Cartographics: Comics, Maps, and Storytelling

As visual-textual mediums, comics and maps have a surprisingly intertwined historical and formal development, and it is productive to view them in conversation with each other. This dissertation, titled Cartographics: Comics, Maps, and Storytelling, examines how comics and maps organize visual information by graphically charting it onto the space of the page, making them both effective when representing space, time, and narratives. As comics studies increasingly turns to expanding the definition of what comics can be, and geography studies increasingly turn to popular and accessible geographic and cartographic public-facing work, my dissertation project adds to this evolving discourse by analyzing how maps can be used within comics to bridge their historical (high art/low art; objective/subjective) and formal (supposed) disparities. I reimagine the boundaries of what comics and maps are and can be. I propose cartographics as an approach to the entanglement and assonances between comics and maps as storytelling mediums that graphically represent spatial and temporal relationships.