Record Details
Extending and Visualizing Authorship in Comics Studies
ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Title | Extending and Visualizing Authorship in Comics Studies |
| Names |
Brown, Nicholas A. (Nicholas Alexander)
(creator) Pflugfelder, Ehren H. (advisor) Jensen, Tim T. (advisor) |
| Date Issued | 2015-04-30 (iso8601) |
| Note | Graduation date: 2015 |
| Abstract | This thesis complicates the traditional associations between authorship and alphabetic composition within the comics medium and examines how the contributions of line artists and writers differ and may alter an audience's perceptions of the medium. As a fundamentally multimodal and collaborative work, the popular superhero comic muddies authorial claims and requires further investigations should we desire to describe authorship more accurately and equitably. How might our recognition of the visual author alter our understandings of the author construct within, and beyond, comics? In this pursuit, I argue that the terminology available to us determines how deeply we may understand a topic and examine instances in which scholars have attempted to develop on a discipline's body of terminology by borrowing from another. Although helpful at first, these efforts produce limited success, and discipline-specific terms become more necessary. To this end, I present the visual/alphabetic author distinction to recognize the possibility of authorial intent through the visual mode. This split explicitly recognizes the possibility of multimodal and collaborative authorships and forces us to re-examine our beliefs about authorship more generally. Examining the editors' note, an instance of visual plagiarism, and the MLA citation for graphic narratives, I argue for recognition of alternative authorships in comics and forecast how our understandings may change based on the visual/alphabetic split. These observations find support in a series of comics panels that show how the intensity of the visual author's contributions may more easily alter an audience's perceptions of the comic book. I then explore how an acceptance of the visual author may encourage further engagement with multimodal composition and collaboration within the writing classroom, positing that a studio composition classroom facilitate such efforts. |
| Genre | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Access Condition | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ |
| Topic | comics |
| Identifier | http://hdl.handle.net/1957/56223 |
