Reading Comics Through The Body: Embodiment and Materiality in the Making and Reading of Comics (Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels) - Hardcover

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Gareth Brookes is a graphic novelist, comics scholar and lecturer in Illustration Animation at Kingston University, UK. He has published four graphic novels, one of which, The Black Project (2013, Myriad Editions), was included in the Sélection Officielle 2018 45e Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême. He has contributed scholarship to the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and Studies in Comics. In 2025 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford University.

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"In this groundbreaking book, Brookes uses his own artistic practice and detailed critical analysis to reveal how materiality has been almost entirely overlooked in comics studies. He shows how comics formalism has extensively excavated elements such as semiotics or page layouts but said very little about physical form and material attributes. He demonstrates this blind spot using his own creative practice, critical review of academic literature, and careful unpicking of the historic pathways that this scholarship has taken - creating an exciting and innovative study that argues for the importance of materiality within comics analysis." - Dr Julia Round, Editor of 'Studies in Comics' and the series 'Encapsulations: Critical Comics Studies'.

"Reading Comics Through The Body exemplifies the current turn in Comics Studies towards bodily experience, materialism and social ecology as a significant corrective to literary and linguistic approaches. Brookes’ exploits his long experience as a comics practitioner, making practice a rigorous method for asking and answering research questions. Rather than simplifying scholarship, this approach demands an originality and deftness of analysis that text-only analysis does not. Reading Comics Through The Body achieves this, consolidating, contextualising and leading future scholarship in the field." - Professor Simon Grennan, University of Chester, UK

This book is about what happens to comics theory when we privilege the relationship between materiality and the body in the analysis of comics. Focusing on how these factors relate to making, technological reproduction and the experience of reading comics, it aims to establish a new theoretical model for comics studies.
Through a close consideration of how technologies of reproduction translate material and embodied traces into the surface of comics, the book argues that tactile and haptic encounters with these surfaces can organise the narrative structure of comics and affect the experience of reading them. The book aims to establish that comics can be thought of as networked sites of embodied encounter in which embodied responses become a register of meaning.

Gareth Brookes is a graphic novelist, comics scholar and lecturer in Illustration Animation at Kingston University, UK.