Comics as a research practice: drawing narrative geographies beyond the frame

Written by a geographer-cartoonist, this book proposes the doing of comics as a practice of research in geography. In light of the ‘creative (re)turn’ in cultural geography and given the growing interest in geohumanities in experimentation with new creative and art-based methods, the book starts with a focus on ‘narrative geographies’ and embraces a cross-disciplinary, geocritical, and relational approach to comic book geographies. The theoretical and methodological proposal of the book involves scholars working in the social sciences, humanities, literary geographies, mobilities, comics, literary, and urban studies, as well as visual artists, comics authors, and art practitioners. Comics are valuable objects of geographical interest because of their spatial grammar. The ‘geoGraphic novel’ is a product and practice of research that has the power to assemble and disassemble new spatial meanings. It allows geographical issues emerge, can compose geocentred stories, engages wider and non-specialistic audiences, promotes geo-artistic collaboration, and works as a narrative intervention in urban contexts. Through a practice-based approach and the internal perspective of a geographer-cartoonist, the book provides examples of how to conduct geoGraphic fieldwork by embracing a disparate set of qualitative, mobile, visual, and creative methods, from walking to creative writing, from interviews to autoehnography, from ethnofiction to photography and observational drawing. Through a processual approach, reflections on key concepts in geography such as assemblage, mobility, public space, fieldwork, positionality, and reflexivity emerge from the analysis of the ideation, composition, and dissemination of geoGraphic narratives.