Experiencing Visual Storyworlds: Focalization in Comics illuminates how comics express what characters and narrators see, think and feel.

Drawing on the narratological concept of focalization, which describes the filtering of a story through the minds of characters and narrators, Drs. Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri analyze comics from a range of genres, including graphic memoir, graphic historiography, silent comics, and metafictional comics.

Through a series of close readings — including Jason Lutes’s Berlin, Charles Burns’s Black Hole, Ellen Forney’s Marbles, Eric Drooker’s Flood! and Craig Thompson’s Habibi — Drs. Horstkotte and Pedri argue that the visual form of comics storytelling is uniquely suited to invite readers into storyworld experiences.

Characters and narrators

The authors break down the ways focalization in comics is cued by features such as color, style, panel size and positioning, and genre — showing how these features regulate how readers access the experiences of characters and narrators.

Dr. Pedri is a professor of English in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Memorial.

Dr. Horstkotte is a professor in German literature and degree co-ordinator at the Centre for Teacher Training and School Research at the University of Leipzig.

Experiencing Visual Storyworlds: Focalization in Comics is published by Ohio State University Press.