked: "Since anger is an abstract concept, it by definition defies iconic representation, and can hence only be rendered by means of indexical and symbolic signs" (2005: 73). He sets out to demonstrate "that pictorial runes denoting anger in comics are not arbitrary signs, but signs metonymically motivated by one or more anger ICMs, just as, according to Kövecses, verbal manifestations are motivated by these models" (2005: 74). However, Forceville starts on a much broader scale that includes postures, gestures and facial expressions as pictorial signals. Since anger is conceptualised as hot liquid contained in or coming out of a pressure cooker, closed eyes and mouths, clenched fists or limbs pressed tightly against the body can be read as attempts to contain anger. Bulging eyes, red faces and shaking bodies signal to readers that the character is about to explode. Open mouths plus steam, spit, spirals or elongated droplets emanating from characters' heads, but also pointing at other characters, signal that the pressure is being forcefully released in a particular direction (cf. 2005: 75–7, 80–2). This is usually accompanied by typographical signs for shouting in speech balloons – large fonts, capital letters, bold face type, exclamation marks – and lightning-like connectors to the characters' mouths (cf. 2005: 77). Forceville concludes "first of all that the pictorial runes signaling anger appear indeed to be Peircean indexes rather than Peircean symbols, since they are motivated rather than arbitrary signs" (2005: 82). He shows that the entailments or surface realisations of both verbal and visual expressions can be traced back to an underlying conceptual metaphor: anger is a hot fluid in a (pressurised) container. Forceville observes that frequently "panels in this Asterix album depict anger effects *before* and *after* an outburst takes place" (2005: 83). Judging from the evidence he provides, I would argue that most images are easy to read as they capture direct outbursts or moments close to the peak, which is in line with Töpffer's approach and contrasts with Tan's observations about alternative comics or art comics that are more subtle in this respect. The only exception is smoke rising from Asterix's head (cf. 2005: 79), which is indicative of a cooling-off phase rather than heightened emotions. As some of the pictorial signals could easily indicate very different emotions on their own – e.g. a red face as a sign of being in love (cf. 2005: 84) – visual clues usually produce redundancy by appearing in combinations: "It is important to emphasize that no pictorial sign single-handedly cues anger: signs combine to suggest anger, and the more signs are used, the more clear-cut and/or the more intense the anger is" (2005: 84). As a final comment it has to be added that signs that appear completely independent of the expressive powers of the characters' anatomy – such as background colours, setting or weather (cf. 2005: 86) – are equally capable of signalling characters' emotions.

In *Blankets* Thompson does not shy away from basic emotions, especially in the sequences depicting his childhood. He raises the bar in later chapters, when the simple love story of two teenagers is complicated by circumstances, such as Raina's turbulent family life. When we look at various expressions of

#### Cartooning 259

Craig's anger (12/4; 21/8; 58/2), they may vary in their expressiveness, but they are equally easy to read. The same applies to the following example (16 → Fig. 2), where we find 'voice-over' narration by the older self and narrating I, combined with a 'perception shot' (cf. Mikkonen 2015: 103), which is a combination of a third-person visual point of view with a metaphorical rendering by Thompson of his brother's thoughts and feelings at the time, in this case horror, which is visualised through spiders, monsters and demons.  The mattress's teeth are again a simple way of turning an everyday object into a devouring monstrosity. Phil's father puts a lot of effort into expanding the bed and his close-knit eyes capture that strain perfectly. The demons are just outlines whose limbs are literally twisted to illustrate their perverted nature. All of this makes the image more legible by foregrounding the essential elements and leaving out anything else.

It has to be accepted that cartooning as an art form automatically and unavoidably leads to exaggeration and stereotypes (cf. Kukkonen 2013a: 16; Duncan, Smith & Levitz 2015: 114). This general deviation from any naturalistic claim is usually exploited to establish a level of metaphoric distortions that would not be possible in other, more realistic or highbrow media. In *Blankets* Craig's cartoon father is disproportionately large, based on the conceptual metaphor that power is size. There are several examples of this to be found in the book (Thompson 2007: 13/4; 203/4; 206/2). Emotions are often represented as so powerful that they distort the established physical features of a character to such an extent that they are hardly recognisable any longer (e.g. 2007: 12/2; 12/4).

Returning to the example (→ Fig. 2), Thompson blends two perspectives into one. This leads to a mismatch, as the standard distance for a reaction shot in film is at least a medium close-up; the horrific scene, however, calls for a wide shot to present the overwhelming horror of the dark hole. Thompson's composition has to accommodate both. A first step is to make the panel larger, so that we can see the details, especially Phil's facial expression. Thompson removed the background, placed the character in the middle and framed him inside the door to draw our attention to him. The white space behind Phil contrasts sharply with the cluttered space of the panel, draws the character closer to the 'camera' and the immanent threats, which is achieved through a lack of depth cues, and reminds readers that Phil's attention is completely focused on the horror in front of his eyes. This compression of depth simulates the effect of a telephoto lens. The world outside the room has ceased to exist, which metaphorically emphasises the claustrophobia and isolation he feels. Mr. Thompson, the monstrous folding bed

**Fig. 2:** *Blankets* (16). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

#### Cartooning 261

and the demons are significantly larger than Phil and, thus, threatening, but their marginality keeps readers' attention firmly in the middle. Both the monster's tongue and one of its teeth overlap with Phil's body, signifying imminent danger. Thompson also employs what resembles a 'canted shot' or 'Dutch angle', which is typical of thrillers, and adds distortions to make the scene even more foreboding.

I stop the analysis at this point, although it would be possible to add further details, such as an interpretation of the narrator's verbal framing of the scene. Despite this attempt to clarify how exactly Thompson managed to build redundancy into this image and convey the same idea in a multiplicity of ways, the carefully arranged clues all point in a single direction: that Phil is struck with fear. Cartooning allows Thompson to foreground and amplify what is important to notice: Phil's eyes, light vs. dark, twisted monsters and an overbearing, pitiless father who is about to crush his younger son. All of this is instantly recognisable, whereas a detailed analysis of narration and focalisation would add layers of complexity without contributing anything significant to readers' interpretations of the scene. Surprisingly, this argument comes directly from Mikkonen, a leading comics narratologist, who states "that it may not always matter that much to the reader or viewer of comics who is responsible for the showing or organising of the images, or indeed if 'anyone' is showing or seeing at all. The authority behind particular choices in the images, or their perspective, may remain indeterminate without blocking our understanding of the story" (2017: 136). Thompson can simply rely on readers' embodied cognition, their intuitive understanding of body language and image schemas, but also a whole range of conceptual metaphors that have been derived from them. As Fein and Kasher demonstrate, we could isolate a medium close-up of Phil and show the image to random test subjects without any context and without all the redundancy built into the image. Still, many of them would be able to read Phil's body language, even if they had to construe scenarios that match their interpretations. For a comics "narratology in action" (Benton 1992: 51), such a reading of characters' physical and emotional entanglements in particular scenes has to play a more important role. At the same time, the presented perspectives *do* play a role. How are we supposed to read Phil's emotions in Thompson's autobiographical fiction? No matter if we look at it from the angle of Iser's coordination of perspectives (cf. 1980: 35, 169), Keen's empathy (cf. 2010) or Dancygier's viewpoint compression (cf. 2012: 112), readers have to understand Phil's predicament as part of a larger picture. In the next chapter we look at four basic tensions that readers have to mitigate in their transactions with comics.

# **4.4 An Art of Tensions**

I borrow this chapter title from Charles Hatfield (cf. 2005: v), who believes that a comics theory that does not acknowledge "a reader's active engagement and collaboration in making meaning" (Hatfield 2005: 33) misses the point. Like other proponents of a reader-response approach he embraces potentially diverse readings that comics may prompt: "Comics are challenging (and highly teachable) because they offer a form of reading that resists coherence, a form at once seductively visual and radically fragmented. Comic art is a mixed form, and reading comics a tension-filled experience" (2005: xiii). He resents the fact that they are considered "either useful as stepping-stones" for proper/linguistic literacy or even "worse than useless" as a medium in their own right (2005: 36). The aim of his book is to demonstrate the unique literary qualities of comics that only become apparent when they are read as a medium different from prose.

Accordingly, he introduces his theory as a series of four tensions that readers have to negotiate and bridge to make sense of a comics narrative. Hatfield argues that "the possibility of generating meaning" is predicated on "the manipulation of tensions inherent in the reading experience" (2005: 39). Artists can use these gaps productively, which is also one of Iser's central tenets. Hatfield classifies the four tensions in the following way: "between *codes* of signification; between the *single image* and the *image-in-series*; between narrative *sequence* and page *surface*; and, more broadly, between reading-as-*experience* and the text as material *object*" (2005: 36). I follow this structure and highlight in each case how a readerresponse approach based on cognitive theories can be brought in line with seminal publications in comics studies.

## **4.4.1 Words vs. Images**

For many critics "the co-presence and interplay of image and written text" (Hatfield 2005: 36) is a *conditio sine qua non* for their definitions of the medium. Despite Will Eisner's observation that comics narratives rely on "a visual experience common to both creator and audience" (2006: 7), thus foregrounding the importance of embodied cognition, he also describes them as a "successful cross-breeding of illustration and prose" (2006: 8). As the title of Hatfield's study *Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature* reveals, he intends to demonstrate the narrative sophistication of comics and promotes the medium as a suitable art form for longer, more intricate, adult-oriented and literary narratives. Hescher identifies Hatfield's 'alternative comics' of the 1990s as an important phase in the evolution of graphic novels (cf. 2016: 15), while Baetens and Frey take this one step further and declare that "the narrator is much more present, both verbally and visually, than in the case of a comic book" (2015: 10). Their close association of the graphic novel with documentary genres – and autobiography in particular – draws attention to such concepts as eye-witnessing and testimony. According to this logic, sustained verbal narration has become a much more acceptable and widespread phenomenon in graphic novels, which is arguably true, as long as we look at bestsellers in life writing, such as Art Spiegelman's *MAUS*, Alison Bechdel's *Fun Home* or Marjane Satrapi's *Persepolis*. This trend has a number of important consequences: prose readers find it easier to transition into comics, literary adaptations become more viable, there seem to be more continuities with the established literary canon and the 'Guardians of the Gutenberg Galaxy' are more inclined to embrace genres and formats that sound familiar: autobiography and the novel. While 'graphic literature' may represent a successful blend between a popular art form and high culture, underestimating the visual mode may lead to complications.

While Groensteen acknowledges "that comics are essentially a mixture of text and images" (2007: 3), he is eager "to demonstrate the primacy of the image" (2007: 3). Next to the wider acceptance of literary, narration-focused graphic novels, there has always been a strong tendency in comics criticism to foreground commonalities with film rather than with prose. This is not without its own problems (cf. e.g. Mikkonen 2017: 2), but it shifts the focus towards a shared visual language that is explored in transmedial narratology (cf. e.g. Thon 2014; 2015), multimodal analysis (cf. Kress & van Leeuwen 2006; Machin 2011), the more education-focused concepts of visual literacy, multiliteracies (cf. Serafini 2014; Elsner 2013; Stafford 2011; Hecke & Surkamp 2010; Cazden et al. 1996) and critical media literacy (cf. Janks et al. 2014; Baker 2012; Scheibe & Rogow 2012; Seidl 2007). Kai Mikkonen's more recent monograph on comics narration explicitly excludes words as essential features:

When the pictorial or the verbal character of comics (or the idea of images in succession) has been deemed to be too prominent, the corrective move has shifted the theoretical perspective in favour of the visual component and graphic art, or vice versa. However, there is just so much variety in comics – that is, in works that are produced, recognised as and called 'comics' – in their blendings of images and words, or their emphasis on one or the other, that the interplay between words and images does not provide us with any self-evident starting point for a comprehensive theory of narrative comics. The rich tradition of wordless comics will also always be hard to accommodate within such definitions. (2017: 15)

Mikkonen's argument is caught in between his acknowledgement of readers' independent meaning-making processes and his background in narratological theory, which takes the intense study of texts by academic specialists as the standard way of looking at the material. Transmedial narratology has to overcome the trap of combining classical narratology with film studies and applying these theories to comics. Researchers are primed to look at panels as if they were shots or stills, which are both imperfect analogies at best. From an educational perspective, narratological approaches would have to change in two significant ways to become more widely applicable: a reorientation towards the needs of general readers and their meaning-making processes as well as a sustained attention to scenes instead of hand-picked, highly unusual examples. This mediation between theory and practical application has to come from educators instead.

A simple activity for the classroom is to isolate the verbal track of a comics scene, such as verbal narration or dialogues, and study them first. This provides students with an entry point that they are familiar with, but the real aim is to illustrate the disadvantages of an exclusive focus on the words, which is the most widespread beginner's mistake. I have already highlighted why sustained verbal narration is both a blessing and a curse: it makes comics more accessible to readers of prose, but it takes more effort to wean them away from words. Suitable examples should contain enough information to be decipherable on their own and enable students to arrive at a general understanding. However, since comics dramatise situations and show characters interacting in very specific contexts, we find a plethora of paralinguistic signs that provide important information about the ongoing conversation. As with stage performances or films, all aspects of mise-en-scène contribute to a holistic impression in their own unique ways. I have extracted a complete verbal exchange from Craig Thompson's *Blankets* (2007: 54–5), which is both a self-contained scene and a turning point in chapter 1 that introduces Craig to the idea of dedicating his life to God in a much more serious fashion:

This exchange sets in motion a complex dynamic of shifting allegiances that have Craig dedicate his life to his faith, his love interest Raina and his art at different stages of his development and often in conflict with each other. A direct consequence of this conversation is a renewed interest in reading the Bible and Craig's need "to burn everything I'd ever drawn" (2007: 57/3). What students take away from this scene during a first reading may be nothing more than Craig's hesitation concerning his future life, which is almost a cliché for older teens during their senior year in secondary school and an experience that is quite relatable. More unusual, however, is the potential career choice of pastor, which illustrates how students identify with characters in degrees rather than in absolute terms.

Since *Blankets* relies almost exclusively on visuals, it was hard to find an 'elaborate' dialogue that contained enough details to make sense on its own. In the present scene, there is no voice-over narration, which is typical of *Blankets* and Thompson's strategy to make past experiences vicariously available to readers as if they were taking place right in front of their eyes, independent of the narrator's framing. The aim of the suggested activity is to intentionally withhold essential information at first, which naturally invites elaboration. What remains is an impoverished, slightly boring verbal exchange. It may be worthwhile to have students read the scene in a dramatic manner – or even act it out – after determining the beats of the exchange and adapting intonation and tone of voice to fit the intentions of the two characters. According to Robert McKee's *Story* (1997), a manual for screenwriting, beat is "the smallest element of structure" within a scene, "an exchange of behavior in action/ reaction" (1997: 37). Generally speaking, beats are essential to pacing, rhythm and movement, which are marked by changing speech acts and emotional states (cf. 1997: 258). The suggested activity requires some imagination, as the 'embodied dialogue' has been deliberately removed, but it is still possible to guess the speech acts and potential reactions from the verbal track alone. Consider now how this scene is presented in the book (2007: 54–5 → Fig. 3 & 4):

We find an 'establishing shot' at the beginning (Community Bible Church; 54/1) and a large transitional panel at the end (55/5) that indicates the passing of time, the season of the year, the kind of landscape in which Craig grew up and/or potentially his mood. It is not framed. The second panel on the same page (55/2) also lacks a frame, whereas the last one on the previous page has two (54/6). Seven panels show the Pastor and Craig within the same frame (54/2–5; 55/1, 3–4), but only two Craig on his own (54/6; 55/2), which correspond directly to the one with two borders (54/6) and the one without (55/2). Two panels have a black background (54/4; 55/1), one is grey (54/6) and six are white (54/2–3, 5; 55/2–4). Only one panel (54/3) shows the physical backdrop to the scene and the

**Fig. 3:** *Blankets* (54). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

**Fig. 4:** *Blankets* (55). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

two characters in context; all the others range from a medium distance to closeups. Every panel contains very explicit gestures (e.g. a handshake, Craig's left hand scratching his head, the Pastor's hand on Craig's shoulder), body postures (e.g. hunched, hands in trouser pockets, arms crossed in front of chest, arms spread out wide), gazes (e.g. eye contact vs. looking away or towards the floor) and facial expressions (e.g. initial smile, hesitation, slight trepidation). Craig is consistently shown to face left, which is the past in visual design (cf. Machin 2011: 139–41).

As with Mikkonen's discussion of *Saga* (cf. 2017: 92), these visual features are largely meaningless without the dialogue/conversation to which they belong, the specific sequence of the panels in which they appear and the overall context of the scene. Students can easily identify Craig's overall hesitation throughout, which is repeatedly and thus redundantly suggested, both verbally (e.g. 'Uh', 'um', 'I guess?') and visually (e.g. scratching his head, shrugging his shoulders). What they may not sufficiently notice at first is how Craig's various reactions to the Pastor's questions are distinct enough to warrant a closer look. These are the beats that are mostly initiated by the pastor's speech acts and responded to by Craig: greeting, asking for his future plans in the form of three increasingly more specific questions and finally making a suggestion twice – first presented as a question (55/1) and then as God's will (55/4), which offers an answer to Craig's embodied question what he is supposed to do with his life (55/3). There may be an overall strategy on the Pastor's part to corner Craig and influence his career in a specific way, while Craig hesitates and attempts to avoid a conversation about his lack of orientation in life.

It is helpful to contrast and compare the dramatisation in the comic with the students' predictions, their first read-through in pairs or an enactment that, as a learner text, serves the meaning-making process and leads to a further exploration of the comic. Naturally, students compress beats into scenes, but Thompson decided to decompress this memory (assuming that this actually happened) and have it develop over two pages, so there may be more to it than meets the eye during a first reading. The most important realisation has to be that the verbal and visual signs are only meaningful together and that they come in multimodal configurations tied to specific beats in the scene. In literature such moves are carefully orchestrated and designed. I have already suggested that the Pastor may be trying to win Craig over and that the latter is hesitant, but how exactly does this conversation progress?

Comics do not only have panels and pages, but also tiers, which are all the panels in one horizontal line from the left to the right margin of a page. In this scene we almost have a direct correspondence between beats and tiers: greeting (54/2); asking for Craig's future plans (54/3–6); suggesting service in the ministry (55/1–2); and Craig's 'question' what to do, answered by the Pastor (55/3– 4). The 'embodied dialogue' is more nuanced than the verbal exchange and we find significantly different expressions in every panel. These facial expressions and body postures allow us to 'read' Craig's emotional states, which may leave some room for interpretation. In contrast to the ostentatious display of basic emotions that we find in the childhood memories, this scene presents more subdued emotions as processes that develop over several panels. Yet, this dialogue takes place within a contextual frame that we experience as an integrated whole and foregrounds themes that we have encountered before. Apart from the verbal and embodied dialogue we detect additional markers that provide punctuation and emphasis. In my formal analysis above I chose to highlight two strategies – background colours and framing – to move beyond film terminology, which also provides some valuable orientation (e.g. the 'establishing shot' in the first panel; 54/1). Our distance to the characters plays a role, as we notice a 'long shot' (54/3) followed by an extreme 'close-up' (54/4). The final panel on page 54 (54/6) looks like a 'subjective shot' from the Pastor's literal point of view that is also a 'highangle shot'. However, I want to draw attention to the panels with a black background that mark the two turning points in the conversation: What are your plans for the future? Have you considered going into the ministry? In both cases we find an immediate emotional reaction that is rendered as lines under Craig's eyes (54/4; 55/1). These are diffuse, pre-conscious emotions that are hard to read, but seem to signal general embarrassment (cf. 185/4; 186/2). Thompson adds a panel in each case that allows Craig to rationalise and appraise his emotions and thus provides more subtlety of expression.

In the first case (54/6) we find a panel that is framed twice. In addition to that, a change in orientation from landscape (54/5) to portrait (54/66) signals entrapment. There is not a lot of space left within which Craig could operate – both mentally and physically, which is already anticipated in panels 54/4–5. Frames are often used like this in a metaphorical sense, relying on our embodied experience of how it feels to be trapped. Based on Craig's religious upbringing and the setting of the scene, shame could play a significant role. This is made more explicit in the following sequence (2007: 56–61), where he is overcome with a strong feeling that he has wasted his life with trivial matters – especially in the form of drawing/cartooning. In the second instance (55/1) we see an enormous Pastor hovering above Craig, who seems to feel intimidated. Yet, on second thoughts, the Pastor's suggestion appears to be a way out of his misery (55/2). In contrast to the previous exchange, we now have a panel without any border. While Craig cannot verbalise yet how he feels about the proposal, we can see some change: from having nowhere to go (54/6) to new possibilities (55/2). There is some 'headspace' now, which was previously taken up by his own confused excuses (54/6). The background has changed accordingly: we find grey for Craig's undecided drifting through life (54/6), black for emotional impact and seriousness (55/1) and then white for a clean slate and new possibilities (55/2). Craig regains some agency – an interpretation that depends on whether one reads this scene as the Pastor's ploy or a real perspective for Craig – and initiates the fourth move in the conversation: Craig's open arms signal an indirect question and an invitation to the Pastor to provide guidance. What does all of this mean for reading and teaching?

First of all, this is my interpretation based on some of the textual clues, but there are many more details to discover: there are two panels in which Craig does not have a mouth (54/4; 55/4), though he utters a 'yup' in the first case; Craig turns away from the Pastor (54/5) to escape questions about his future (54/4–5); the Pastor and Craig hold on to their bibles in a strikingly similar fashion (55/1); the pastor's height and proximity to Craig vary from panel to panel to fit the specific moment; the way the pastor reinforces his declaration of God's will by putting his left hand on Craig's shoulder etc. There is no point in forcing one's own interpretation onto the students, nor does it make sense to engage in a narratological analysis in twelve distinct categories that would dissolve a contextual frame into its constituent parts that tell readers little about the overall meaning. Students should work on their own interpretations by going into some more depth and pick those clues that they find significant. Panels are foregrounded by framing them in numerous ways (e.g. 54/4; 54/6; 55/1; 55/2), so students are likely to find some support for their ideas. There is also no need to over-interpret sequences as long as students signal that they have a more differentiated view than the most blatantly obvious. This can easily be achieved through a stage 5 rereading task.

Projecting page 54 as a starting point for a classroom discussion and asking students what the double frame means in panel 54/6 would be the exact opposite of what I have proposed so far in this thesis: students do not have any time to refamiliarise themselves with the scene; they cannot share and negotiate their own interpretations; only one student gets to speak instead of several at the same time in pair or group work; the person who volunteers feels the pressure to get the answer right in front of the whole group; and it picks out a random visual element without discussing the context first. The question also implies that there is a correct answer and that the teacher knows what it is. Instead, global understanding has to come first, with students working on and comparing their own readings, so that the interpretation of textual features results from such meaningmaking processes in pairs and groups.

Having established the close ties between words and visuals, it has to be stressed that they may be employed to contradict each other strategically and tell very different stories. McCloud introduces seven types of word and picture relations (cf. 1994: 152–5), which have to be seen on scale (cf. 1994: 155). The most important one – and thus a part of many definitions of comics – is interdependence (cf. 1994: 155), which we have just encountered in the conversation about Craig's future plans. While McCloud offers some unusual choices (e.g. duo-specific, parallel), he forgets about 'counterpoint', which is a staple of picture book studies (cf. Nikolajeva & Scott 2006: 17–26). In fact, the concept is so central to this field of research that Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott discuss it at great length and introduce eight major subcategories (cf. 2006: 24–6). For the following scene (cf. Thompson 2007: 51–2) "Counterpoint in genre or modality" (Nikolajeva & Scott 2006: 24) is the most appropriate description: while the verbal track captures Craig's childhood aspirations, the visuals depict a fall from grace during his teenage years. On pages 51–2 we read: "At that moment [after hearing about eternal life in Sunday School in contrast to the insignificant physical existence on Earth], I knew what I wanted … I wanted Heaven. And I grew up STRIVING for that world - - an ETERNAL world - - that would wash away my TEMPORARY misery" (2007: 51–2 → Fig. 5 & 6):

While the narrator keeps talking about his childhood dream of ascending to heaven, we see various incarnations of teenage Craig falling – from heaven – into the dark world of physical existence – all naked, a flesh and blood human being, with his penis visible in two of the panels. Through compression two parallel movements are blended together: while his aspiration takes him upwards, his body in full puberty drags him downwards towards earthly existence. We first see Craig as a child, probing the clouds with his toes to find out whether they would carry him, but then he falls through, his developing body twisting and turning uncontrollably. Every single panel skips a few years and Craig hits the ground as a 17-year-old young man who has no idea how to reconcile the physical and the spiritual. Page 52 is a paradigmatic example of double-scope blending, as it literalises the 'fall of man', uses Craig as a stand-in for all mankind, associates it with puberty/sexuality and, more specifically, with Craig's teenage years, and compresses time and identity into singularity in the blended space.  While Craig's specific life contributes a concrete example of how the fall of man could be understood in a

**Fig. 5:** *Blankets* (51). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

present-day context, the Biblical story provides a specific framing of Craig's life and dramatises his experiences as going beyond the usual teenage trepidations.

It is an interesting choice on Thompson's part to associate the high ideals with voice-over narration and the logos, whereas reality – the naked truth – is represented as the visualisation of contorted teenage bodies. Puberty serves as an easily accessible context for this scene, although the religious subtext may be

**Fig. 6:** *Blankets* (52). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

lost on some readers. At the same time, aspirations in any field and the reality of underachievement can easily substitute for it as an alternative frame for readers' attempts to interpret this sequence. Overall, Thompson refrains from extensive retrospective commentary in captions to let the scenes he unravels in front of our eyes 'speak' for themselves. Yet, presuming we could witness the experiences of the artist's younger selves more directly as compared to the narrator's retrospective commentary is clearly an illusion, as the source of the images is exactly the same as for the verbal text. Still, readers tend to judge the dramatisation of scenes as more immediate and directly accessible, despite the fact that they are reconstructions of real-life events at best, often created many years after they took place. Through its high metaphoricity page 52 serves as an ostentatious reminder that there is a shaping presence that arranges the material, which undermines the illusion of direct access.

Groensteen argues that images create a sense of the "*here and now*" (2013: 87), which is even encoded in English grammar: in contrast to the past tense of verbal narration, speakers describe the scenes that are depicted in images in the present progressive, as if they were happening at this moment in time, right in front of our eyes. Readers are likely to recognise a tension in comics between the 'pastness' of verbal narration and the readers' experience of 'eye-witnessing' the very same events in the present (cf. 2013: 108), which means that creator and recipient operate within different time frames. The autobiographer's outlook is retrospective and follows the logic of the present perfect tense – a series of events that have led to a result in the present – an end point that the narration is supposed to reach in classical autobiography. Readers are experiencing past events as the present in the form of a visual dramatisation and speculate in the future tense about the autobiographer's present that the narrative may eventually reach. This inverse dynamic functions as a guarantee to readers that the depicted events are worthy of their attention, as the author is assumed to have an overall plan for the development of the narrative. This tension and interplay between the verbal and the visual is a key factor in autobiographical comics and essential to an understanding of the genre in this specific medium.

Readers may not consciously notice how they gradually slip into a more dramatised form of presentation when a narrative voice eases them into a story and then gradually fades away, while the actors take over. This is a significant transition in (auto)biographical comics, when the recounting of events is replaced by re-enactment. Authors in their roles as autobiographers and 'puppet masters' in the background take out "the paper marionettes" (Groensteen 2013: 121) and let the show begin. This may seem somewhat cynical, as a trick performed at the expense of readers, but the creative unfolding or decompression of the authors' tightly compressed memories and personal stories allows for the flavour and qualia of personal experiences that would otherwise be lost. What readers should hope for is a taste of what it felt like to be those individuals many years ago instead of expecting the factual truth about the writers' lives.

A final point that has to be addressed in this context is the artificial separation of visual and verbal tracks in comics. It has already become clear that, most of the time, both contribute to the ongoing narration in equal measure, but they are also much more alike than usually acknowledged. Eisner highlights the fact that the letters of many alphabets – such as Chinese and Japanese – are abstracted pictographs or symbolic signs that developed out of iconic signs via several iterations (cf. 2006: 14–15). Comics are a reminder of the interrelatedness of all signs, for example in the form of lettering and typography. These offer much more flexibility in visually communicating the paraverbal aspects of speech, such as volume, pitch and intonation (cf. Khordoc 2001: 164–5). Typography can even serve the advancement of the narrative. One striking example can be found in chapter VI of *Blankets*, where Craig's confession of love – rendered in personal hand-writing – is answered by Raina in type: "OH CRAIG" (cf. 2007: 346–7).

In comics, the distinction between verbal and visual signs can become blurred, as hand-lettering and conventions allow for a much more fluid interrelation. Some or even all the words in speech balloons can be visually modified or replaced by symbols. These may also serve as conventionalised indicators of the tone of voice in addition to the words. It is not unusual for balloons to contain just punctuation, such as exclamation marks, question marks or a series of full stops, to indicate confusion, surprise or a sudden realisation (cf. Khordoc 2001: 170). The shape, size, colour and outline of captions and balloons (cf. 2001: 163) provide additional information on how the comics narrative appeals to "the mind's ear" (2001: 156) of the reader. As the number of words a single character can use is strictly limited, "the speech balloon is a very dense source of information" (2001: 159). It has to fit the overall visual pattern of balloons, the character's position in the panel, his or her general (vocal) behaviour, a precise point in a conversation and the overall tone of the exchange (cf. Groensteen 2007: 67–85). Due to comics' greater reliance on dramatisation, artists traditionally try to reduce the interference of a narrator by relying on acting and direct speech (cf. Khordoc 2001: 163; Grünewald 2000: 17).

In a "*mono-sensory* medium" (McCloud 1994: 89/6; see also Smith, Duncan & Levitz 2015: 141–4; Groensteen 2013: 122) comics artists only have visual signs at their disposal which have to represent any type of experience or perception (cf. Duncan, Smith & Levitz 2015: 141–4). To elucidate this point further, I briefly focus on the sound effects of comics, whose realisation across words and visuals is both "complex and sophisticated" (Khordoc 2001: 159). Usually, they are conveyed through onomatopoeic words that both visualise and imitate the sound and its volume or proximity through conceptual metaphor – e.g. louder is bigger, nearer is bigger. They are integrated into the drawing and have a strong visual component (cf. 2001: 168–9).