I enjoyed working on this book so much, and it was a massive learning experience for me! I can’t wait to get started on the next one. Please check out the book at the publisher’s website here. Book review editors or review writers can write me directly at elizabethallyn.woock (at) upol.cz if they would like a review copy of the book. I’m really curious to hear what folks think about the ideas I propose in here.

Overview:

• Explores the communicative possibilities of the comics format
• Brings a comics-based research methodology to the study of space, atmosphere, affect and mood in comics
• Layers in a nuanced approach to the depiction of medieval environments

About this book

This book proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing and discussing narrative space in comics. Building on Mieke Bal’s phenomenological approach to cultural analysis (2002), Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1996), and Geraint D’Arcy’s use of the mise en scène to describe space in the comics format (2020), this book layers in a nuanced approach to the depiction of medieval environments through affect theory and poetics to interrogate the staging of ideas which are associated with the medieval period. Considering the action, setting, and story – as well as affect, atmosphere, and mood – medieval space is contextualized as an ethically complex poetic image. This book also explores the communicative possibilities of the comics format, and seeks to show rather than just tell the methodologies of space in comics-based research through illustrating key sections of the text.

I divided up the analyses and topics into: Canonic Space, Eulogized Space, Unnatural Realms, Projected Archeology and Reader Space, with a comics-format methods section at the front and comics-format conclusion at the end.