„Essayistic Comics and Non-Narrative Coherence“

Abstract

In this paper, I am going to explore a rather neglected sub-form of comics that cannot adequately be described as narrative. This is highly relevant to all considerations of coherence in comics. If a comic is taken to be narrative, it must also be coherent on a global, multimodal level: The represented situations, events, and characters can be ›read‹ as located within a consistent storyworld (a diegesis or a possible world) then, based on interconnected temporal, spatial, causal, and ontological relations. The narrativity of comics has, of course, repeatedly been challenged in recent decades, but mostly concerning abstract works (see Casper and Howaldt; Grünewald; Rommens et al.). Less attention has been paid to comics, that do – on a global, multimodal level – neither present (fictional or non-fictional) events, situations, or sequences of actions, nor show individual existents (characters or objects). Instead, they employ various forms of interrelations, juxtapositions, and tensions between ›comic-like‹ pictures and verbal essays. They present theses, formulate arguments, or reflect on thematic relations mainly through written discourses.1 In comics – being a multimodal media form containing pictures – these verbal arguments and reflections are usually contextualized, symbolized, metaphorized, or contrasted through a pictorial ›track‹, but the respective images cannot be related to the spatio-temporal continuum of a »basic facts domain« (Margolin 2007, 71) or a »unified narrative space« (Gavaler, 157). I have discussed this before (Wilde 2017) with respect to specific webcomics (especially The Oatmeal by Matthew Inman) and I would now extend these observations to a larger corpus of works by Lynda Barry (2008; 2019), Nick Sousanis, and Schlogger (Johanna Baumann). I am going to analyze all three authors across their considerable differences with regard to prototypical (and, as I shall show, narrative) comics, as I think that their works all deviate in a specific way from the ›regular‹ procedures of generating (narrative) coherence in comics.

„Essayistic Comics and Non-Narrative Coherence“