The Reading Room Gallery
November 10, 2008

A talk by Karin Kukkonen, PhD candidate at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and the University of Tampere, Finland.

Being a medium of visual narration, the images of comics are not limited to merely showing events. On the contrary, much of their storytelling relies on what the image sequences tell readers. Yet are images even capable of telling like language? Can they reproduce the stylistic effects of metaphor and metonymy? And will Superman escape the clutches of anaphora or is he doomed to live through the same story time and again?

Addressing these and other questions, Karin Kukkonen’s talk explores the visual rhetoric of comics narration on the level of individual images, image sequences and larger narrative structure. If the rhetoric of comics emerges from the same thought patterns as classical rhetoric, she argues, this longstanding critical tradition can help us to understand how comics tell their story.

Co-sponsored by Project Narrative and the Cartoon Research Library.