Narrating and focalizing visually and visual-verbally in comics and graphic novels

Literary narratology has rightly devoted much attention to “narration” and to “focalization”. Assessing the identity of narrators and focalizers is crucial for understanding what is going on in the story world. Which agent is responsible for what information? Is the narration and/or focalization layered? If the latter is the case, is there any “colouring” by the higher-level narrative agent of anything said, thought, or experienced by the lower-level agent? Is the information provided trustworthy? Nuanced? Prejudiced? Narration and focalization have supra-medial as well as medium-specific dimensions. Recently, the issue of how these concepts function in the medium of comics, which combines visuals and language, has begun to be systematically addressed. This paper aims to show how the visual mode can, on its own or combined with the written-language mode, signal the sources of narration, focalization, and joint narration-and-focalization, as well as distinguish between different levels at which these take place.