Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics
This essay considers the obsession with historical and archival work in contemporary graphic narratives, focusing on examples from graphic narratives by Ben Katchor and Kim Deitch. The essay argues that the comics form has an especially important role to play in the new century, in large measure because of its longstanding negotiation of the interplay between word and image—a hybrid language increasingly central in the age of new media.