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