Reading Comics Through the Body: Embodiment and Materiality in the Making and Reading of Comics

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. 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.