This book is about what happens to comics theory when we privilege the relationship between materiality and the body in the analysis of comics. Focusing on how these factors relate to making, technological reproduction and the experience of reading comics, it aims to establish a new theoretical model for comics studies.
Through a close consideration of how technologies of reproduction translate material and embodied traces into the surface of comics, the book argues that tactile and haptic encounters with these surfaces can organise the narrative structure of comics and affect the experience of reading them. The book aims to establish that comics can be thought of as networked sites of embodied encounter in which embodied responses become a register of meaning.
1. Introduction.-
2. Practice Overview.- Part I.-
3. Material and the
Body.-
4. Time and Touch.-
5. The Performance of Reading.- Part II.-
6. The
Role of the Haptic and Indexical in Iconic Solidarity and Braiding.-
7. The
Indexical in Visual Metaphor - A Critique of Elisabeth El Refaie's System for
Analysing Metaphor.-
8. Reconsidering Metalepsis in Comics - Theorising the
Relationship Between Storyworld and the Drawn Trace.-
9. Close Reading-
Materiality and Embodied Trace in Superhero, Manga and Children's Comics.-
10. Conclusion.
Gareth Brookes is a graphic novelist, comics scholar and lecturer in Illustration Animation at Kingston University, UK. He has published four graphic novels, one of which, The Black Project (2013, Myriad Editions), was included in the Sélection Officielle 2018 45e Festival International de la Bande Dessinée dAngoulême. He has contributed scholarship to the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and Studies in Comics. In 2025 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford University.
