Simon Grennan

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 multi-faceted focus on drawing and teasing out the difference between what is and is not language, Grennan brings together a wide range of materials in the field from sources published at the foundation of the discipline to recent scholarship. Structured around English, French, Japanese, Chinese and Korean case studies from different traditions of comics drawing, distribution and use, the book includes over 180 illustrations and students can also benefit from a glossary of key terms and further reading for each section. Making fresh connections between familiar and unfamiliar ideas and ranging widely across histories, people and places this is a unique, powerful introduction to how comics work as a medium of communication and creativity.

Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval (Isabelle Émilie de Tessier, 1847–1890), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century. It discusses key themes and practices of Duval’s vision and production, relative to the wider historic social, cultural and economic environments in which her work was made, distributed and read, identifing Duval as an exemplary radical practitioner. The book interrogates the relationships between the practices and the forms of print, story-telling, drawing and stage performance. It focuses on the creation of new types of cultural work by women and highlights the style of Duval’s drawings relative to both the visual conventions of theatre production and the significance of the visualisation of amateurism and vulgarity. Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist establishes Duval as a unique but exemplary figure in a transformational period of the nineteenth century.

This accessible book explains the significance of relationships between the body and the mark, visual imitation, drawing and writing and visual storytelling, providing a simple guide to these key ideas. For millennia drawing has been conceived as an exploratory activity, mediating between the vision of the drafter and what they are drawing. Drawing reveals hidden relationships, directs attention, scrutinises the material world and provides plans for further action. The book unpacks the key ideas that have shaped the rich, complex and foundational activity of drawing. It presents an unexpected, engaging and authoritative range of illustrated examples of drawings made by culturally and historically diverse people for different purposes, with different media, in widely different times and situations. Educator, author and artist Simon Grennan builds together concepts to create a complete guide to ideas about drawing.

This accessible book explains the significance of relationships between the body and the mark, visual imitation, drawing and writing and visual storytelling, providing a simple guide to these key ideas. For millennia drawing has been conceived as an exploratory activity, mediating between the vision of the drafter and what they are drawing. Drawing reveals hidden relationships, directs attention, scrutinises the material world and provides plans for further action. The book unpacks the key ideas that have shaped the rich, complex and foundational activity of drawing. It presents an unexpected, engaging and authoritative range of illustrated examples of drawings made by culturally and historically diverse people for different purposes, with different media, in widely different times and situations. Educator, author and artist Simon Grennan builds together concepts to create a complete guide to ideas about drawing.

Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist offers the first critical appraisal of the work of Marie Duval (Isabelle Émilie de Tessier, 1847–1890), one of the most unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the later nineteenth century. It discusses key themes and practices of Duval’s vision and production, relative to the wider historic social, cultural and economic environments in which her work was made, distributed and read, identifing Duval as an exemplary radical practitioner. The book interrogates the relationships between the practices and the forms of print, story-telling, drawing and stage performance. It focuses on the creation of new types of cultural work by women and highlights the style of Duval’s drawings relative to both the visual conventions of theatre production and the significance of the visualisation of amateurism and vulgarity. Marie Duval: maverick Victorian cartoonist establishes Duval as a unique but exemplary figure in a transformational period of the nineteenth century.

This book offers an original new conception of visual story telling, proposing that drawing, depictive drawing and narrative drawing are produced in an encompassing dialogic system of embodied social behavior. It refigures the existing descriptions of visual story-telling that pause with theorizations of perception and the articulation of form. The book identifies and examines key issues in the field, including: the relationships between vision, visualization and imagination; the theoretical remediation of linguistic and narratological concepts; the systematization of discourse; the production of the subject; idea and institution; and the significance of resources of the body in depiction, representation and narrative. It then tests this new conception in practice: two original visual demonstrations clarify the particular dialectic relationships between subjects and media, in an examination of drawing style and genre, social consensus and self-conscious constraint. Thebook’s originality derives from its clear articulation of a wide range of sources in proposing a conception of narrative drawing, and the extrapolation of this new conception in two new visual demonstrations.