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Lost in the gutters: creativity studies and creative practices through comics based research

 

Marco d'Alessandro, University of Bologna

 

Silently, as the sounds of words translated into drawn onomatopoeias, an emerging field of practice is carving its way between the academic borders. Despite the fact that visual language has been a part of human history since its birth, comics had to fight to find themselves a space of legitimacy as a language. Always regarded as something childish or even harmful, Umberto Eco was among the first scholars in the 60s to openly address the relevance of comics as cultural objects and as a language (Eco 1964). Many years passed, and even if comics became more than relevant among the arts and editorial world, their affordances as a language are still far from being truly explored in the research environment. In this presentation I will trace a brief history of comics based research (CBR), starting from the role of visual metaphors in the scientific discourse (Farinella 2018) and following with the main fields where CBR is actively encompassed, from ethnography to graphic medicine (Kuttner, Weaver-Hightower and Sousanis 2020, Peterle 2021) . Then, we will move towards the unique affordances that comics offer as an amphibious language: the dance between images and words allows to multiply the senses between the two (McCloud 1993), allowing the researcher to entwine data and analysis, theory and practice, analogies and contradictions, objective and subjective. Moreover, we will delve into the possibilities comics offer by entwining the sequential and the simultaneous: the linear experience of panels in sequence coexist with the rhizomatic, planar dimension of the page (Sousanis 2015). This is the dimension where we can play with rhythm, time, silence and all of those aspects that words can only evoke. The simultaneity breaks the causality of sequence, opening space for divergent analysis that focus on processes and synchronicities. It is a good application of what Morin hoped in his transdisciplinary proposal: different levels of reality which builds a common ground in which different disciplines and languages can intersect and build something bigger than the sum of the parts. This language highlights also the role of the reader in interpreting a text: nothing like the gutter, the blank space between panels calls for an active role in filling what is silent, participating in a reasoning, drawing conclusions. Coming to an end, we will use creativity studies as a peak example of a field that needs to incorporate different practices of research to make account of a skill so embedded in human nature. Research show us that creativity is not something purely mental, but a phenomenon that emerges from the double engagement with environments, materials, and others (Malafouris, Gosden and Overmann 2014, Glăveanu 2014). To show this effectively we need to be open to play with the topic we are researching, welcoming the researcher’s hand along the researcher’s eye: perhaps it is in the oscillation between images and words, between sequential and simultaneous that lies the key to a better, transdisciplinary understanding.

 

Keywords: comics based research, creativity, materiality, comics, transdisciplinarity


Biography
Marco d’Alessandro is a freelance cartoonist and Ph.D. student. He braids the academic path – focusing on semiotics, cognitive sciences and aesthetics with the manifold spaces of comics and illustration, from underground festivals to international collaborations. In 2020, he graduated with a master’s degree in semiotics. Between 2021 and 2023 he has been drawing papers in various fields of practice, from comics theory to migration studies. Currently he is researching play, games and creativity. His last project is a series of illustrated books for children about death and grief, in collaboration with the University of Ferrara.