Abstract
Seeking to move beyond Scott McCloud’s spatio-temporal reading of the bleed (1993: 103), this article explores how Canadian writer/artist Emily Carroll’s graphic narrative Through the Woods (2014) employs the bleed as a means to give form to a mode of horror known as the ‘abject’. Employing theories of embodiment that excavate historical conflations of femininity and nature, in addition to socio-cultural discourses that figure the female body as more uncontrollable than the male, this article explores the anxieties experienced by Carroll’s adolescent protagonists as they traverse the boundary separating girlhood from womanhood. By paying particular attention to Carroll’s excessive use of bleeds, this article argues that the stylistic convention of the bleed is utilised to adumbrate and illustrate the abject horror of such boundary crossings.
Highlights
In his iconic study of comics and graphic narratives, Scott McCloud draws our attention to those incidents when discrete moments of time are no longer separated by or contained within the borders of individual panels
Carroll’s artwork, the ubiquity of bleeds on her pages, visually underscores the manner in which ‘the fecund female body reminds man of his debt to nature, and as such threatens to collapse the boundary between human and animal, civilised and uncivilised’ (Ussher 2004: 81)
The wilderness in its excess and insurgent vastness reflects an abject threat to ontological categorisation akin to that associated with the female body
Summary
The Comics Grid: Journal of C omics Scholarship, 10(1): 5, pp. Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities. Open Access: The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. Miranda Corcoran, ‘Bleeding Panels, Leaking Forms: Reading the Abject in Emily Carroll’s Through the Woods (2014)’ (2020) 10(1): 5 The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship.
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