< Back to previous page

Project

Lost in Hotel Penumbra. A Playful Study on the (Dis)appearance of the Character in (Post)comics.

“The way text is used visually in comics seems to me to be so incredibly limited. It’s the one avenue in comics that seems to have been more or less completely untouched.”

This statement from 1997, made by the acclaimed comic artist Chris Ware, is key to understand the intentions of WRITE ME A PANEL. Despite the fact that most comics have text, the comic is regarded as a medium of visual storytelling, with words taking a backseat to images. Being trained as an illustrator, I am used to drawing pictures, to showing something through images, to having images tell and express the story. At the same time, I have always enjoyed playing with words, fooling around with text panels, inventing word puns. In my master year, I even wrote a comic, Doomed, which is (almost) solely made up of speech bubbles. The aim was to experiment with the narrative strength of the text in a medium that supposedly needs images in order ‘to be’.

In my doctoral project, I intend to further explore the uses, functions and possibilities of text and words in comics by studying previous attempts to experiment with text, and develop some experiments myself. According to Thomas E. Wartenberg (2012), there are four different ways in which text functions in comics: as the representation of a character’s thoughts or speech; as narration; as a pictorial element; or as the representation of sonic events. My goal in WRITE ME A PANEL is to look into these functions, develop a theoretical framework to analyse the different functions of text in comics, study experimental uses of text in comics and other (related) media, and at the same time create my own ways of handling text and narrative in comic books.

Date:29 Mar 2018 →  29 Mar 2022
Keywords:comics, word, narrative, strip, narratie, bild
Disciplines:Architectural engineering, Architecture, Interior architecture, Architectural design, Art studies and sciences
Project type:PhD project