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Abstract

This dissertation expands the already explosive field of comics studies by examining the recent concept of expanded comics to which relatively little attention has been paid. Drawing on definitions of expanded cinema, I define the term “expanded comics” as a spatial metaphor which characterizes the spreading out of comics from its conventional core in the culture industry to the realm of the art world where we find unconventional, often interdisciplinary forms. Taking a transatlantic perspective, and through qualitative analysis, I offer textual and contextual readings of case studies created between the years 2010 and 2021, stemming from Spain as well as Latin America (specifically, Argentina), two loci for the expanded comics movement. I comparatively analyze these with other cases from North America that have cropped up within the same time frame. Case studies include the music-comics object (a multimedia pairing of musical tracks that accompany the same number of comics narratives in one material or digitally packaged product), operatized comics (a performance blending a visual comics narrative with operatic music and often operatic voice through the use of digital technologies and projection), sculpture and design comics (three-dimensional comics in which, speaking from a semiotic perspective, the host medium, signs and/or content are made of sculptural materials and designed for installation), and exhibition comics (site-specific, large-scale narrative comics specifically commissioned for the art gallery or museum). Furthermore, I theorize how expanded comics propel the medium beyond aesthetic paradigms of modernism and postmodernism to which they have historically been tied. I contribute to debates on art after postmodernism by theorizing expanded comics through metamodernism, which reconfigures taste hierarchies to bridge mass and high culture in renewed, sincere bids for meaning. I conclude that for key principles such as interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and a focus on the creative process, as well as common narrative features such as a quirky tone, the figure of impossibly possible utopias and a meaningful use of materials, expanded comics are made possible under the metamodern paradigm and meanwhile exist as an additional and overlooked object of inquiry which allows us to increase our awareness of this cultural logic.