I thus proceeded with a methodological assumption that to limit our students to only one mode of response is also to limit their possibilities for textual description and existential understanding. In response to their experiences of reading, I asked this reader to think about her own adolescence and to create a visual representation of a memory that was sparked while reading. I explore this reader’s responses to two texts: Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer, and Lynda Barry’s My Perfect Life. In this paper, I look at the multimodal interpretive practices of one adult reader who participated in a study I recently conducted with a number of undergraduate students in teacher education, reading a series of graphic novels that centred on themes of adolescence. For more details, visit our friends at Fantagraphics Books right here.With the increasing educational and institutional legitimacy afforded to multimodal texts, there is a need to further explore the use of the visual and its place in reader response, not only as a textual means to prompt interpretation but also as a form of interpretation itself. “Arsene Schrauwen” is a 257-page trade paperback. It is in this story that, for a relatively brief time, you get to see him in all his glory, among the shadows and the ghosts, in his true element. Arsene, after all, is supposed to be an enigmatic creature from a bygone era. And we get a consistent pitter-patter of our many characters, much like you’d find in a classic comic strip or a silent movie. Schrauwen manages to keep to a steady pace by framing much of the story in a grid-like pattern: most pages hold six panels that oddly resemble playing cards. This is a tour de force of weird fiction full of the fantastical and an unabashed celebration of the human psyche and all bodily functions.įor a graphic novel weighing in at 257 pages, it makes sense to bring in some anchoring devices to keep things on track for the long haul. And then there’s the leopard men with insatiable sexual desires. Ostrich eggs appear regularly as you see Arsene preparing them for breakfast just as often as he’s throwing them against a wall. You read on about the constant threat of “elephant worms” that give Arsene nightmares about tiny elephants entering his body. The very next page thanks you for waiting. At intervals, you’ll get a notice requesting that you please wait a week before reading further.

The air is thin at times in this rarefied environment. With Schrauwen, you have definitely entered into an ideal example of the often cryptic and fascinating world of alternative comics.

Arsène Schrauwen by Olivier Schrauwen