CLOSURE #8

CLOSURE , 2021

What connects two panels placed side by side? The default answer, more often than not, is ›narrative.‹ Scott McCloud, for one, calls for an unravelling of the »[m]ysteries surrounding the invisible art of comics storytelling« (74). Issue #8 of CLOSURE contests this narrative reduction and uncovers a non-narrative art of comics beyond storytelling. From a variety of perspectives, our articles show how comics subtract narrative, withhold closure, stall storytelling – and theorize the unfamiliar formal, abstract, nonfictional or poetic constellations that emerge as a result. »Must Narrative Be Renounced?« (Groensteen, 174) Our contributors experimentally answer ›yes‹ to this question and outline the logical, affective, designed connections that emerge in place of narrative.

Comics as Communication, 2019

This preliminary chapter approaches the question of comics as meaning-making by exploring comics that challenge the notion of meaning itself: the recently affirmed subgenre of abstract comics. This exploration leads to the groundwork for a pragmatics of comics and raises issues about the nature of reading and the reader’s active approach to creating meanings from comics texts, as well as the nature of abstraction, and how it is realised in the comics text. Abstract comics present challenges for traditional definitions and accounts of graphic narrative, identifying areas in existing theory that a functional model of comics meaning-making may illuminate.

2017

Studies in Comics 4.2, 2013

How can one read an abstract graphic narrative? Under what conditions do we cease to view a set of images as static representations, or as marks on paper existing for their own sake, and begin to read them as the story of a changing world in motion, or even invest them with impetus, emotions and desires? In this article I will explore the ways in which readers can make sense of abstract comics. The notion of an abstract graphic narrative seems to be a contradiction in terms: how can something be non-representational, and also be a narrative, a category which seems to presuppose representations of characters, settings and events? When confronted with these visual texts, readers will have to seek out and create such ‘actants’ and ‘existents’ from the material abstract comics offer, if the text is to warrant its status as narrative. The article will use a number of exemplar stories from Andrei Molotiu’s 2009 collection Abstract Comics to explore the process of reading these image texts. It will use ideas from narratology and philosophy of consciousness to help outline some of the ways we can ‘animate’ the static images we see across the sequence of panels, in which we recognize and reconstitute persistent entities, bringing a narrative life to the apparently inert marks on the comics page. I will explore the limits of readers’ ability to apply this process and comment on its relevance to more mainstream graphic narrative in general.

2015

UOU Scientific Journal, 2022

This study is a critical reading on the spatial narrative of abstract comics. The form of representation, which is defined as an abstract comic, is a narrative series that creates a reaction in the audience with the forms and techniques it uses. The aim of the study, considering the communication between the spectator and the representation, is to emphasize the potential that emancipated the spectator and made the representational form open to sensations. The represented space must have traces that make the subject’s experience and temporality visible in order for the spectator to communicate with the representation. The experience that the space provides to the subject is thought to be lacking in traditional architectural representation because it does not have a counterpart in representation. Because the act of “experiencing” is temporal, the visibility of temporality in representation will create gaps that will include the spectator in the representation. Abstract comics have been evaluated as a form of representation that will make the spatial experience visible by making the concept of time legible with the possibilities of representation and having the potential to be used as a communication tool. The fact that the abstract comic book representations examined are ‘abstract’ transforms the form of representation into a field of experience for the spectator, providing a setting for sensations. On the other hand, the readability of time provides a participatory communication environment in which the spectator imagines what happens between the panels (singular units of sequential productions) and what might happen outside the panels. This study examines the communication that spatial narrative establishes with its spectators through representational forms defined as abstract sequential art. It is valuable in that it underlines the visibility of experience in a representation that emerges with the concepts of time and sensation, and opens the topic of temporality in architectural representation to discussion.

ICLA Conference 2016 Proceedings, De Gruyter, 2020

Co-edition of the section of the Official Proceedings of the ICLA Conference 2016, Vienna, presented by the ICLA Research Committee "Comics Studies and Graphic Narrative".

Abstraction et Bande Dessinée., 2019

Dialogues between Media

DIEGESIS 8.1, Special Issue co-edited by: Christian Klein, Matías Martínez, Lynn L. Wolff