Comic Book Collaboration: A Practice-Informed Study of Mutual Artistic Figuration

Collaboration in comics production is widely normalised and recognised in comics cultures yet the dominant paradigm in the discourse perpetuates the auteurist practice of singling out an individual author within such groups as a supposed main author. This practice-informed study investigates the largely unexplored tension within this cultural paradox to scrutinise the ideas auteurism promotes as given truths. By considering the multiple subjectivities at play when creators collaborate to realise a work, and when culture receives it, I explore through practice whether collaboration effects renegotiation of artistic identity, the sanctity and integrity of which are central to auteurist thought.

The study explores how creators are presented and received as authorial presences by themselves and culture, using studies on artistic persona and social understandings of art worlds. My approach is interdisciplinary with usage of fine art theory, fine art history, poststructuralism, literary criticism, and sociology in addition to comics-specific cultural history, and narratology. A practical component in the form of an autoethnography addresses collaborators’ experiences of the shaping of the authorial image through their work as they work. Approaching the research questions as a relationship between the politics of auteurism and the subjective experience of creators in collaboration is a new combination of ideas, and creates the opportunity to reconsider current notions of authorship in comics. It also brings autoethnography into comics scholarship as a tool to explore subjective creative experiences.

In providing cultural context and social explanations for the perpetuation of auteurist beliefs, I find that artistic identity fulfils functions serving dominant groups in art worlds. By considering artistic identity an act of figuration occurring through establishing boundaries as to what this identity represents, I also find collaboration to entail conditions that destabilise these boundaries. In considering the overlapping subjectivities at play through a perceptual framework, I propose the idea that collaborating creators mutually modulate each other’s work through figurating one another in their own perceptions of working to create a comic.

The author of this thesis has not given permission for it to be available in UAL Research Online. Please contact UALRO for more information.