Visual Metaphor and Drawn Narratives

“John Miers belongs to that rare breed of authors that present complex ideas in a highly lucid and engaging style. Critically reviewing insights from art history, aesthetic philosophy, and cognitive science – and drawing on his own experiences as a cartoonist living with chronic disease – he argues convincingly that metaphor is always deeply implicated in the production and interpretation of narrative drawing. An outstanding achievement.”

- Elisabeth El Refaie, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University, UK, author of Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives and Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures

“Interacting with a vast range of images and comics and covering a wide expanse of scholarship, John Miers’ Visual Metaphors and Drawn Narratives offers valuable insights into the plasticity and functioning of visual metaphors.”

— Maaheen Ahmed, Department of Literary Studies, Ghent University, Belgium, author of Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Comics

This book contributes to metaphor and comics scholarship by bringing together established theories of metaphor and of depiction and applying the result to the analysis of narrative drawing. Miers synthesizes two strands in recent comics scholarship: the analysis of comics as drawn texts, informed by art history and aesthetic philosophy, and the use of contemporary metaphor theory as a lens to examine how meaning is produced in comics. It aims to enrich and substantiate claims about the metaphorical characteristics of pictorial representations, and develop our understanding of how metaphor use is guided by stylistic features of drawing that are characteristic of the comics form.

John Miers is Senior Lecturer in illustration at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, UK and a Leading Researcher in graphic medicine at the Vrije Universteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.