Abstraction and Experimentation in Comics

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines abstract and experimental comics that push the notions of abstraction and simplification associated with comics, fundamentally challenging questions of composition, representation, reference, identification, and access. Due to these challenges, they may be said to challenge readerly engagement and by extension the cognitive framework developed so far. How do readers think through such reductions in multimodal expression to come to some form of interpretation of this textuality? This chapter expands the cognitive theory to engage with interpretive possibilities that are generated through improvisational qualities of cognition, including the experience of fictive motion and fictive change that lead to notions of temporality, agentivity, and narrativity in abstract forms. It shows that even in abstract and experimental comics, modal and multimodal glimpses of agency offer opportunities to build meanings that explore the foundations of mediation and expressivity in comics and can even offer political and decolonial implications for readers.