![]() Therefore, if we attempt to conceive of the modern world as “an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity,” as Homi Bhabha suggests, a medium that corresponds to this reality needs to be able to reflect on and perform the same kind of hybridity-a state of inherent simultaneity of fragmentation and wholeness in the form of a dynamic collage of diverse elements (38). Since at least the “postcolonial turn,” modern cultures are no longer conceived as sealed and homogenous national entities, but rather as hybrid and inherently fragmented constructs (Bhabha 1994). Comic art, as a rhizomatic form of artistic expression, is capable of creating meaning and representation in a multidirectional fashion that avoids binary and genealogical structures, while also offering diversified perspectives on its objects due to its inherent medial hybridity.īecause of their extraordinary medial disposition that is inherently defined by fragmentation, comics or manga are particularly suitable for an artistic response to and reflection of the changes and challenges that a modern, highly digitalized and diversified world brings. This non-linear, non-restricted mode of reception and meaning production can be described in terms of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome (Deleuze et al. The reader can look at an entire page at once in a “synthetic global vision,” yet needs to conduct a “moment-to-moment reading” as well to decipher the full, potential meaning of the comic (Groensteen 19). This simultaneity of “wholeness” or spatial representation, and “fragmentation” or sequential and segmented representation, manifests itself in the coexistence of images and texts that makes up a significant part of the medium’s artistic appeal. Comic art’s fundamental principle is the representation of its objects in sequences of fragmented images that are “separated … and which are plastically and semantically over-determined by the fact of their coexistence in praesentia” (Groensteen 18). Volume 3, Issue 2: William Blake and Visual CultureĮvery reader who opens a comic or manga will inevitably glimpse at “a space that has been divided up, compartmentalized, a collection of juxtaposed frames,” as Thierry Groensteen posits (19).Volume 3, Issue 3: Comics and Childhood.Volume 4, Issue 1: The Comics Work of Neil Gaiman.Volume 4, Issue 3: ImageSexT Proceedings.Volume 5, Issue 3: Convergences Proceedings. ![]() Volume 5, Issue 4: Alan Moore and Adaptation.Volume 6, Issue 2: ImageNext Proceedings.Volume 6, Issue 3: Shakespeare and Visual Rhetoric.Volume 7, Issue 1: Worlds of the Hernandez Brothers.Volume 8, Issue 1: Monsters in the Margins.Volume 9, Issue 2: Mixing Visual Media in Comics.Volume 10, Issue 3: Comics and Fine Art Forum.
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