The Patron Saint of Superheroes

First, an enormous thank you to the reviewers of The Comics Form: Richard Reynolds, Maaheen Ahmed, Lukas R.A. Wilde, Shawn Gilmore, and Sam Cowling; and to the comics journals that published them: Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Image [&] Narrative, Closure, INKS, and ImageText (forthcoming).

Being reviewed is no small academic accomplishment, and a reviewer’s careful study is a kindness. All of the reviews were in response to the hardback edition of The Comics Form published in 2022. Despite the institutional pricing, Bloomsbury sold enough copies to warrant a less expensive paperback edition, available beginning this week. I’m taking this as a moment to review my reviews, looking for shared points and possible consensus.

First, a disclaimer: Comics studies is a fairly small room. I know and like all five reviewers. But since they were writing professionally, I’ll refer to them by their last names (and with an implicit wave hello).

Also, forgive me for beginning with the praise.

Cowling writes:

“This is the best scholarly book yet written on the formal structure of comics and mandatory reading for scholars within comics studies.”

Reynolds:

“It feels as if a new phase in the formal analysis of our art form may have arrived … a sign of comics scholarship and comics studies arriving at a new level of maturity – which is a good reason to celebrate the publication of this book.”

Ahmed:

“Chris Gavaler’s The Comics Form therefore offers a welcome and original addition to the still relatively limited reflections on the visual elements of comics. […] The Comics Form is an interesting and important work …”

Wilde gives the most concise praise:

“The bar has been raised, without question.”

And Gilmore introduces some skepticism:

“The Comics Form attempts to rigorously systematize the relationships between sequenced images that exist with its definition of form. Some scholars may find distinctions here that, when applied to particular comics, help explain interesting formal and aesthetic aspects.”

Happily, all agree on the book’s primary goal, and nearly all agree on its accomplishing it. A majority also agree that, in addition to its detailed formal analysis, The Comics Form offers something of further value, its theoretical scope.

Reynolds:

“As a researcher and writer, Gavaler’s greatest strength lies in his tenacity in probing and analysing the complex tissue of existing scholarship, and this new book emerges initially as a summary and a roadmap to this sometimes confusing field of enquiry.”

Cowling:

“Alongside the theoretical toolbox Gavaler carefully assembles over seven chapters, this book accomplishes something of evident disciplinary importance: it places extant research on the comics form (e.g., regarding layout, style, and closure) in productive dialogue. Too often, formal theories of comics engage one another in glancing, anecdotal, or unproductive ways. Throughout The Comics Form, Gavaler articulates and usefully criticizes competing approaches, marking points of theoretical agreement and disagreement. So, while the novel proposals advanced in The Comics Form are substantial and capably defended, this book is no less notable for its successful critique of methodologically disparate work on the comics form by a broad range of scholars.”

Wilde:

“Chris Gavaler now presents what is probably the broadest survey of the last two decades of comic theory, in an almost obsessive quest for ever more precise ways of distinguishing and describing the narrative functions and interrelations of sequential images. […] What makes this sweeping tour as impressive as authoritative [is] the sheer number of comic-theoretical reference texts that Gavaler subjects to critical and detailed scrutiny, especially recent work from the last five years […] Rarely does one see so many threads brought together in original ways. Even authors whose works come from quite heterogeneous directions – Neil Cohn’s cognitive psychology (2013), for instance, Hannah Miodrag’s linguistic works (2013), or Barbara Postema’s semiotic orientation (2013) – are translated benevolently but rigorously into and against each other to expose ever more subtle differences which actually do make a difference! […] hardly any comic-theoretical discussion of the last decades is left out … to which the most relevant problems, classifications, and differentiations are not just concisely reflected but often also substantially expanded.”

Ahmed doesn’t evaluate the scope but does name four comics scholars (Groensteen, McCloud, Cohn, Eco) and four disciplinary theories (visual, linguistic, cognitive science, literary) discussed, adding:

“While the typological inclinations of the analytical framework can sometimes seem overwhelming, every aspect is carefully explained and often grounded in theories stemming from comics as well as other disciplines.”

Only Gilmore seemed displeased:

“Gavaler then begins itemizing the work of various scholars, citing García, Groensteen, Earle, Hatfield, Cohn, Beaty, and Hague on the first page alone, in a litany of definitional quotations, previewing the book’s approach to comics studies. Throughout, scholars and their arguments almost always appear without introduction, typically without first names or textual references to their works, which makes for a mélange of disembodied snippets, including when Gavaler assembles eighteen key definitions of comics, ranging from Waugh (1947) to Duncan and Smith (2015).”

To be fair, Cowling also called that list a “litany,” though with a positive connotation:

“Gavaler’s search for and subsequent defense of his preferred starting point is conspicuously democratic: he assembles a litany of proposed definitions of comics and notes that, if anything has claim to being the orthodox view of comics, it is that they are images in sequence. As he puts it “Sequenced images is the most common denominator of comics definitions” (2). In contrast to approaches that might hinge upon some putatively a priori principle of comics as the foundation from which to build, Gavaler’s strategy actively seeks out the limited common ground among theories of comics. There’s a laudable humility to this methodology. This ecumenical stance also ensures that the specific theses Gavaler defends in the book are of direct relevance to most approaches for understanding comics. Gavaler relies upon the same democratic approach at other points in the book as well—e.g., when carefully navigating views regarding the nature of sequences. The result is a book-length antidote to worries about the fragmentary character of theorizing about comics and the paucity of productive engagement between competing or even complementary formal investigations into comics.”

Four of the reviewers also praise the scope of examples.

Reynolds:

“Furthermore, the book also engages with a refreshingly wide range of cultural references, within and beyond comics and graphic novels.”

Wilde:

“What must be conceded with special appreciation for all of Gavaler‘s obsession with detail, the book remains virtually jargon-free and is interested in actual issues – in narrative differences – which he vividly discusses through many hundreds of current examples.”

Ahmed:

“The explanations are complemented with examples of comics and images stemming from a wide range of image-making techniques and contexts.”

Cowling praises the nature of the scope in detail:

“Crucially, Gavaler resists any view that requires images to be drawn. This is obvious enough from Gavaler’s use of photographic images throughout the book, but it should be noted that this verdict is also a direct consequence of his view of formal analysis. If the comics form is to be distinguished solely by reference to intrinsic features—roughly, those properties a thing has independently of anything else—then we cannot invoke a range of familiar and perhaps intuitively intimate properties of comics. […] The moral here is an interesting one about method: if we are concerned with the comics form rather than the comics medium and contend that the comics form is a purely intrinsic matter, certain familiar features of comics like those regarding production will soon fall outside of the scope of our analyses and definitions.”

Only Gilmore implies that the approach and resulting range is a flaw:

“The Comics Form works by establishing congruent aesthetic elements that appear in any combination of ‘sequenced images.’ This means that the specific examples presented throughout the book are mostly secondary to the configuration of formal categories and subcategories. […] This typology is primarily explained not by specific examples from comics themselves, but by pointing to examples from Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Tom Phillips, followed by an illustration of Gavaler’s own making …”

Gilmore also refers twice to the book’s “narrow scope” and “very narrow focus,” which, despite seeming to contradict the other assessments, may reveal a point of agreement.

Wilde writes:

“Chris Gavaler’s project at first seems almost modest or overambitious – depending on your point of view: it is about nothing more and nothing less than a purely formal description of comics and its resulting necessary (but also typical) means of representation. […] Thus the book may also conclude with a somewhat less than modest mic drop in the last sentence: ‘These are the qualities of sequenced images, which together explain the comics form’ (TCF, 210).”

The outlier also devotes half of their review to the introduction, which sets up the book’s formal approach in relation to other possible approaches. The others mention the introduction only briefly and positively.

Reynolds:

“a substantial ‘Introduction’ that contextualises his work within the history of the medium and existing definitions of the comics form”

Cowling:

“An introductory chapter places Gavaler’s project in relation to various approaches for analyzing the comics medium.”

Ahmed:

“The book opens with a highly useful contextualization of comics definitions across the past decades of comics scholarship. The overlapping definitions are mapped across the parameters of publishing history, style, conventions and the form of comics (3). Acknowledging that there can be no single definition to comics, Gavaler works with sequenced images as ‘the most common denominator of comics definitions’ (2).”

Wilde:

“From an initially unsurprising definition, namely sequential imagery (“both the most repeated and the least contested features in comics definitions,” TCF, 9), his introductory chapter derives a transmedially connectable and media- or form-specific understanding of discourse vs. diegesis.”

Ultimately, the dissenting review may object not to the book per se, but to formal analysis in general, preferring other areas of comics studies:

“But separating form from context, history, aesthetics, and narrative does just that, leaving this notion of comics form quite apart from much of comics studies.”

I’ll therefore close by suggesting a caveat to the first sentence cited above:

The Comics Form may be “mandatory reading for scholars within comics studies” who are interested in formal analysis.

The paperback is available January 25:

Tags: Lukas R.A. Wilde, Maaheen Ahmed, Richard Reynolds, Sam Cowling, Shawn Gilmore, The comics form