Multiple Literacies and Approaches to Reading Processes in American Periodical Comics

Comic are a complex form which require that a reader engage in multiple literacies as part of the reading process. A reader not only needs to be able to identify and interpret information presented to them in the forms of text and image but also to draw complex connections between these and other communicating elements within the structure of the form. Through an examination of the elements which make up the comics structure, and reading processes, I will propose an expanded toolkit for reading comics. This expanded reading toolkit will serve as a foundation for the analysis of the American periodical presented through the printed codex and modern touch screen displays technologies such as tablets and mobile phones. This will mark early steps of testing an expanded toolkit which can be further developed through application in other types of comic in future studies. Comics academia has seen a significant increase in research of comics reading in the recent years. Prior to this time comics academia in English was generally focussed on historical or cultural studies which primarily reflected on what comics have to say, and how they say it, rather than how they are read. Studies of reading comic up until the early 2000s generally discussed comics as tools for teaching and often only considered comics to be useful in preparing children for “proper” prose reading (Hatfield, 2005). Research on the reading processes prior to the beginning of this study was provided primarily by practitioners or practitioner theorist such as Will Eisner and Scott McCloud whose ideas form a groundwork on which early academic studies of reading comics are based (Eisner, 1985; McCloud, 1997). Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature by Charles Hatfield (2005) outlines the history of how comics were discussed prior to this point and establishes comics literacies as something worthy of more comprehensive study. During the early 2000s a groundswell of academically robust work in the field began to appear. It was also during this time that a key Francophone text from Groensteen was translated to English (Groensteen, 2007). This was the state of the academic field of study when work on this dissertation began however relevant new texts have since been released. One of the key challenges of this thesis was to bring together the key disparate ideas of comics reading in order to understand and apply an expanded reading toolkit to comics. This thesis aims to bring together comic reading studies so as to present an expanded understanding of how comics are read and what literacies are expected of a reader. In combining the work of each of the researchers that contribute to the study I aim to identify both where ideas overlap and where gaps need to be filled. In filling some of these gaps with my own research I will propose an expanded reading toolkit which can be applied to understanding of how comics are read. This expanded reading toolkit will consider the multiple literacies of comics and how images, text and conceptual metaphor come together to create meaning. It will also look at the holistic structure of comics and how a reader navigates that structure. Here we will discuss the sense-making processes involved in panel-transitions, Cohn’s Hierarchy (Cohn, 2010) and braiding (Groensteen, 2007) before applying ideas of sequence and layout. In this discussion of reading sequence, I will outline one of my core contributions to knowledge by presenting meta-rastic indices, which are key to understanding how readers find their path through complex layouts. Having outlined each of the core structural and reading components and how they impact the reading process it will then be possible to look at how these reading processes are impacted by the substrate medium on which a comic is presented. Through close readings of American periodical comics presented in print and on screen I will examine the established reading toolkit and discuss how reading processes shift between presentations. This will contribute substantially to an understanding of how the device used for presentation impacts processes and practices of reading the comics form. Using close readings and diagrams this thesis will offer substantial contribution to the existing field by presenting an expanded reading toolkit which accounts for the various activities and processes used by readers of comics. It will also provide a vocabulary for discussing these and establish a link between reading of the comics and the form in which it is presented to the reader.