My research aims to provide professionals in the architectural disciplines with an in-depth analysis of comic strip as possible working tool. We will define the operating methods whereby this specific language can lead to better knowledge of the built space and a more effective representation of it: the comic strip is thus considered a cognitive tool, a tool of design and of communication.
We will first examine a series of topics that run through the history of the representation and conception of space and, as such, constitute the background context within which words and images (narrative and space) interweave to create a synergy that finds wide-ranging expression in the comic strip, and which strongly connects this language to the themes of space (particularly urban space) and its representation. Building on these considerations we will go on to show how the development of a set of expressive needs closely associated with the visible growth of the metropolitan phenomenon (from the late 19th century) has coincided with the sudden development of comic strip language, and how this development process is also intrinsically connected to the city at the thematic level. We will then attempt to summarize the specific solutions – duly contextualized in terms of historical factors, style and content – devised in order to meet space-specific narrative requirements.
This study is divided into two broad areas which, for the purposes of clarity, will be approached separately, but which are nevertheless interrelated at various levels and in relation to various aspects. On the one hand, by analyzing the architectural elements around which the narrative of space designs its strategies (the window, the façade or section, stairs and the floorplan), we will investigate the narrative strategies related to the so-called architectural scale involving the enclosed space and the structure of a building, as well as, by extension, its immediately surrounding space. The vision that structures a delimited space and communicates with its surrounding space though complex openings (above all the window) will enable us to discover the representational strategies associated with a space of proximity, inside which we typically carry out our everyday activities and which is designed, altered and inhabited by us. In this context we will look at composite representational solutions, such as the use of perspective planes, the strategy of shot-reverse shot, the narrative reinterpretation of architectural sections, and the spatial rendering of three-dimensional elements (above all stairs).
The other area of investigation, based on a comparison between narrative examples focussing on the city in its extended dimension (urban scale), will consider the urban setting in its entirety, and how the language of the comic strip provides scope and tools of representation for the complexity that distinguishes it. We will analyze the strategies of description, orientation and localization applied in the case studies, and the methods used to narrate the experience of traversing the urban environment. We will also conduct an in-depth study of two particular cases with respect to which comics are developing specific strategies: the first focuses on places of consumption and the saturation of the vision, and the second considers the representation of the fantastical city and the theme of dizziness, or vertigo.
The guiding and unifying element in this research process is the vision (the position of the video camera, we might say, to use a filmmaking metaphor now widely used in comics): a vision that explores the city by drawing an invaluable and highly complex overall synthesis and interpretation of it, and which, through the mise en page of the comic strip, is able to tackle the yawning gulf between the detail and the whole. Through this gradual process of discovery we will consider examples drawn from the international publishing scene, focussing especially on the output of the West (France, Italy and North America in particular), but also looking at the comic strip production of the East (particularly Japan), and making the due connections with the languages and settings featured in peripheral fields to comics (film and illustration).
