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Knowledge and Scholarship

This column was set up for those seeking information and knowledge about comics. Various articles analyzing many topics related to comics are covered.

Comic scholarship has existed for decades, as an offshoot of cinema studies. If film were worth studying, why not comics? Early comic scholarship was mostly focused on histories of the medium and contents analysis. It is will cartoonist Will Eisner that the contents were separated from the form, and that the mechanics of how comics work were studied seriously.

Scott McCloud further contributed to the establishment of serious comic scholarship by publishing Understanding Comics (1994), which was itself inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s famous book Understanding Media (1967). McCloud’s work also has the distinction of mattering in the film of visual rhetoric where filmmakers and other visual researchers study his work to understand how does the visual work and how to use it to make arguments that are not language-based?

For years, this section of ComicBookBin was ill-defined. It was, as written above, about providing a basic understanding for comics for those who wanted sought it. Being a university professor has its perks and thus, I believe that it is best to orient this section of the Bin as the scholarly one, where citing my sources will not deter nor confuse.

Although not nominally a comic scholar, I have been embedded in that world my entire life and perhaps I can claim to be a comic scholar as I have published peer-reviewed material on comics. I have presented material on comic scholarship at conferences, and I have taught comics in the classroom. Perhaps it is time that I shed my imposter's syndrome affectation.

Hervé St-Louis, PhD, September 27, 2021

Last Updated: August 28, 2024 - 10:19