The Graphic "I" in Research Comics

As academic comics become more common in journals and more researchers are sharing methodologies for the production of academic comics, the appearance of the researcher's avatar in the illustrated article has become an accepted part of the practice. These comics show the researcher as an author, an illustrator, and even a narrative character in a graphic narrative. The practice of illustrating comics-based research has not yet codified how to transmediate academic writing norms into sequential art, or what best practice to apply in embodying the researcher on the page. Through a survey of recently published guides to creating academic comics and research comics, this study proposes several reasons for intentionally including the embodied researcher and suggests conditions when the embodied researcher might best be excluded.