Heike Polster (The University of Memphis)
For more than a century, comics have addressed issues that remained on the periphery of critical concerns. Now issues of representation, temporality, narrative, and writing have moved from the margins to the center of critical discourse, as borders between media collapse. Comics are an example of media hybridity and constitute the only narrative form in which past, present, and future can become visible simultaneously. As such, comics give us a profound experience of time through a complex portrayal of motion and succession within a varied practice of reading, reinventing a formal mode of visual storytelling that transforms the process of reading and writing.
This panel seeks new scholarly work on the representation of temporality in comics and graphic narratives, with a particular attention to the formal qualities of comics. Papers may address sequentiality, simultaneity, seriality, human vs. cosmic time, eruptions of the past into the present, or other experimental permutations of time in comics. Graphic narratives from other countries and traditions outside of the Anglophone world are welcome.