Recently I noticed a graduate student struggling with the amorphous nature of comics scholarship. She wanted to examine how comics authors execute shifts in consciousness or point of view, but quickly became frustrated with existing scholarship: countless works that either focused on defensive arguments of the form or provided close readings with little regard for contributing to growing theories of the form. Existing approaches to formalism weren't applying cleanly to her readings either. She articulated this frustration in my office one afternoon; I shared that I too have experienced similar setbacks in my research. Together we lamented the ways in which the interdisciplinary study of comics requires us to pull from so many sources in order to generate a productive lexicon for describing the form—which itself presents problems—let alone borrowing critical approaches from other disciplines without time or ability for due consideration of their intellectual genealogy. A few weeks later I began reading Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form by Hannah Miodrag. My first instance of marginalia read, "She is moving Anglophone comics scholarship in the right direction."
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/molly-scanlon/22/