| Even as the medium of comics, especially the "graphic novel," has acquired cultural cachet and attracted academic attention, it remains undertheorized as theoretical approaches to Anglophone comics have tended to be proscriptive and procrustean, grounded in unquestioned assumptions from popular sources. This dissertation is an investigation into and invention of concepts specific to flat visual narrative media, particularly comics, in terms of their potential as well as into aspects of caricature and printmaking and games studies, especially sprite-based games. An anarchy of method derived principally from the theoretical work of Paul Feyerabend and from Donald Ault's alternative narratology is used to broaden the sense of "narrative" in visual media and to explicate the value of multiple, incommensurable meanings in such media.;Methodological tools of close visual analysis from the work of James Elkins, Richard Schiff and other scholars of art history and visual culture are combined with the critical theory of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, producing an analysis of visual details in terms of the concepts of the signifying surface and the plane of immanence. The advantage of this mode of study is that it aids in the perception and description of the multiplication of narrative meanings or trajectories though a work of comics, caricature, etc .;A theory of depthlessness in visual media is developed in which the idea of the page, panel, screen, or interface as a window onto another, complete world must be discarded. These structures may have a false "above" (projected into a non-existent plane of higher ontological priority) and a "below" (or outside) characterized by conspicuous absence and unknowability, but there is nothing "behind" or "through" them. From this perspective, multiple processions through time, and multiple kinds of time can be discerned, and analysis of different kinds of time in interactive media becomes possible. All of these concepts are united in the concept of "processual narrative," the analysis neither of plot nor "gameplay" but of the visual structures and intertexts that open up and complicate the meaning of the object of analysis. |
