Representing experience in comics: Carnet de Voyage. Issue 2 (2nd April 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Davies, Paul Fisher
• Is Part Of: Journal of graphic novels & comics. Volume 7:Issue 2(2016)
• Page Start: 117
• Page End: 133
• Publication Date: 2016-04-02
• Subjects: carnets de voyage -- systemic functional linguistics -- multimodality -- phatic -- text world theory; Graphic novels -- Periodicals; Comic books, strips, etc -- Periodicals; Popular culture -- Periodicals; Art, Modern -- 21st century -- Periodicals; Art, Modern; Comic books, strips, etc; Graphic novels; Popular culture; Comicroman; Comic; Periodicals; 741.5
• DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2015.1131173
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2150-4857

Abstract

Abstract : Comics offer distinctive approaches to representing experience, combining the modalities of the visual and the verbal in compatible ways. In his Carnet de Voyage – created during a trip publicising Blankets (2003) and researching for Habibi (2011), and later published as 'a little snack' to cover the long wait between these books – Craig Thompson uses a range of approaches to render his travel experience in words and pictures, ranging from the recognisably comics-like to more diaristic and sketchbook modes, similar to carnets published by l'Association. This article uses Thompson's Carnet to illustrate a variety of ways in which human experience, internal and external, is construed in images as in language, and how those modes interact. I employ a framework for describing how experience can be rendered in graphic narrative, based on a Hallidayan functional model of language similar to that explored in Kress & van Leeuwen's Reading Images and O'Toole's The Language of Displayed Art .