Visual stories, like comics and graphic novels, are often thought to be easy to understand. Everyone can read pictures, right? Also, visual stories have so much creativity in them. There cannot be much structure in how they are made, right?

No and no. Visual storytelling is far more complicated than that! And my dissertation can show you how. It investigates the idea of coherence: the feeling that a story makes sense, which arises when you can connect the parts of the story together logically. 

To investigate coherence, this book combines the topics of co-reference in comics and mental events in comics with new analyses of 771 (!) comics. These new analyses show that including mental events is a very common storytelling technique, used in 50% of comics. There are systematic patterns for how this technique appears in comics and consistent cues that signal it to readers. For example, mental events have different panel borders (dotted lines, wavy lines, etc.) or a different colour palette than real events, or appear on a new page. These patterns and cues are also quite similar across the globe. 

Altogether, this collection of research dives into the cognitive processes that guide how we read and understand comics. It foregrounds the role of graphic and structural features of comics, like linework, colours, panel borders, morphology, panel templates, and narrative categories.