Eye Like Comics: Ocularcentrism and the Ideal Perspective in Comics Studies

The notion that comics are a visual medium would seem to be an unassailable one. While some thinkers (e.g. McCloud) assert that comics are exclusively visual, others (e.g. Eisner, Groensteen) acknowledge the possibility for comics to have non-visual elements, but do not pursue these elements in their studies. In addition to this emphasis on visual elements, or ‘ocularcentrism’ as Martin Jay calls it, sight as a physical process has tended to be subordinated to the idea of sight: seeing is only the (assumedly transparent) process/means by which a relationship is entered into by the seer and the seen. It is incapable of agency in and of itself. Yet as Roger Sabin, Mel Gibson, Charles Hatfield, Ernesto Priego and others have emphasised, this conceptualisation of the medium is not wholly satisfactory because it does not account for the material elements of comics, their physical properties, or the complexities of readers’ interactions with them. In fact, a number of texts make very explicit use of non-visual modes of communication to express ideas in ways that could not be conveyed using sight alone.

In this presentation, I will first outline the concepts of ocularcentrism and the ideal perspective in comics scholarship, giving an indication of how they have been perpetuated through attempts at defining comics and understanding their poetics. Next, I will seek to demonstrate the multisensory nature of comics and provide a selection of examples showing how readers engage with the medium using the senses of hearing, touch, taste and smell. Finally, I will argue that the nascent ‘material turn’ that we can observe in more recent scholarship on the medium is to be encouraged and developed in order that we might work towards a more comprehensive, multisensory understanding of the poetics of comics.

References

Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Paramus, NJ: Poorhouse Press, 1985 (2006).

Gibson, Mel. "What you read and where you read it, how you get it, how you keep it: Children, comics and historical cultural practice." Popular Narrative Media 1.2 (2008): 151-167.

Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

Hatfield, Charles and Jared Gardner. Charles & Jared Talk Comics and Narrative Theory. 19 April 2011. 27 January 2012. <http://thepanelists.org/2011/04/charles-jared-talk-comics-and-narrative-theory/>.

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkely, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1994.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993 (1994).

Priego, Ernesto. "On Cultural Materialism, Comics and Digital Media." Opticon1826 2010: 1-3.

Sabin, Roger. "The Crisis in Modern American and British Comics, and the Possibilities of the Internet as a Solution." Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Reading Comics. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press & University of Copenhagen, 2000. 43-57.

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