In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Comics and Narration by Thierry Groensteen
  • Rachel Trousdale (bio)
Comics and Narration, by Thierry Groensteen. Translated by Ann Miller
. University Press of Mississippi, 2013. ISBN 978-1-61703-770-2. 205pp. $55.00.

Thierry Groensteen’s Comics and Narration returns to his influential 1999 Système de la bande dessinée, published in English as The System of Comics in 2007. The first volume was, Groensteen explains, a “macrosemiotic” theory, “not concerned with the details of single imagos” (3). Comics and Narration applies Groensteen’s theories to individual comics pages, using examples from Europe, America, and Japan. In the process, he examines iconic “waffle-iron” comics pages; the innovative work of Chris Ware; experimental abstract comics; and intersections of comics with contemporary art. The result is a comprehensive overview of current comics practice and of the medium’s place in a broader discourse of visual culture.

Groensteen argues that comics are essentially distinct from other art forms that do not comprise the three essential components of image, language, and sequence. He offers a wide array of terms for elements unique to this hybrid medium: for example, he distinguishes visual and verbal narrative viewpoints, [End Page 146] offering the term “monstrator” for the implied consciousness behind the panels’ images and “reciter” for that behind the words.

Groensteen is most concerned with what he sees as comics’ fundamentally cumulative nature. We cannot, he says, read a comics panel in a vacuum: the comics text, even more than others, gains its meaning from context. As the book’s title emphasizes, this context is fundamentally narrative: panels progress in a linear sequence and the reader is trained to expect not just certain visual patterns but an overall rhythm.

“Rhythm” is Groensteen’s word, and the book’s most interesting chapter may be its seventh, in which he examines how pages construct both a primary rhythm of reading formed by the placement of panels and an array of counterpoint rhythms made out of components like color and subject matter. This visual rhythm is distinct from the passage of time in the narrative, which may move at a very different rate from the rhythm produced by the page as a whole.

For readers already familiar with Groensteen’s other work and comics theory more broadly, Comics and Narration does not offer an entirely new direction, but it establishes principles and terminology that are illuminating for comics from three continents, and compellingly articulates just what makes the comics form unique. [End Page 147]

Rachel Trousdale
Northeastern University
Rachel Trousdale

Rachel Trousdale is an Assistant Professor of English at Framingham State University. Her book Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010, and she’s now working on a project on humor in modern poetry. Her work on twentieth-century fiction, poetry, and comics has appeared in The Journal of Modern Literature, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Yale Review, and many other places. She also writes poetry.

...

pdf

Share