“Walks through the museum of images: openness and self-reflexive images in comics”
(2014) Les Cahiers du GRIT no.3 — accepted/in-press
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- Abstract
- This article focuses on the openness in comics that is generated through their techniques of word-image narration and the self-reflexive interaction with selected media and their imaginaries. Although popular approaches towards word-image media often follow the paradigms of literary and cultural studies, a more anthropological perspective can be useful for looking at comics, especially through focusing on the image instead of giving the word the upper hand. This article seeks to highlight certain ways in which narration and – to go beyond the textual bias of narratology – imagining through images, manifests itself in certain comics. Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work of art is used for examining the multimodal complexity of the comics discussed. This is followed by an exploration of intermediality or references to other media and their self-reflexivity as additional factors contributing towards openness, in comics’ images. Bryan Talbot's The Tale of One Bad Rat is used in the second section to discuss the interaction between comics and illustrated children’s books as well as innovations within the very technique of sequential narration for adding multiple connotations to the stories and generating openness in the content. Focusing on references to other visual media (like photography and the fine arts) and the consequent self-reflexivity of the images, the third section analyzes selected volumes from Yslaire's XXe Ciel and Liberge's Aux Heures Impaires to show how a collective imaginary of key images and media connotations persists even after being filtered through the comics artist’s distinctive idiom and combination of media.
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Ahmed, M. (2014). “Walks through the museum of images: openness and self-reflexive images in comics”. In Jean-Louis Tilleuil (ed.), Les Cahiers du GRIT no.3. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/85880