Narrativising chaos via narrative agency: COVID-19 comics as narrative meta-control

Title

Narrativising chaos via narrative agency: COVID-19 comics as narrative meta-control

Creator

Stephen, Albeena; Jacob, Reshma

Description

The initial COVID-19 pandemic phase was a period of chaos, instability, and disorder. In this context, this paper explores the narrative potentialities of COVID-19 comics as a means of narrative meta-control over the chaotic nature of the lived pandemic experiences. Meta-control, the act of regaining a sense of agency over a contingent circumstance that is otherwise uncontrollable, offers narrative agency as a means of navigating meaning-making and the reality of chaos. In this paper, This Quarantine Life: A COVID-19 Era Comics Anthology (2020), a global anthology brought forth by the New York Arts Students League, is analysed as a chaos narrative. Interrogating normative understandings of chaos narratives, the paper reframes these comics as spaces of and for narrative resistance, where aesthetic form functions as narrative repair by interrogating its acts of meta-control. Interweaving both conceptual reframing and multimodal discourse analysis, this paper shows how comic artists use narrative strategies of braiding, arthrology, and spatio-topia to work with chaos. In working with chaos, such strategies affirm comics as a narrative agent that helps capture and work through the reality of chaos. This study furthers contemporary concerns with graphic medicine about the practicalities of narrative agency in comics in a post-COVID-19 reality. 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Source

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics;

Date

01-01-2025

Publisher

Routledge

Subject

Chaos narratives; COVID-19 comics; meta-control; multimodal discourse analysis (MDA); narrative agency

Coverage

Stephen A., Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST University, Bangalore, India; Jacob R.

Rights

Restricted Access; Hardcopy may be available in the library

Relation

ISSN: 21504857;

Format

online

Language

English

Type

Article

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2025.2563031

https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105017044250?origin=resultslist