This section of the site is about how reading comics is an embodied experience- or how, in my opinion, it should be. Sometimes I just glance over stories for information about the plot, but I don't think that's what narrative is for. Mostly it's going to be about my current main special interest, a comic called The Power Fantasy (link to "primer", a brochure about TPF's premise.) Potentially some other stuff too, we'll see.
External links have parenthetical explanations of where they link to. If there's no parenthetical after a link, it's another page on this site.
Please keep in mind that this website contains explicit content, and only proceed if you're willing to see that.
I first learned about this topic from two main books: Picture This (author's own website) by Molly Bang, and Metaphors We Live By (publisher's store page) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Bang is a children's book author/illustrator who also did this art theory book about how to design images that have emotional impact. Lakoff and Johnson are academics, and Lakoff in particular has had a long career writing books about metaphors that shape how we think.
The books' topics are really two takes on the same thing. Bang is talking about images, and Lakoff and Johnson about words, but their central points are the same. Human cultures take common physical experiences and use them to represent unphysical things- emotions, moral values, social dynamics, that kind of thing.
Some of the physical experiences the two books talk about are the same, through different lenses- Bang tells the reader to put characters high up on the page if they're supposed to feel powerful or happy, Lakoff and Johnson list out idioms about power and happiness like "I'm on top of the situation", "he is under my control", "you're in high spirits", "I'm feeing down". Some are different, because some metaphors work better in pictures and others in words: Bang goes into a lot of detail on meanings of color and shape, Lakoff and Johnson focus heavily on metaphors for arguments and communication. But it's the same basic phenomenon: a physical thing and an intangible idea that have the same association with each other, again and again throughout culture.