Aaron Kashtan is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Miami University.
This is the source
Materiality Comics is a digital comic produced with a combination of Bitstrips and Comic Life. It argues and visually demonstrates that materiality is an important topic for comics scholars to consider, and that through creating essays in comics form, comics scholars can develop insights about materiality that are unavailable when analyzing comics by others.
A comic and artist statement that argues for the importance of materiality for comic scholars
This was one of the hardest academic projects of my career. I am neither a trained artist nor a trained programmer, and by far the greatest obstacle I faced in starting this project was my own lack of confidence. Now I understand how my students feel when I ask them to write essays in comic or game form. Nonetheless, I feel not only amazed that I finished this project, but also proud of how it turned out.
Nonetheless, I was excited to do this project because it gave me an answer to the question of how digital humanities – or practice-based research, or critical making – could be made to work for me. As a Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech, I saw my colleagues doing complicated-sounding things like corpus analysis and visualization and distant reading, and as a scholar whose work focuses on comics rather than the sorts of texts usually analyzed with DH methods, I didn’t see how these methods were relevant to my work. One inspiration for this project, therefore, was to use comics to do practice-based digital research, and to implicitly argue that comics could be an effective means of conducting such research. Most of my theoretical arguments on this point did not survive into the final draft, yet
My specific goal in this project was to demonstrate that materiality is a useful rubric
for theorizing comics, and that making comics can be an effective way of experimenting
with and learning about materiality. This argument is explicitly stated in the captions
and word balloons, but is also visually demonstrated by the wide range of visual
materials included in the comic, ranging from hand drawings to photographs to public
domain images from the Internet. (An important parenthetical note here is that my goal
throughout was to make this comic visually interesting
The process by which this work was created is also proof of its argument that making comics is an effective way of learning about materiality. I chose to create this comic digitally both because of its DH focus and because given my lack of drawing ability or experience, completing a 20-page comic with pen and paper was out of the question. (For similar reasons, I typically offer my students the option to create longer comics projects with Bitstrips or Pixton instead of by hand.) I initially considered executing this project with Javascript or InDesign, but because of my lack of coding proficiency and my unfamiliarity with the latter program, I ultimately created my project using a combination of Bitstrips and Comic Life. The former is a free online comics creator tool and the latter is a proprietary application for designing comics pages. Neither program was sufficient on its own, because Bitstrips offers only rudimentary support for designing unique page layouts and has a limited repertory of fonts, while Comic Life only allows preexisting images to be imported and does not contain its own facilities for creating images. Therefore, creating