Narrative Structure in Comics

An examination of the narrative and pictorial qualities of comics and how these help comics to communicate and create meaning.

In Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments, Barbara Postema seeks to explain how comics communicate and create meaning, with an emphasis on two aspects of comics. She first examines the pictorial quality ofcomics, which receives more emphasis than verbal/textual elements. Her second focus is upon the storytelling and narrative qualities of comics, as well as the literary explorations they provide. The "narrative structure" refersto the potential of images, the story telling capacities of panels, and the sequence of panels, in addition to the more traditional narratological concepts. Overall, the author presents a credible rationale for the way in which comics structure their narratives. At every level of communication, comics rely on gaps or absences to create meaning and guide the reader to a meaningful experience.

RIT Press is pleased to announce Narrative Structure in Comics as the first book published in its Comics Monograph Series.

BARBARA POSTEMA is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Ryerson University in Toronto, where she is working on a project about wordless comics. She has published several articles in the International Journal of Comic Art.