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Focalization is at work in every narrative. It can be marked in different ways in different narrative media. In literary fiction, focalization markers include free indirect discourse, reported thought, and what Dorrit Cohn has called “psycho-narration,” the “profusion of verbs and nouns of consciousness” that are applied to a central character but rendered in the narrator’s voice (32). In film, focalization can be marked through point-of-view shots, perception or projection shots, and other angles of framing (Branigan 79). In comics, point-of-view images, gaze images, and subjective optical effects have been identified as focalization markers (Mikkonen 2013: 102-3). Other comics storytelling techniques that may cue focalization include color, shading and line work, panel size and framing, layout, lettering, the repetition of identical or similar panels, and the use of visual metaphors, as well as the style and genre of a comic, all of which can operate individually or in conjunction to indicate focalization and direct the mood of a graphic narrative. In fact, because comics are a highly versatile, stylistically diverse storytelling medium, focalization markers are often specific to a particular comic book and its narrative world. This study is devoted to focalization in comics. We demonstrate how the comics medium requires a substantial revision of the narratological key concept of focalization, and we show how that revised concept enables a deeper understanding of the art of comics and of some especially striking examples of that art. We thereby hope to contribute to the fields of comics studies and of narrative theory, as well as to the critical conversations about the specific narratives they analyze. Comics are a bimodal medium, narrating across visual and verbal tracks simultaneously. Their bimodality allows for a complex distribution of narration and focalization. Comics also communicate on multiple levels, including those of the panel, the sequence, the page layout, and the entire comic book. Their multilayered narrative structure prompts readers to continuously consider several combinations of narrative instances at once, to return to previous moments in the narrative, and to reconfigure their understanding and experiencing of the narrative in relation to newly acquired information. Comics are stylistically versatile, and they often explicitly connect the hand-drawn quality of their style to the corporeality of the comic artist. To readers, this corporeal quality offers a particular kind of rich sensorial experience. The style of a comic can express the subjective perception of characters, the atmosphere of a narrative world, or the take of a noncharacter narrator on characters and their world. Style is a subtle, highly effective focalization marker, conveying character attitude and emotion and inviting affective responses in readers. However, focalization markers like style or color should not be confused with focalization itself: While style and color are aspects of the text that can be pinpointed in analyses, focalization is not an aspect of the text but an analytical concept that describes the distribution of perception, knowledge, and affect in a narrative based on the identification of textual markers. Besides color, style, panel size, and so on, focalization in comics is also affected by genre, because distinct comics genres draw on specific combinations of narration and focalization and tend to carry with them specific ways of thinking and feeling. For example, autobiographical comics or graphic memoirs, as they are often called, are typically rendered by an autodiegetic narrator who is also the focal character. The genres of graphic journalism and graphic historiography often rely on a similar combination of homodiegetic narration and character-bound focalization. However, narrators in them are typically outside witnesses to other characters’ stories, and their internal focalization frequently embeds the focalization of these others, leading to a more speculative, multilayered focal filtering. Sans paroles present an even more ambiguous focalization, often taxing readers’ understanding by deliberately veiling the distinction between character bound focalization and narratorial focalization or between a character’s “what it’s like” and the mood of an entire narrative world. When readers sit down with a comic from a particular genre, they are already primed to experience certain things in a certain way. Our main argument in this book is that the focalization of a narrative gives readers a particular kind of access to experiences within the storyworld, enabling them to have experiences in their own turn. In our study of how focalization can be productively engaged in concrete analyses of individual comics, we emphasize that focalization’s greatest action is not to provide an angle of vision on a particular object or narrative agent. Rather, its main narrative work is to cue readers as to how the narrative world is understood by those who occupy it and, by doing so, draw readers into the mental and physical experiencing of those inhabitants and their world. By talking about the experiences inside a narrative, we adopt a phenomenologically inspired approach to comics narratology in order to investigate how the distribution of information and knowledge and the physical, cognitive, and emotional experiences of characters impact readers. Phenomenology addresses lived experience, that is, our conscious experience of the world (the way we exist in the world as selves) and how that experience makes the world appear a certain way. A phenomenological concept of experience also emphasizes how consciousness and the world it experiences are reciprocally related and mutually dependent. A phenomenologically inspired approach to focalization allows us to assess how the subjective experiences inside the narrative world of a comic—the seeing, acting, and judging of that world—are not confined to the narrative world, but can be accessed, even shared, by readers.
