Thinking About Comics : An Introduction to Ideas, Medium and Cultures

A lively and compelling guide to the key ideas that have shaped how drawn stories are made and used globally, this book is a comprehensively illustrated roadmap to thinking about comics and narrative drawing as centres of cultural change and for making sense of the world. Balancing crucial detail with accessible brevity, Thinking About Comics consolidates and connects the most significant ideas from comics and media studies, art theory and philosophy to offer a fresh characterisation of the medium, its past and current uses, and possible future transformations and opportunities.

Revealing the relationships between visual storytelling and the body, mass production and seriality, drawing and language, social conventions and the impact of comics on lived experience, author Simon Grennan foregoes a chronological approach to comics to start with the nature of visual depiction; what follows is a dynamic overview of the visual language of comics across different cultures. With a fundamental and multi-faceted focus on drawing and teasing out the difference between what is and is not language, Grennan brings together a wide range of materials in the field from sources published at the foundation of the discipline to recent scholarship.

Structured around English, French, Japanese, Chinese and Korean case studies from different traditions of comics drawing, distribution and use, the book includes over 180 illustrations and students can also benefit from a glossary of key terms and further reading for each section. Making fresh connections between familiar and unfamiliar ideas and ranging widely across histories, people and places this is a unique, powerful introduction to how comics work as a medium of communication and creativity.