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“Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies” released in paperback

By John Freeman on 7 October 2026 • ( 0 )

Intellect Books’ Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies, edited by Madeline B. Gangnes, Christopher Murray and Julia Round, first published in 2024, is now available in paperback.

Comics exist in complex relationships with other media and so have always embraced a diversity of formats and been dynamic in their response to new technologies and means of distribution. Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies, a collection of essays selected from the journal, Studies in Comics, explores interactions between comics and other media and technologies, employing a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives.

By focusing on key critical concepts within multimodality – transmediality, adaptation, intertextuality – and addressing multiple platforms and media – digital, analog, music, prose, linguistics, graphics – this collection expands and develops existing comics theory and addresses multiple other media and disciplines.

Multimodal Comics demonstrates the evolution of Comics Studies over the last decade and how the field continues to engage with new media and technologies in a continuously evolving artistic and production environment.

Over the last decade Studies in Comics has been at the forefront of international research in comics. This volume showcases some of the best research to appear in the journal. In so doing it demonstrates the evolution of Comics Studies over the last decade and shows how this research field has engaged with various media and technologies in a continuously evolving artistic and production environment.

The theme of multimodality is particularly apt since media and technologies have changed significantly during this period. The collection will thus give a view of the ways in which comics scholars have engaged with multimodality during a time when ‘modes’ were continually changing.

• Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies is available here from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) | More information from Intellect Books

The Authors

Madeline B. Gangnes is an associate professor of English at the University of Scranton, who received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida and her M.Litt. in comics studies from the University of Dundee. Her research and teaching concern nineteenth-century British literature, periodical studies, comics and visual studies, book history, digital humanities, and environmental and climate literature. She is a co-editor of Studies in Comics and editor emerita of Sequentials. Her scholarship appears in Studies in Comics, Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Popular Fictions and The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), among other venues.

Madeline also co-edited Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies (Intellect, 2024) and contributed entries to Key Terms in Comics Studies (Palgrave, 2022) and The Literary Encyclopedia (online).

More information about her scholarship and teaching can be found at mbgangnes.com

Professor Christopher Murray is Chair of English and Comics Studies in the Division of Humanities at the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, University of Dundee. He’s also author of The British Superhero and Champions of the Oppressed?: Superhero Comics, Popular Culture, and Propaganda in America During World War II. He is Director of the Comics Studies Creative Research Hub (CSCRH) and Co-Director of the Institute for Social Sciences Research (ISSR). Murray co-edits Studies in Comics, which he co-founded, and is co-organiser of the International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference. He is also the editor of UniVerse Comics.

Murray researches British Comics, including the work of writers Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, and is interested in the adaptation of literature into comics and the relationship between comics and other media, such as film and video games.

Murray’s research has a creative practice element. He writes scripts and collaborates with artists to produce comics for research and engagement purposes. He has created comics about British superheroes, and many that adapt literature to comics, with an emphasis on science fiction. He has also written and edited many Public Information Comics in partnership with various charities.

He has collaborated with comics artists to produce several comics for research and engagement purposes, including adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (UniVerse, 2015–19), Lord Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ (UniVerse, 2024), Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (UniVerse, 2022), Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (Shift Publishing, 2024), several short stories by Robert Duncan Milne, appearing in Robert Duncan Milne’s Tales from the Argonaut (UniVerse, 2025), and many healthcare and public information comics.

*Posy Simmonds and Julia Round at Comics Jam in 2019*

Julia Round (MA, Ph.D.) is an award-winning writer and independent scholar whose research focuses on the intersections of gothic, comics and children’s literature. Her books include Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (McFarland, 2014), Gothic for Girls (University Press of Mississippi, 2019) and the co-authored Comics and Graphic Novels (Bloomsbury, 2022). She has also co-edited books such as Horror and Comics (University of Wales Press, 2025), Multimodal Comics (Intellect, 2024) and Companion to Literary Media (Routledge, 2023) and written over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.

She is a visiting fellow at Bournemouth University, United Kingdom, where she was previously associate professor of English and comics studies and head of the Narrative, Culture and Community Research Centre.

Julia is one of the founding editors of Studies in Comics (Intellect) and the Encapsulations book series (University Press of Nebraska) and a co-organiser of the International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference, an annual academic event focusing on the study, creation, and cultural impact of comic books, manga, webtoons, and graphic novels.

Julia shares her work at juliaround.com.

• Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies is available here from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) | More information from Intellect Books

Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies: Table of Contents

List of Figures
Foreword – Roger Sabin
Introduction – Madeline B. Gangnes, Christopher Murray, and Julia Round

SECTION ONE: MULTIPLICITY AND (INTER)TEXTUALITY
– The Shape of Comic Book Reading – A. David Lewis
– Re-inventing the Origins of the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up: Regis Loisel’s Peter Pan – Armelle Blin-Rolland
– The Myth of Eco: Cultural Populism and Comics Studies – Marc Singer
– Intertwining Verbal and Visual Elements in Printed Narratives for Adults – Pascal Lefèvre

SECTION TWO: METACOMICS AND THE DIGITAL
– Spiegelman’s Magic Box: MetaMaus and the Archive of Representation – Elisabeth R. Friedman
– Meaning from Movement: Blurring the Temporal Border between Animation and Comics – Joshua Gowdy

SECTION THREE: LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE
– Narrative, Language, and Comics-as-Literature – Hannah Miodrag
– The Cognitive Grammar of ‘I’: Viewing Arrangements in Graphic Autobiographies – Christian W. Schneider

SECTION FOUR: SOUND AND VISION
– Sound Affects: Visualizing Music, Musicians, and (Sub)Cultural Identity in BECK and Scott Pilgrim – Camilo Diaz Pino
– The Musicalization of Graphic Narratives and P. Craig Russell’s Graphic Novel Operas, ‘The Magic Flute’ and ‘Salome’ – Victoria Addis

SECTION FIVE: FROM MATERIAL TO TRANSTEXTUAL AND BEYOND
– ‘Animating’ the Narrative in Abstract Comics – Paul Fisher Davies– Multimodal Duck-Rabbitry: Multistable Perception and the Narrative Potential of Fold-Ins – Thomas Hamlyn-Harris and Ross Watkins
– Resisting Narrative Immersion – Greice Schneider
– Square Eyes: Augmenting Bodies, Boredom, and Things – Merlyn Seller

Afterword – Madeline B. Gangnes, Christopher Murray, and Julia Round
Notes on Contributors
Index

• Multimodal Comics: The Evolution of Comics Studies is available here from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link) | More information from Intellect Books

About the Author
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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.