Prelude: ‘Animating’ the Narrative in Abstract Comics

Abstract

This preliminary chapter approaches the question of comics as meaning-making by exploring comics that challenge the notion of meaning itself: the recently affirmed subgenre of abstract comics. This exploration leads to the groundwork for a pragmatics of comics and raises issues about the nature of reading and the reader’s active approach to creating meanings from comics texts, as well as the nature of abstraction, and how it is realised in the comics text. Abstract comics present challenges for traditional definitions and accounts of graphic narrative, identifying areas in existing theory that a functional model of comics meaning-making may illuminate.