Comics Is a Way to Circulate Experience
摘要
Johnathan Flowers draws on John Dewey’s Art as Experience to argue that comics are a vital medium for circulating experience. He emphasizes how comics allow readers to access others’ perspectives through visual and narrative organization. Marc Singer responds by exploring why comics are effective at this task, analyzing Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home to show how comics’ formal features—word-image interplay, visual sequencing, and materiality—enable nuanced representation and self-reflexivity. Singer critiques medium-specificity and argues that comics’ power lies in their cultural status and reception. Flowers replies by shifting the focus from “why” to “how” comics circulate experience, emphasizing the embodied process of creation and the integration of internal and external materials. He concludes that comics are expressive media shaped by individual creators’ use of form to organize and communicate experience.