Metalepsis in Comics and Graphic Novels

The Return Journey in Alison Bechdel'sFun Home

“…Bechdel's voyage home crosses both space and time, with the protagonist needing to present the past through a subjective lens, while simultaneously both attempting to decode it for herself and inviting the reader to do the same. As Karin Kukkonen suggests, Alison the protagonist is the narrative's focal point, in as much as “the images do not represent what [she] sees at this point, but how she imagines it in hindsight” (59). In other words, the images serve the same function for Bechdel as they do for readers: They are semiotic clues to help us decipher the events of the past.…”

Picture This: A Review of Research Relating to Narrative Processing by Moving Image Versus Language

“…Lang et al suggest that audiovisual narratives can share some of the structure of oral conversational narratives (Lang et al, 1995). Work in the humanities on “transmedia” narrative theory has also identified both affordances specific to particular media, and ways in which these can create formal equivalence (Ryan, 2004; Walsh, 2006; Kukkonen, 2011, 2013).…”

“…However, as the discussion of cinematic form earlier suggests, a different film genre might produce different interactions between these three elements. Work on graphic novels and comic books shows that formal features of image and text, such as viewpoint, can conflict as well as harmonize, supplying these media with a particularly rich and challenging range of affordances (Kukkonen, 2011, 2013; Sabeti, 2012). As with research on visual versus verbal processing, research on mixed media suggests that great care is needed if comparing narrative stimuli by medium.…”

Genre Fiction in the Graphic Novel: The Case of Science Fiction

“…It rather employs subtle metafictional and metanarratorial devices throughout its narrative, as we have seen for its presentation of the printed paperback romance A Night Time Smoke, that allow its narrative to retain an immersive quality. Saga is one of the comics that provides an excellent counterexample to the notion that metafiction disrupts and denaturalises the reading process (for another example, see Kukkonen 2011). Instead, Saga's metafictional moments, tying in with the materiality of the comic book, the mise-en-abyme of characters reading, and playfully omniscient meta-narration, articulate the immersive reading experience in the sense that they make distinct its elements and features to the reader without, as it were, breaking the illusion.…”