Bibliography by Katie Kelp-Stebbins

By Katie Kelp-Stebbins, Comics : Berlin Team

1. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Paramus, NJ: Poorhouse Press, 1985.

Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art was the forerunner to most books on comic theory. Through his examination of the components of sequential art, Eisner comes to the conclusion that this form is not simply an artistic application, but its own “art of communication” (6). This art requires readers to analyze visual and verbal inputs simultaneously and designate meaning through synthesis. Eisner characterizes sequential art as having two broad applications, it may be used for instruction or entertainment (139), predominantly within the vehicles of comics, manuals and storyboards. Although his book explores the principles of sequential art within all of these vehicles, Eisner focuses a great deal of attention upon his own craft, comics. Comics are at once a difficult mode of expression and one in which Eisner sees limitless possibilty for growth and improvement. Unlike a purely textual work, the comic runs the risk of inhibiting the reader’s own visual imagination, by providing pictorial representations. Thus for Eisner the “privacy” (140) of the relationship between reader and work is less participatory in comics than in traditional prose work. Eisner also identifies a challenge in depicting abstraction within comics, singling out the difficulty of conveying emotions or emotional shifts in a drawing. Throughout his demonstrations of the techniques and potentials for comic art, Eisner suggests ways to elevate and refine comic practice through “the mastery of narrative style” (161) within a language comprised of words and images, collaborating to create an aesthetic whole.

2. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

Thierry Groensteen's work on comic theory, The System of Comics, goes farther than any other theoretical work in meticulously detailing the mechanical or semiotic apparatus of comics. Originally published in 1999 in France,  the book spans from paratext to intertext as it describes the overarching system at play in the language Groensteen calls comics (or bande desinee). Within each of the three chapters, "The Spatio-Topical System," "Restrained Arthrology: The Sequence" and "General Arthrology: The Network," Groensteen articulates the formal elements comprising a "preponderantly visual language in which text plays a subordinate role" (7). His terms correspond to the two predominant forms of the comic structure. Spatio-topical evaluations of comic systems stress the importance of space and place, determining how the aesthetic effects of panel, gutter, frame and margin location are central to the operative logic of comics (26). By arthrology, Groensteen creates a neologism from the Greek arthon (articulation), to refer to the study of relations between panels. Groensteen's approach is especially different from previous attempts taken to study comics. He refuses to consider comics through deconstruction into consitutive elements. Rather Groensteen holds "iconic solidarity" to be the foundation upon which is structured, "an organic totality that associates a complex combination of elements, parameters, and multiple procedures" (159).

3. Lutes, Jason. Berlin: City of Stones, Book One. Drawn & Quarterly, 2000.

Berlin: City of Stones, Book One collects the first eights issues of Jason Lutes' serialized comic book, which weaves together multiple plotlines to depict life in pre-World War II Berlin. The entire work is rendered in black and white, with relatively standard panel construction. Lutes' work has been widely praised for engaging readers in the individual stories of each character's life to the grand effect of telling the entire history of Weimar Republic-era Germany. Although similar in subject to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Lutes does not employ immediate visual metaphors, like Speigelman's Jewish mice and Nazi cats to convey conflict or judgment. Instead, each of Lutes' subjects operates within a shared textual/visual space, where the reader's understanding of their morals and intentions unfolds slowly. Marthe Muller, the art student, and Kurt Severing, the journalist, share a conversation within the prologue to the book that makes the journalistic nature of Lutes' perspective apparent, in describing her drawing Muller states, "They are something. The people. But in there just for practice. I don't feel too strongly about any of it. Just trying to record what I see" (8), Severing responds that he does the same but, "I try to do it with words. I write" (9). By this introduction, Lutes at once proposes the method by which he will create his record of people in time, while hinting at the objective style with which he hopes to do so. No one character is visually privileged so that the reader could confine them to a stereotypical station within the cultural turmoil of the age, yet within the tales of a communist single mother, a lesbian art student, a policeman, a newspaper editor and the rest of the cast, Lutes creates an intricate and subtle world on the brink of upheaval.

4. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.

Scott McCloud’s book, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, is considered to be the seminal text in comic theory, and was the first in his trilogy, preceding Making Comics and Reinventing Comics. McCloud traces the lineage of comics over 3,000 years, before structurally assessing the functional components at work within the medium. Understanding Comics is itself a comic, according to the terms which McCloud constructs by reassessing Will Eisner’s term, “sequential art,” and elaborating to create his definition: “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (9). McCloud asserts that comics are a language composed of words, pictures and other icons (47) and attributes the lack of a unified vocabulary within this language to the separation of the disciplines of writing and drawing within art theory. A considerable portion of his work is dedicated to the formation of this vocabulary within the pyramid of picture-plane/art object, reality and language that he depicts in order to demonstrate constitutive elements that combine to engage reader/viewer cognition.

Using Marshall McLuhan's designation, "cool," to describe media, which command audience involvement through iconic forms, McCloud dubs iconography the vocabulary, and “closure” the grammar of comics (51). The basis of his exploration of these themes maintains that comics require unique acts of imaginative interplay between the reader and the work. While icons allow for greater reader-response and identification with specific characters (30), closure is only established when a reader imaginatively makes connections between disconnected images and texts. McCloud highlights how the fragmentary nature of sensory perception--observing the parts but perceiving the whole--is mirrored in the “gutter” of comics, the spaces between panels that force the reader to create imaginary bridges between two separate images (62-66). Extending this idea into the realm of computational model, McCloud identifies six different types of panel to panel transition and charts the frequency of each within a wide range of subjects. He interprets the data--specifically the discrepancy in American and Japanese paneling--as further evidence of comics’ intrinsic reader engagement, “the comics creator asks us to join in a silent dance of the seen and unseen. The visible and invisible…No other artform gives so much to its audience while asking so much from them as well. This is why I think it's a mistake to see comics as a mere hybrid of graphic arts and prose fiction. What happens between these panels is a kind of magic only comics can create” (136). 

5. Meskin, Aaron. "Defining Comics?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65.4 (2007): 369-379.

Aaron Meskin begins his article, "Defining Comics?," by rejecting all prior attempts at comic definition, and goes on to argue against the practice of defining comics for interpretation and understanding of the medium. Meskin begins by taking issue with what he deems, "ahistorical" definitions, argued by Greg Hayman and Henry John Pratt, Scott McCloud, Will Eisner and David Carrier. In these attempts to understand precisely what comics are, Meskin believes the authors leave too much room for those examples that predate and are not comics, "spatially juxtaposed pictorial narratives existed well before the birth of comics in the nineteenth century and any definition that characterizes these as comics is guilty of anachronism" (373). Although he allows for some utility in the rhetorical purpose of appealing to ahistorical categories, he does not consider them to be of any practical use for artists and critics. Instead, Meskin surmises that the impetus for constructing a closed artistic category for comics arises from an "aesthetic insecurity" (374), that has plagued comics through the last 150 years. By falsifying a history for comics and establishing a centuries-old medium, it might acquire greater levels of legitimacy within the art world. Meskin shifts away from this tradition and suggests that more might be accomplished by adopting a "historical account" of comics (375). He presents three possible methods for undertaking this measure: the intentional-historical definition, the institutional account and the historical narrative account. The first and second rely upon artistic intention and public reception, the third upon the identification of art through its placement in time. Meskin ultimately determines that each of these would still be insufficient and unnecessary for identifying comics. He finds no value in essentializing comics for evaluative and interpretive advances. Meskin understands these practices as a reflective, regressive approach to comics, while he contends that with investigation of styles, techniques and purposes of comics, one might better evaluate the form. The article concludes by further positing that determining the "standard, contra-standard and variable features of the art of comics" (376) would be much more beneficial for comic criticism, propelling it beyond the definitional project into further realms of inquiry and realization.

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