Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels

This book proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing and discussing narrative space in comics. Building on Mieke Bal’s phenomenological approach to cultural analysis (2002), Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1996), and Geraint D’Arcy’s use of the mise en scène to describe space in the comics format (2020), this book layers in a nuanced approach to the depiction of medieval environments through affect theory and poetics to interrogate the staging of ideas which are associated with the medieval period. Considering the action, setting, and story – as well as affect, atmosphere, and mood – medieval space is contextualized as an ethically complex poetic image. This book also explores the communicative possibilities of the comics format, and seeks to show rather than just tell the methodologies of space in comics-based research through illustrating key sections of the text.

This book discusses five recent, hand-drawn, comics memoirs of women’s mental health experiences, not easily captured in words alone. It deals with a range of mental health experiences that are not simply diagnoseable mental disorders, and do not always stem from visible physical conditions (heavy feelings, loneliness, postpartum depression, grief, schizophrenia and suicide). Yet, by also considering the formal qualities of these stories, it is able to focus on embodied aspects of experience, inflecting these with perspectives from a range of women of various ages, sexualities, genders, races and cultures. This book demonstrates how comics are an effective, interdisciplinary means of communicating women’s mental health and wellbeing.

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.