Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form
"Hannah Miodrag'sComics and Languageis a powerful corrective to failures in the existing literature of comics studies around the use of language and offers new avenues for engaging with the scholarship of comics. Her close readings of specific works are insightful and succeed at what good criticism should do. After reading this book, I wanted to go pull volumes of George Herriman, Lynda Barry, and Posy Simmonds off the shelf and start rereading with renewed enthusiasm and an expanded attention to the language at work in the comics."--Derik A. Badman, artist, critic, and web developer"Miodrag unflinchingly challenges what she considers to be the false assumptions of comics scholarship: comics are a kind of language, comics are a kind of literature, words and images are equivalent in comics. She undercuts these claims with compelling arguments about the significant differences between written language and visual language. But Miodrag is doing more than merely hurling brickbats;Comics and Languageprovides a new critical framework for understanding comics form."--Randy Duncan, co-author ofThe Power of Comics: History, Form, and Cultureand co-editor of the Eisner-nominatedCritical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods