Unaframed: A Short Visual Essay

In the wake of comics studies, many scholars have been digging and delving into the medium’s multifarious facets. Whether by assessing an origin, explaining the grammar, tracing its cultural relevance, or exploring any other molecular aspect, researchers found themselves with a basket full of microsemiotics: dead bits of a dissected language – is comics a language? This is debated too! (Cohn 2012, 2020). My argument is that comics are an amphibious entity, always living in-between categories: images and words, time and space, sequential and simultaneous, seriality and novels (and more). This fact assesses the need of a transdisciplinary (e.g., Barbieri 1991, Pintor 2017, Di Paola 2019), or multimodal approach to the subject. McCloud’s legacy, as per Understanding Comics, is that comics are first and foremost a flexible, complex, and open language. This was well understood by Nick Sousanis in his Unflattening (2015): a visual essay exploring the relationship between images and words. Entwining both worlds in a visual dance that embraces complexity, Sousanis allows richness to emerge: the more vantage points, the deeper the understanding. Drawing from semiotics, cognition, media studies and my own experience as a comics creator, in this hybrid essay I discuss the necessary transdisciplinary lenses that this elusive amphibian needs to be seen. From above.