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Explores fundamental concepts in composition, layout, and the elements of successful visual storytelling by using 230 unique illustrations and 166 easy-to-understand diagrams as examples.

In Show Me Where It Hurts , Monica Chiu argues that graphic pathography-long-form comics by and about subjects who suffer from disease or are impaired-re-vitalizes and re-visions various negatively affected corporeal states through hand-drawn images. By the body and for the body, the medium is subversive and reparative, and it stands in contradistinction to clinical accounts of illness that tend to disembody or objectify the subject. Employing affect theory, spatial theory, vital materialism, and approaches from race and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, disability studies, and comics studies, Chiu provides readings of recently published graphic pathography. Chiu argues that these kinds of subjective graphic stories, by virtue of their narrative and descriptive strengths, provide a form of resistance to the authoritative voice of biomedicine and serve as a tool to foster important change in the face of social and economic inequities when it comes to questions of health and healthcare. Show Me Where It Hurts reads what already has been manifested on the comics page and invites more of what demands expression. Pathbreaking and provocative, this book will appeal to scholars and students of the medical humanities, comics studies, race and ethnic studies, disability studies, and women and gender studies.

An examination of the art in superhero comics and how style influences comic narratives. For many, the idea of comic book art implies simplistic four-color renderings of stiff characters slugging it out. In fact, modern superhero comic books showcase a range of complex artistic styles, with diverse connotations. Leading comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown assesses six distinct approaches to superhero illustration-idealism, realism, cute, retro, grotesque, and noir-examining how each visually represents the superhero as a symbolic construct freighted with meaning. Whereas comic book studies tend to focus on text and narrative, Super Bodies gives overdue credit to the artwork, which is not only a principal source of the appeal of comic books but also central to the values these works embody. Brown argues that superheroes are to be taken not as representations of people but as iconic types, and the art conveys this. Even the most realistic comic illustrations are designed to suggest not persons but ideas-ideas about bodies and societies. Thus the appearance of superheroes both directly and indirectly influences the story being told as well as the opinions readers form concerning justice, authority, gender, puberty, sexuality, ethnicity, violence, and other concepts central to political and cultural life.

This book is the follow-up to Thierry Groensteen's ground-breakingThe System of Comics, in which the leading French-language comics theorist set out to investigate how the medium functions, introducing the principle of iconic solidarity, and showing the systems that underlie the articulation between panels at three levels: page layout, linear sequence, and nonsequential links woven through the comic book as a whole. He now develops that analysis further, using examples from a very wide range of comics, including the work of American artists such as Chris Ware and Robert Crumb. He tests out his theoretical framework by bringing it up against cases that challenge it, such as abstract comics, digital comics and sh?jo manga, and offers insightful reflections on these innovations. In addition, he includes lengthy chapters on three areas not covered in the first book. First, he explores the role of the narrator, both verbal and visual, and the particular issues that arise out of narration in autobiographical comics. Second, Groensteen tackles the question of rhythm in comics, and the skill demonstrated by virtuoso artists in intertwining different rhythms over and above the basic beat provided by the discontinuity of the panels. And third he resets the relationship of comics to contemporary art, conditioned by cultural history and aesthetic traditions but evolving recently as comics artists move onto avant-garde terrain.

This edition of Thierry Groensteen'sThe System of Comicsmakes available in English a groundbreaking work on comics by one of the medium's foremost scholars. In this book, originally published in France in 1999, Groensteen explains clearly the subtle, complex workings of the medium and its unique way of combining visual, verbal, spatial, and chronological expressions. The author explores the nineteenth-century pioneer Rodolphe Töpffer, contemporary Japanese creators, George Herriman's Krazy Kat, and modern American autobiographical comics. The System of Comics uses examples from a wide variety of countries including the United States, England, Japan, France, and Argentina. It describes and analyzes the properties and functions of speech and thought balloons, panels, strips, and pages to examine methodically and insightfully the medium's fundamental processes. From this, Groensteen develops his own coherent, overarching theory of comics, a \"system\" that both builds on existing studies of the \"word and image\" paradigm and adds innovative approaches of his own. Examining both meaning and appreciation, the book provides a wealth of ideas that will challenge the way scholars approach the study of comics. By emphasizing not simply \"storytelling techniques\" but also the qualities of the printed page and the reader's engagement, the book's approach is broadly applicable to all forms of interpreting this evolving art. Thierry Groensteen is a comics scholar and translator in Brussels, Belgium. He is the author ofLa bande dessinée: Une littérature graphiqueandLa construction de la cage, among other books. Bart Beaty is associate professor of communication and culture at the University of Calgary. Nick Nguyen is an archivist at Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, Ontario.

A troubled childhood in Iran. Living with a disability. Grieving for a dead child. Over the last forty years the comic book has become an increasingly popular way of telling personal stories of considerable complexity and depth. InAutobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Elisabeth El Refaie offers a long overdue assessment of the key conventions, formal properties, and narrative patterns of this fascinating genre. The book considers eighty-five works of North American and European provenance, works that cover a broad range of subject matters and employ many different artistic styles. Drawing on concepts from several disciplinary fields--including semiotics, literary and narrative theory, art history, and psychology--El Refaie shows that the traditions and formal features of comics provide new possibilities for autobiographical storytelling. For example, the requirement to produce multiple drawn versions of one's self necessarily involves an intense engagement with physical aspects of identity, as well as with the cultural models that underpin body image. The comics medium also offers memoirists unique ways of representing their experience of time, their memories of past events, and their hopes and dreams for the future. Furthermore, autobiographical comics creators are able to draw on the close association in contemporary Western culture between seeing and believing in order to persuade readers of the authentic nature of their stories.

In the circumstances of the 21st-century digital and technological turn, and due to the burst of the cosmopolitan way of living, the urban environment has gradually transformed in its appearance and identity. The loss of object singularity in urban context due to continuous variability and functional indeterminacy blurs the boundaries between architectural and urban scale, personal and social experience. Through an interdisciplinary framework, this paper deals with the fluidity phenomenon instrumentalisation through value-based research of renominated architectural practices in creating an authentic methodological research model that connects urban dynamics and architectural design methods, techniques and instruments in shaping a contemporary spatial experience. The resulting methodological model employs an analytic graphic narrative to formulate a strategy integrating fluidity into the process of architectural design. The paper explains how architectural design, as a cultural practice, employs fluidity to incorporate dynamics and needs, strategically enhancing the expression of urban values, requirements, and narratives.

In response to the increasing politicization and polarization of discourses around gender, sexuality, and the body, feminist theorists like Judith Butler call for feminism to strive toward flexibility and responsivity. This essay lays out some of the theoretical considerations that inform studies of graphic embodiment—or studies of embodiment in graphic narratives—both generally and within feminist studies, then examines several graphic texts by Tillie Walden and Élodie Durand that exemplify feminist theories of embodiment, with particular attention to the creative co-construction of embodied narratives.

The ongoing opioid epidemic has been associated with increases in emergency department visits and hospitalizations for drug overdose and injection-related infections. These encounters with the health care system provide an opportunity to offer drug treatment linkage and support for people with opioid use disorder (OUD). There is a need for interventions that enhance linkage to and engagement in treatment with medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) for people with OUD identified in hospital settings as they transition back to community settings. The mTools4life (Johns Hopkins University) study aimed to develop and evaluate a peer-led intervention integrating narrative-based health communication into a mobile health (mHealth) app to increase posthospitalization engagement in MOUD and reduce substance use. The formative phase of the study consisted of semistructured interviews with people with OUD and clinicians who provide care to people with OUD. Interviews sought to identify salient content to include in visual narratives within the mHealth app and information that may increase motivations for behavior change related to MOUD engagement. The intervention was developed in accordance with the information-motivation-behavioral skills model, transportation theory, and the transtheoretical model. The pilot phase of mTools4Life (Johns Hopkins University) aimed to evaluate the acceptability and usability of the intervention. People with OUD were recruited from the Johns Hopkins Hospital Emergency Department and consented to receive the intervention for a 3-month period. Participants completed a study survey at baseline and a 3-month follow-up. Data on demographics, past 30-day substance use, MOUD, and intervention appropriateness and acceptability were obtained at both time points. Additional data on intervention uptake and frequency of use were collected at follow-up. Dependent samples 2-tailed t tests were conducted on continuous data, and Fisher exact tests were conducted on count data. Twenty people with OUD piloted the intervention. The sample was mostly male (13/20, 65%) and non-Hispanic White (13/20, 65%) with a mean age of 41.1 (SD 8.7) years. Most participants (16/20, 80%) completed the 3-month follow-up. Fewer participants reported opioid use at follow-up (9/16, 56.3%) compared to baseline (20/20, 100%; P=.001, and mean days of opioid use out of the past 30 days declined from baseline (19.9, SD 11.7) to follow-up (8.3, SD 11.4; P=.002). MOUD treatment in the prior 3 months was reported by 65% (13/20) of participants at baseline and 81.3% (13/16) at follow-up (P=.46). Most participants used the app (11/16, 68.8%) or engaged with their peer navigator (10/16, 62.5%) during the intervention period. At follow-up, mean acceptability and appropriateness scores (scale 0-5; higher score indicating greater acceptability or appropriateness) were 4.5 (SD 0.5) and 4.3 (SD 0.8), respectively. This study demonstrates the feasibility of the development and deployment of a narrative-based mHealth intervention to support OUD care engagement and preliminary data in support of the intervention's acceptability, appropriateness, and effectiveness.

The Thing. Daredevil. Captain Marvel. The Human Fly. Drawing on DC and Marvel comics from the 1950s to the 1990s, and marshaling insights from three burgeoning fields of inquiry in the humanities--disability studies, death and dying studies, and comics studies-- José Alaniz seeks to redefine the contemporary understanding of the superhero. Beginning in the Silver Age, the genre increasingly challenged and complicated its hypermasculine, quasi-eugenicist biases through such disabled figures as Ben Grimm/The Thing, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and the Doom Patrol. Alaniz traces how the superhero became increasingly vulnerable, ill, and mortal in this era. He then proceeds to a reinterpretation of characters and series--some familiar (Superman), some obscure (She-Thing). These genre changes reflected a wider awareness of related body issues in the postwar U.S. as represented by hospice, death with dignity, and disability rights movements. The persistent highlighting of the body's \"imperfection\" comes to forge a predominant aspect of the superheroic self. Such moves, originally part of the Silver Age strategy to stimulate sympathy, enhance psychological depth, and raise the dramatic stakes, developed further in such later series asThe Human Fly, Strikeforce: Morituri, and the landmark graphic novelThe Death of Captain Marvel, all examined in this volume. Death and disability, presumed routinely absent or denied in the superhero genre, emerge to form a core theme and defining function of the Silver Age and beyond.