Establishing Relations
Photography in Wordless Comics
Barbara Postema
Abstract
In the process of providing close readings of a number of silent comics, this article considers the difference between drawn images and photographic images as vehicles for narrative, traces a number of the ways in which photos are remediated in comics, and suggests various narrative functions for which photographs in wordless comics are used as stand-ins for text.
Résumé
Axé sur la lecture détaillée de plusieurs bandes dessinées muettes, cet article s’interroge sur la différence entre images dessinées et images photographiques en tant que support d’une narration. Il discute aussi certaines formes de remédiatisation de la photographie au sein de la bande dessinée. Enfin, il présente plusieurs fonctions narratives que la photographie peut assumer quand elle se substitue au texte dans une bande dessinée muette.
Keywords
Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Jess Fink, Matthew Forsythe, Megan Kelso, remediation, silent comics, Shaun Tan, George A. Walker, wordless comics
Photocomics or Fumetti are not a very common genre of comics. Wordless photocomics are more rare still. Through the intervention of text balloons and captions, photographic images can be manipulated into functioning like the sequential panels of comics, though as Clive Scott points out in The Spoken
Image, even when arranged as panels in a photo-story, the photograph still functions differently from
the drawn comics image (206). But once photographic images are deprived of the textual paraphernalia of comics, they seem to lose the juxtaposing and sequential drive that the verbal texts provided and revert back to being photographs, rather than narrative images.1 It seems they cannot act independently
to tell stories in the way that the drawn images of comics can. The near non-existence of wordless photocomics (insofar as I have been able to determine) illustrates two things: it highlights the inherent narrative potential of drawn comics images which is lacking in photographs, and it shows how strong the photograph’s character of “reality recorded” is, which can be temporarily overruled when speech balloons are added, but to which state the photograph returns again immediately when that text is removed. Indeed, photographs retain this quality when they themselves are drawn. Images representing (fictional, imagined) photographs are used extensively in comics.2 In wordless comics, drawn photographs are
used precisely for their referential qualities, and the emotions and personal histories we endow them with, to fill in details that due to the constraints of wordlessness, these silent comics cannot narrate in another way.
Establishing What Is Real
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes argues that the “photographic referent” is different from the referent in other systems of representation (76). It is not an “optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens” (ibid., emphasis original). Painters are free to image the things they represent on their canvas, but with a photograph -- at least before Photoshop -- we could “never deny that the thing has been there,” as Barthes puts it, even if the photograph is staged and includes fantastical costumes and backdrops. Walter Benjamin makes a similar point in his “Brief History of Photography,” where he notes the “Here and Now” of old photographs, “with which reality has […] signed its pictorial character through and through” (176). This quality of photographs carries over to the drawn images of photographs. In a comic, the world that is created, the diegesis, may be imaginary, but any photographs that are part of that world are understood to represent things that really exist there, things that are part of the diegesis whether they are shown directly or not.3
1. To be sure, photographs carry their own narrative potential, in the way a moment captured in a snapshot implies what went before, or what will happen just after. However, due to the more direct connection between the “real” and the image in photographs, a sequence of photographs is more likely to imply the reconstruction of an action, rather than the creation of action, which is evoked by a sequence of drawn images.
2. For example, as I have discussed in Narrative Structure in Comics, photography is a leading theme in Jason Little’s Shutterbug Follies, where photographs end up providing key evidence to solving the graphic novel’s murder mystery (108). The most extended wordless sequence in this comic also happens to be a series of six panels that represent all the negatives exposed on a roll of film in an abandoned camera, which, once developed, encapsulate the entire life of an unknown man in six photographs (Postema 70-76).
3. My focus in this article is on the uses of photographs in advancing the narrative in silent comics. While the ontological differences between drawn photographs, photorealistic drawings, and real photographs included in drawn narratives raise interesting questions, I will leave those to be addressed elsewhere.
This transferable quality of realness makes photographs a valuable narrative tool in wordless comics. In a genre of comics where things can only be told by showing them, exposition -- that is to say, relevant back story elements to do with the setting, for example -- is only possible by adding detail to the images and hoping that attentive readers will take the time to take in the information. Some of the simplest narrative functions of photographs in silent comics underscore this expository function: formal, framed photographs of a family are used regularly to wordlessly establish the connections that exist between certain characters in the story, whether or not they are present in the immediate surroundings.
Family Pictures
Amazing Spider-Man, issue 39, contains a story called “Meanwhile…”, which was part of the ‘Nuff Said
“challenge,” for which Marvel creators were asked to produce a one-off wordless issue of the series they were working on. This story switches between the points of view of Mary Jane, Aunt May, and Peter Parker, an unspoken “meanwhile” connecting the scenes. The final page of the story brings the three storylines together through panels showing Peter and Aunt May having dinner together, Mary Jane sleeping, Aunt May reading in bed, and finally Peter asleep in his own bed. These panels are connected by the photographs in the background of each panel: the dining room has framed portraits of Uncle Ben, as well as Peter and Mary Jane as a couple on the side board. Aunt May has those same photographs on her bedside table. Meanwhile, Mary Jane too has a framed picture of herself and Peter by her bed, while Peter’s bedside table shows a magazine with Mary Jane’s picture on the cover. These repeated portraits show the connections that exist between these three individuals: the loss of uncle Ben is still felt acutely by both his wife and his nephew, even as Peter and Aunt May struggle to be close to one another, and though they are not together as a couple at this time, strong bonds still exist between Peter and Mary Jane, as they miss each other but are unable to reach out.
Photographs also serve to underscore the presence of absent loved ones in Marvel’s tribute comic to the first responders on 9/11. In A Moment of Silence several stories use family portraits in their settings. In “Sick Day,” a woman hugs a photograph of her husband to herself along with her children, as they watch the coverage from the World Trade Center on TV, knowing that as a member of the New York Fire Department, her husband will be there. In “Periphery,” unobtrusive family portraits included as part of the setting on the first and last page of the story -- one on the fridge door and the other on the television -- bookend a family going from everyday bickering to panic to extreme relief, as in the last three panels it is revealed that the husband did not get to work on time and as a result was not in the Twin Towers when they were hit by airplanes. The final panel of “Periphery” contrasts the hug of a family that has been reunited against all expectation with the television screen that is still showing an image of the burning towers. The TV set is topped with a framed photograph of that same family. This photograph, an echo from the kitchen door photograph on the first page, shows (perhaps somewhat sentimentally) that despite their arguing this family is defined by their identity as a family. It also contrasts this story implicitly with the story “Sick Day.” The family in the photograph in “Periphery” is still complete: all the members of the family in the picture are now together in their living room. The photo of the father and his son in soccer gear in “Sick Day” has become a memorial by the end of that story: while the son is still there to mourn, the father was lost when the towers collapsed.
Holding on to the Past
This mourning aspect is for Barthes another key feature of photographs, their ability to show the dead when they were still alive. He calls the person or thing that was photographed the Spectrum, “because this word retains, through its root, a relation to ‘spectacle’ and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead” (9). Photographs of people who have since died represent the paradox of showing someone who is both alive and dead, and after his mother’s death, Barthes turns purposefully to his photographs of her to find her again (67). The mourning function of photography is used explicitly in the comic Krokodilstaden by Knut Larsson. The crocodile hunter who is the protagonist of this post- apocalyptic story has a picture on his wall of a beautiful, sad looking woman, with in front of it a cup-shaped container that looks like a reliquary, perhaps an urn. The presence of these objects together indicates that the hunter lost someone who was important to him, like a lover or even a wife, and that he still pines for her. Indeed, another photograph on the wall in the bedroom shows him and this woman together. The photograph in the bedroom is shown only as a detail in the background, but is nevertheless significant in its contrast with the actions taking place in the bedroom, as the man is sharing his bed with a crocodile woman he caught earlier that day. The presence of his departed wife now becomes literal, the Spectrum from the photograph becoming a spectre, as midway through the story the spirit of the woman is shown emerging from the urn, released by her photograph, after which she jealously sets about interfering with the hunter’s new relationship.
The portraiture of loved ones, whether kept as a memorial to the dearly departed or just a keepsake of temporarily absent friends and family, is an important function of photographs in wordless comics and is used frequently. Family relationships are often an important part of protagonists’ personalities, and photographs in wallets or framed on walls are a convenient shorthand to establish the presence of such people in the characters’ lives. A Gutsman story about the hero’s troubled relationship with his parents starts and ends with a panel showing the hero as a child, flanked by his smiling parents (Kriek, 3 and 9). All are recognizable by their ubiquitous hero masks, modeled after the eye mask of Will Eisner’s Spirit. In the erotic steampunk comic Chester 5000, photographs are used to show the shifting love interests of the main characters. A prudish husband builds a robot, Chester, to meet his wife’s desires. At first the wife is reluctant, but when she discovers her photo portrait in the robot’s heart cavity, she understands his devotion and gives in (17). When some time later the husband sees her placing a portrait of herself and Chester together into the robot’s heart cavity (58), he becomes consumed with jealousy, removes the robot’s capacity to feel love and sells him. Again the photographs are used to establish emotional ties between individuals that drive the narrative.
In The Arrival by Shaun Tan, a family photo of the narrative’s protagonist with his wife and
daughter is one of the few personal possessions he is able to bring with him when he immigrates to a new and fantastical land.4 The repeated inclusion of the image of the photograph shows how much the man
misses his family, and that they are constantly on his mind. For the reader, the picture, which he looks at often, also implies the motivation that drove him to leave his family for so long as, by the end of the book, they are reunited in a better life in their new country. This family narrative is not the only narrative 4. See Postema, “Following the Pictures: Wordless Comics for Children” (316-317), for a longer discussion of
thread in The Arrival that is supported through the function of photographs. The stories of several other immigrants whom the protagonist befriends are told in images that explicitly evoke the appearance of photographs, through their framing, the way their borders are rendered, and their drawn-in folds and crumpled edges. These drawn photographs do not represent actual photographs, even within the diegesis, but rather they are the pictured recollections of atrocities in the home countries of individuals now safely settled in their new land. The representation of these memories as photographs gives them a documentary function, a weight of evidence that explains the importance of these people’s opportunity to start a new life. Florian Groẞ points out the transnational nature of The Arrival’s narrative, which brings together individuals from many different fictional “old world” countries in a fantastical new land, and simultaneously evokes the real historical experiences of immigration by creating explicit references to historical accounts and photographs, for example of Australian immigration processes and of Ellis Island, the main portal into the US for European migrants in the early 20th century.
Another important common function of photographs is as an instrument of identification, through official documents like passports and driver’s licenses that contain photographs. The Arrival is in part a narrative of mass immigration, with people from many different countries arriving in a new world, and inspection and identification are a part of this process. Upon entry at the harbor, the protagonist is given identification papers, possibly some kind of residence permit, and the book shows him reaching out to several other newcomers through their shared ID papers. Several other wordless comics employ this identifying function of photographs to propel their narratives forward. In “Jour de Neige,” Boulet shows the protagonist with a detailed notebook that includes headshots of his intended victims, as on a snow day he goes on a quest to track down all those who somehow hurt him in the past and bombard them with snowballs. After he has hit his childhood tormentor in the face with a snowball (9), and has buried a mean elementary school teacher in a heap of snow (11), he takes a quick snapshot of each to have a record of his revenge. The meeting with one intended victim instead turns into a warm reunion, but the photographs on his “wall of victory” become his downfall when she finds she was supposed to be a target (24). The photographic “hit list” in this silent comic is effective in tying together the flashbacks of perceived slights that the main character suffered, with his present drive for vengeance. Thomas Ott similarly uses a photograph to identify the target for a hired killer in his wordless story “Washing Day” (137), but as is to be expected in Ott’s dark narratives, the assassination doesn’t work out in the way the hit man had planned (150).
Drawing Photographs
While in the previous examples photographs facilitated the wordless comics’ narratives by providing background to and connections between characters in these stories, there are also a number of silent comics where the photographs themselves drive the story. Megan Kelso’s contribution to the wordless comic anthology Comix 2000 is structured around shots that a family took during a hiking trip (Fig. 1). As the family of four watches the slides taken during their vacation, the space between the slides is filled with panels showing the various family members’ personal recollections of the trip, including the bugs and the blisters (864), but also a family session of star gazing (866). The photographic images taken during the hike only show a small part of the trip, seemingly the moments that were most fun
and picturesque. In contrast with the sometime uncomfortable reality of the hike, these images may come across as ironic, but they are also a way of bringing back to mind some of the highlights of the vacation that could not be captured on film, such as the sense of fulfillment that comes from conquering a mountaintop and the sublime view of the starry night sky (866).
Fig. 1: Megan Kelso, “Kodachrome” 864 © 1999 Megan Kelso. Used with permission from the artist.
In David Wiesner’s picturebook Flotsam, the images on a roll of film discovered in a mysterious antique underwater camera tell the story of the camera’s travels, both through space and time. The photographs show the magical underwater places the camera has been able to capture, thanks to sea creatures operating the camera. The film roll also reveals the camera’s history: the very first photograph shows the last child who found the camera, holding the picture of the kid on the previous roll, and so on, creating a mise en
abyme of children holding photographs that reaches back to the very first child in the early 20th century,
who first loaded the camera with film and threw it into the ocean. The young boy in Flotsam puts a new roll of film in the camera, takes his own picture, and gives the camera back to the sea. The narrative here is told in large part through full-page illustrations representing the photographic images from the camera, with sections in between showing the actions of the boy who found the instrument.5
Ojingogo by Matthew Forsythe features another child with a camera. The little girl in this story
is shown taking pictures that the camera helpfully prints out and hands to her, so she can paste them into her photo book. When the girl and her camera get separated, her only clue to its whereabouts is a photograph left behind by the camera, taken as it was being picked up by a strange creature. With this photo as her starting point, the girl is able to track down her camera, which seems to have forgotten who she is and tries to attack her instead. However, just as the creature that stole away the camera is about to grab the girl, the camera is reminded of the last picture it took for her and regains its memory. Thus they are reunited, once more taking photos together of the interesting creatures in the strange world 5. For a discussion of the ways in which this children’s picturebook works like a comic, see Postema, “Following the Pictures” (319-320).
she inhabits. The camera is a living presence in Ojingogo, but its images also work to structure and bookend the narrative. Boulet uses photographs similarly in his wordless story “Sirènes,” providing an external structure for the narrative as an alternative to the caption narration that cannot be employed in silent comics. In the second panel of “Sirènes,” Boulet shows a man taking a picture of himself and the impressive fish he just caught, using the timer function on his camera (67). The very last page of the story contains only the image of that very snapshot, set against a black background (89). This image is now imbued with irony, showing a lost innocence as the man at the moment of taking that photo was still blissfully unaware of the fateful course of events set in motion when he caught his fish.
Photographic Interactions
Le bonhomme au chapeau is one example of the uncommon wordless comic that contains actual
photographs. In this slightly confusing story where the titular little man with the hat keeps getting sent to inhabit the control room in various people’s heads to operate them, the photos are integrated in a metafictional way, showing yet another world or dimension where the little man with the hat is sent to operate an individual’s movements.6 In this case, the photographs show the cartoonist himself, and the
man with the hat drives his hands as he is creating the comic we are reading. This comic uses numerous techniques to show the different worlds the man with the hat enters, each differentiated by its unique representational mode. Most are based on different styles of comics, some more realistic than the little man’s home world, some in a manga style, and some with screentone shading. The black and white photographs of the cartoonist add another representational style, and the final world the little man enters is the most “realistic,” represented by colour photographs on glossy paper, that also do not employ the grid layout in panels and gutters. He tries to hijack the woman who is shown reading the comic he escapes from, and the photographic images here imply that the little man with the hat has escaped his regimented existence into the “real” world. The last image shows his drawn black and white figure on a photograph of a beach, next to the woman he was trying to operate. The woman’s designated operator, a cartoon character in colour, is next to him, so apparently they have figured out a way to work together. In this comic, the photographs do not work as a reference or to establish relations, but function as a representational mode to indicate other possible or parallel worlds amongst many.
Sometimes comics remediate existing photographs. The historical photographs from Ellis Island and the streets of New York that Shaun Tan adapts in The Arrival are one example of this. Such well-known images add a sense of historical memory: the reference to Ellis Island in The Arrival makes explicit that immigration is not a new or uncommon experience but has shaped history and society in many places, including the United States and Australia, Shaun Tan’s home country. This type of imagery, which blends journalistic or reportage images into a diegesis that may or may not be fictional, 6. In “When Photographs Aren’t Quite Enough: Reflections on Photography and Cartooning in Le Photographe,” Nancy Pedri points out the difference in modes of communication between comics images and photographs (paragraph 16), even as the two forms are working together (paragraph 4). In the graphic novel Le Photographe cartoons and photographs are used side by side to weave a narrative that is to a large degree about the situations in which these photographs were taken. In Le bonhomme au chapeau the production process of the included photographs is elided, even more so than the production of the cartoons is: the book humorously shows photographs of the cartoonist creating the comic in question, while the photographic images just “are”.
also plays a role in George A. Walker’s most recent work, The Wordless Leonard Cohen Songbook, as well as his earlier The Life and Times of Conrad Black. Walker’s woodcut novels celebrate and continue the tradition of the socially engaged woodcut narratives from the early twentieth century such as those by Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward, but they are decidedly current in their topics and choice of images, many of which are based on photographs. Walker’s texts only contain one panel per page, a format in which his work mimics the original woodcut novels. However, since many of his images are close-ups and portraits of his famous subjects, the single panel format also evokes the photo album. The difference is that in Walker’s texts, these images are carefully ordered to construct an explicit narrative of the life of its subject, a teleology that in a photo album only ever tends to be implied.
In his introduction to The Wordless Leonard Cohen Songbook, Norman Ravvin mentions “the camera” that has captured Cohen over the years. He notes an early CBC TV interview with Adrienne Clarkson, and goes on to say that over the years “the camera and the person wielding it became more cordial” (14). Whether meant for TV or the press, the camera is a ghost that is present in Walker’s book. Many of the images in the book, especially ones of Cohen by himself, are recognizably based on iconic photographs of the man. The result of fame is such that while we may have never met a person, we recognize their image from their photographs, whether on album covers or in the press. But in Walker’s woodcuts, the camera is no longer there. The artist has digested the images: between his eyes and his hands, the images have been transformed, and what comes out when Walker’s end-grain blocks of Canadian maple are printed onto the page is his vision of Cohen, no longer the camera’s or the original photographer’s. Of the eighty woodcuts in the book, some show objects, symbols, or people that were formative in Cohen’s life, but most figure Cohen himself, either in isolation or with another artist or another person of significance (Fig. 2). Walker blurs documentary and fiction, creating his imagined images of Cohen’s personal life to supplement the public images based on photographs that fans of Cohen will be familiar with. Of Walker’s eighty woodcuts, more than sixty include Cohen’s face. It seems like a certain kind of devotion to go through the laborious process of cutting and scraping wood into the likeness of Cohen so many times over, and one wonders if this face has become ingrained in Walker or in the sense-memory of his hands in the process, as he has translated the photographs of Cohen into the black and white areas of a woodblock print.
Fig. 2: George A. Walker, The Wordless Leonard Cohen Songbook 87 © 2014 George A. Walker. Used with permission from the artist.
Making Reprints
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin discusses the difference in cult value and exhibition value of the photograph and the work of art. The photograph, with its infinite reproducibility, has exhibition value, while the work of art, with the aura of its original creator, retains cult value. However, in “Brief History of Photography,” Benjamin notes how much more easily art “can be grasped in a photograph than in reality” (188), actually allowing people to understand art better. In addition to that, there is the aforementioned effect of old photographs on the viewer, according to Benjamin, the “Here and Now” quality of a face in a photograph, the “still real” of a person long since aged or even dead (175). Walker’s carved images balance these qualities. He has taken photographs and re-inscribed them with a cult value, attaching an aura to them by leaving the trace of the hand of the artist, even as the woodcut is also the first form of true mechanical reproduction, as Benjamin points out (“The Work of Art” 218). Yet, these images also retain some of the “Here and Now,” the uncanny glimpse of a person who no longer exists in that form.
Walker’s art is a form a remediation. He takes photographic images and translates them into another medium. The images are still recognizable from the photographs, but they have also become his own images. In The Wordless Leonard Cohen Songbook, this implies an intimacy with the subject, a Zen-like tracing and retracing of Cohen’s face that seems appropriate for the venerable poet and musician who has famously converted to Buddhism. In the reading of The Life and Times of Conrad
Black, that interpretation of transforming photographic images into black and white woodcut prints
process, Walker’s work seems to be as much about his relationship with his subjects as with the subjects themselves.
As with The Wordless Leonard Cohen Songbook, the wordless biography of Conrad Black is to a large degree based on familiar photographic images. In Black’s case, many of these photographs came from newspaper and magazine articles about him, some to do with his rise to power as a media magnate, himself a very public figure, but many of the most memorable media images of Black, for various media, were to do with his downfall, when he was disgraced and went through a trial, and eventually spent some time in prison. In “Cosmopolitan Suspicion: Comics Journalism and Graphic Silence,” Georgiana Banita likens the intermittent wordless panels in otherwise verbal-visual hybrid examples of comics journalism to photographs: “Still images ultimately cede the position of firsthand witness to the reader -- in ways that share more with war photography than literature” (50).7 She implies there is an objectivity
to these panels, as if they are less mediated by their creators. Walker’s silent images track the opposite trajectory. They are based in photographs, but have lost in objectivity as they have been re-imagined by Walker. The woodcuts reduce Conrad Black’s life to a stark black and white, without the grayscale that we find in black and white photographs. However, while Walker’s art eliminates grayscale, the narrative that he constructs out of these woodcuts allows the gray to come back in, as the text makes room for the moral ambivalence that seems to have been so important in Black’s business decisions. Walker’s version of Conrad Black is offered some form of redemption, as he is shown changed by prison and reunited with his wife.
Conclusion
The techniques and sequences created with the use of and reference to photographs in these silent comics are not unique to wordless comics alone; they can be, and often are, employed just as easily in conventional comics that use text in word balloons and captions. However, in silent comics, these photographs carry the full weight of the processes by which the images create narration. In some cases, key information for the narrative is encapsulated in the photographs that are drawn as part of the background imagery, while in other instances the references to real-world historical photographs add depth and meaning to the drawn pictures. An important signifying function of the photograph is to say that the represented thing or person really existed, and the photograph retains this power even when it is itself only drawn. Anything shown in photographs in these wordless comics becomes part of the diegesis and is offered up as potentially important in relation to the narrative, but it is up to readers to note this and draw out those relationships.
7. Banita’s occasional use of the descriptor “still” for these silent panels is somewhat problematic, since it ascribes a lack of movement to these panels, in addition to a lack of sound, which is by no means a prerequisite for silent panels, much less silent comics..
Works Cited
Bagley, Mark, et al. A Moment of Silence. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002.
Banita, Georgiana. “Cosmopolitan Suspicion: Comics Journalism and Graphic Silence.”
Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives. Ed. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 49-65.
Boulet. Notes 8: Les 24 Heures. France: Delcourt / Shampooing, 2013.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Benjamin, Walter. “Brief History of Photography.” One-Way Street and Other Writings.
Trans. J.A. Underwood. London: Penguin, 2009. 172-192. ---. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.
Denson, Shane, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein, eds. Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Fink, Jess. Chester 5000. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, 2011.
Forsythe, Matthew. Ojingogo. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2008.
Groẞ, Florian. “Lost in Translation: Narratives of Transcultural Displacement in the Wordless Graphic Novel.” Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives. Ed. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 197-210.
Kelso, Megan. “No Title.” Comix 2000. France: L’Association, 1999. 863-866. Kriek, Erik. Gutsman Comics, No II. Amsterdam: Oog & Blik, 1998.
Larsson, Knut. Krokodilstaden. Stockholm: Kartago Förlag, 2008. Ott, Thomas. R.I.P.: Best of 1985-2004. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2011.
Pedri, Nancy. “When Photographs Aren’t Quite Enough: Reflections on Photography and Cartooning in Le Photographe.” ImageText 6.1 (2011).
http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v6_1/pedri/
Postema, Barbara. “Following the Pictures: Wordless Comics for Children.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5.3 (2014): 311-322. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2014.943541 ---. Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments. Rochester: RIT Press, 2013. Scott, Clive. The Spoken Image: Photography and Language. London: Reaktion, 1999.
Straczynski, Michael (writer), John Romita Jr. (pencils), and Scott Hanna (inks). “Meanwhile… (Amazing Spider-Man #39).” ‘Nuff Said. New York: Marvel Comics, 2002.
T., Otto. Le bonhomme au chapeau. Poitiers, France: Éditions FLBLB, 2005. Tan, Shaun. The Arrival. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books/ Scholastic, 2007.
Walker, George A. The Wordless Leonard Cohen Songbook. Erin, ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2014.
---. The Life and Times of Conrad Black: A Wordless Biography. Erin, ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2013.
Barbara Postema is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Modern Literature and Culture Research
Centre at Ryerson University in Toronto, funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is working on a book project about silent comics. Postema has presented on comics at numerous conferences, including the Modern Language Association, Popular Culture Association, and the International Comic Arts Forum, and is currently serving on the Executive Committee of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics. She has published articles in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and the International Journal of Comic Art, and her book Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments came out with Rochester Institute of Technology Press in 2013.
