American Studies Commons^™

Viewing The Whale: Space, Time, And The Imagination In "Moby-Dick" And Comics, Garrett Sterling Bond

Senior Projects Spring 2016

In defining ‘comics’ as a genre in his groundbreaking Understanding Comics, scholar Scott McCloud considers images in narratives more generally as operating within a representative space between the storyteller and the objects they describe. This project extracts from comics a structural theory of reading as a subjective visual experience, by comparing the framing of images in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick with that in works of graphic narrative, primarily Richard McGuire’s Here, Chris Ware’s Building Stories, and Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page. In order to consider comics as works of narrative, McCloud emphasizes the …