COMICS & LANGUAGE REIMAGINING CRITICAL DISCOURSE ON FORM

It has become an axiom in comic studies that 'comics is a language, not a genre.' But what exactly does that mean, and how is discourse on the form both aided and hindered by thinking of it in linguistic terms? In Comics and Language, Hannah Miodrag challenges many of the key assumptions about the 'grammar' and formal characteristics of comics and offers a more nuanced, theoretical framework that she argues will better serve the field by providing a consistent means for communicating critical theory in the scholarship. She exposes the problems embedded in the ways critics have used ideas of language, literature, structuralism, and semiotics, and sets out a new and more theoretically sound way of understanding how comics communicate.