Formal Metacomics: Practice as Theory

ABSTRACT: A “formal metacomic,” as defined by Roy T. Cook, “is a comic whose plot involves formal manipulations of the conventions of the comic medium.” Such manipulations draw attention to Charles Hatfield’s understanding of comics as an “art of tensions,” specifically “between codes of signification; between the single image and the image-in-series ; between narrative sequence and page surface ; and, more broadly, between reading-as- experience and the text as material object .” These tensions are related to, and possibly unified by, one overarching tension: between the imagined diegetic qualities of an evoked world and the discursive qualities of physical marks on paper that co-produce that world through viewer perception. Such discursive-diegetic tension embodies a range of theoretical concerns, including: the simultaneous discursive presence of multiple images representing a single diegetic subject (recurrence); the ambiguous natures of artistic style and medium materiality as definitively neither diegetic qualities reducible to a depicted subject nor discursive qualities traceable to an artist or to a comic as a physical object (transparency); the connotative influence of image layout on the perception of image content when the two are understood to be unrelated (primary and secondary diegeses); the evoked presence of non-diegetic elements through discursive allusions (intertextual braiding); and the temporal contradictions between a representative image’s implied diegesis and its discursive presence and viewing. While comics generally embody such tensions, formal metacomics directly and literally illustrate them. The following eight comics, developed from my personal artistic practice, are both an application and an analysis of comics theory.