Embodied Responses to Materiality in the Making and Reading of Comics
Comics studies is a relatively new and fundamentally cross disciplinary field. While this has led to rich and inventive analysis combining theory from a range of scholarly practices, it has also resulted in theory being applied to drawn narratives which take little account of material factors specific to the making and reading of comics. This PhD takes a formalist approach to reveal gaps in theory and builds on existing comics scholarship to propose a new model of analysing comics foregrounding the role of materiality in relationship to embodiment. As is appropriate to the focus of the study, this thesis privileges practice as a research method. Reflections on intuitive practice foregrounding material processes involving rubbing, soaking, and entangling, contribute to a theoretical framework informed by theory drawn from fine art, cinema studies, and the close reading of comics. By examining the relationship between different materials of drawing and the body, between technologies of reproduction and embodied responses to haptic images, and the performative relationship between the reading body and tactile forms, I argue that comics can be analysed as sequences of sited embodied encounter, in which embodied response becomes a networked register in the experience of meaning in comics. This suggests revisions to received comics theory to account for the experience of these embodied encounters in the context of a narrative. This includes retheorisations of the notions of indexicality and trace in comics, leading to revised models of iconic solidarity, the role of embodied trace in establishing storyworlds, and the function of materiality in the structure of visual metaphor. As reproduction technologies continually develop, mimicking the indexes of materials through novel forms, new inter-constitutive relationships between the body and surfaces of reproduction are opened up. A study of the kind described above becomes urgent as reading and drawing practices respond to this change.
Brookes, Gareth <https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/view/creators/Brookes=3AGareth=3A=3A.html> (2024) Embodied Responses to Materiality in the Making and Reading of Comics. PhD thesis, University of the Arts London.
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