Representing experience in comics: Carnet de Voyage

Abstract

Comics offer distinctive approaches to representing experience, combining the modalities of the visual and the verbal in compatible ways. In his Carnet de Voyage – created during a trip publicising Blankets (2003) and researching for Habibi (2011), and later published as ‘a little snack’ to cover the long wait between these books – Craig Thompson uses a range of approaches to render his travel experience in words and pictures, ranging from the recognisably comics-like to more diaristic and sketchbook modes, similar to carnets published by l’Association. This article uses Thompson’s Carnet to illustrate a variety of ways in which human experience, internal and external, is construed in images as in language, and how those modes interact. I employ a framework for describing how experience can be rendered in graphic narrative, based on a Hallidayan functional model of language similar to that explored in Kress & van Leeuwen’s Reading Images and O’Toole’s The Language of Displayed Art.