Comic strips and the making of meaning: emotion, intersubjectivity and narrative drawing.

This study argues that the experience of reading comics is comprehensible as a series of intersubjective relationships represented in physical form. Considering concepts of self-conciousness, perception, embodiment and social experience, it develops a narrative model that brings the physical forms of self-expression into a series of relationships generated and made meaningful to embodied subjects.

I seek to develop the theoretical work of a minority of comics narratologists. In particular, theorists who focussed on the relationship between content, form and enunciative context, rather than focussing on the study of enunciation alone.

Following cultural theorist Martin Barker, I adopt a crossdisciplinary theoretical approach, which considers the relationship between the ideas, forms and methods of one discipline and another. However, I adopt an interdisciplinary method in two practical Drawing Demonstrations, that makes instrumental use of studio methods in solving two theoretical problems. I argue for practice-based research as problem solving.

My argument has a main axis: readings of philosophical descriptions of self-consciousness and perception on one hand, and readings of the work of narratologists who focus on the relationship between histoire and discours, on the other. My argument establishes a set of theoretical predecessors in works that I bring together for the first time. This constitutes a new set of ideas from which my argument derives. This set has not been compiled before in English language comics narratology.

The model of narrative that I describe is also original, although correlates to the work of other narratologists. Also original are my analysis of the theory of 'mediagenius' and conditions of intersubjectivity and my analysis of comic strip artist Matt Madden's work in terms of concepts of self observation. My two Drawing Demonstrations provide an original model of practice-based research following a problem-solving approach.

In approaching comics narratology as a relationship between histoire and discours, this study develops Barker's approach. It provides opportunities for comics narratologists to reconsider the application of both the approach and the ideas that it represents.