Explore the vast range of titles available.

2019 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Nominee, Best Academic/Scholarly Work In Between Pen and Pixel: Comics, Materiality, and the Book of the Future , Aaron Kashtan argues that paying attention to comics helps us understand the future of the book. Debates over the future of the book tend to focus on text-based literature, particularly fiction. However, because comics make the effects of materiality visible, they offer a clearer demonstration than prose fiction of how the rise of digital reading platforms transforms the reading experience. Comics help us see the effects of alterations in features such as publication design and typography, whereas in print literature, such transformations often go unnoticed. With case studies of the work of Alison Bechdel, Matt Kindt, Lynda Barry, Carla Speed McNeil, Chris Ware, and Randall Munroe, Kashtan examines print comics that critique digital technology, comics that are remediated from print to digital and vice versa, and comics that combine print and digital functionality. Kashtan argues that comics are adapting to the rise of digital reading technologies more effectively than print literature has yet done. Therefore, looking at comics gives us a preview of what the future of the book looks like. Ultimately, Between Pen and Pixel argues that as print literature becomes more sensitive to issues of materiality and mediacy, print books will increasingly start to resemble to comic books.

Materiality Comics is a digital comic produced with a combination of Bitstrips and Comic Life. It argues and visually demonstrates that materiality is an important topic for comics scholars to consider, and that through creating essays in comics form, comics scholars can develop insights about materiality that are unavailable when analyzing comics by others.

This essay analyzes Chris Ware’s graphic novel/artist’s book Building Stories as an example of what comics can tell us about the future of the book. I argue that Building Stories represents a prototype of the book of the future thanks to its innovative hybridization of print-based and digital modes of materiality and narrative organization.

Aaron Kashtan taught three sections of ENGL 1102, the second course in a mandatory first-year writing sequence with a heavy multimodal focus, during his first semester as a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Tech. The specific subject matter for these sections was handwriting and typography. Assignments and readings required students to develop sensitivity to the rhetorical potential of font choice and typographic design and to produce multimodal texts that made significant use of typographic rhetoric. For example, the second essay asked students to compose a handwritten essay that analyzed their own handwriting. In keeping with this special issue's focus on comics, this course design explains how Kashtan's lifelong interest in comics provided the theoretical rationale for this course, even though comics was not its explicit subject. Overall, the assignments discussed in this article suggest ways in which an understanding of comics can inform the way not only multimodal assignments but also traditional alphanumeric writing are taught.

This chapter sets the stage for the chapter 2 discussion by demonstrating the ways in which materiality affects the reading experience of comics.¹ Thanks to the work of textual critics like Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie, as well as material rhetoricians like Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, it has long been known that the physical and technological form of a text affects the way in which the reader comprehends its meaning. However, my contentions in this chapter are that comics scholars have not been sufficiently sensitive to questions of materiality and material rhetoric, and that comics scholars need to

The previous chapter established the parameters for this book by explaining the importance of considerations of materiality and material rhetoric to comics studies and by analyzing the kinds of changes that occur when comics are remediated from print to digital. My basic argument was that comics are bound to their physical and material form in ways which are much less noticeable in the case of prose fiction, and that therefore comics offer an effective test case for how digitization affects the material rhetoric of texts. In this chapter and in the rest of the book, I examine specific categories of

The previous two chapters discussed comics that are fixed to their original medium of publication, whether that medium is print (Barry, Kindt) or digital (“Click and Drag”). However, as Jeet Heer suggests, fixity is only one of two options that comics can employ. Comics can also be designed for flexibility—that is, comics creators can intentionally design their comics in such a way as to make them translatable into multiple publishing formats. Comics that are flexible, in this sense, can shift from print to digital platforms and back. Such flexible comics are similar to prose texts, the vast majority of

In reinventing comics (2000), which remains the foundational theoretical text on webcomics, Scott McCloud predicted a postprint future for comics. McCloud expected that improvements in webcomic technology would render print obsolete and that webcomics would prevail over print comics because of their ability to exploit creative possibilities not open to print. Webcomics offer access to interactivity, sound, moving images, and what McCloud calls the infinite canvas, or the ability to scroll indefinitely in any direction. As webcomics creators produced more and more work that could not be reproduced in print, print would gradually lose relevance as a delivery mechanism. At

Long believed to have been terminally ill, the print medium finally died on July 25, 2013. The Onion, America’s finest news source, reported: “Sources close to print, the method of applying ink to paper in order to convey information to a mass audience, have confirmed that the declining medium passed away early Thursday morning.” The demise of print was the result of a long, drawn-out struggle in which “younger, more nimble channels such as the internet, email, and social media” chipped away at some of its most cherished manifestations, including the newspaper and the magazine (“Print Dead”). Yet perhaps the