Upcoming talk: presence in comics

I’m going to present a paper at the conference Presence and Agency: Rhetoric, Aesthetics and the Experience of Art, which takes place in Leiden from Thursday to Saturday this week. Here’s a very short abstract for my talk:

Presence is the feeling in a viewer that a depicted figure is a living being that is really there. Theoretical literature suggests that the size of the figures and their deictical orientation are the most important factors of presence in single images. Comics, however, consist of a sequence of images, so the degree of presence in a comic panel is influenced by its surrounding panels, either by means of contrast or progression. Another typical feature of comics is written text, which betrays their mediality and consequently decreases presence. The example used here is the superhero comic The Ultimates (Marvel, 2002-2004).

I’ll post further information about this paper and its publication by and by.