Comics as enchantment: For the sake of affect and imagination
FORUM - ISSN 0963-8253
Volume 63 Number 3 (2021)
Comics as enchantment: For the sake of affect and imagination
Vicky Grube pages 76-86
DOI: 10.3898/forum.2021.63.3.09
Abstract
A lot is happening at the drawing table. Children are busy inventing stories, reassembling their thoughts, gleaning knowledge and making decisions. This article digs deep to see what is going on the children’s art-making through drawing and reading comics. In an after-school drawing club the author reveals how children are transformed through comic book drawing, realising their body’s potential to use images to tell a story. Drawing from imagination, memory and inventing brazen story lines, the body steps out of the present and moves into the future, into ‘What’s next? The ownership of the seriated drawn ideas leaps ahead, using all kinds of memory- what the child has seen, experiences, and can imagine as possibility. This all entails choosing which decisions make the most sense, delighting in affect. I call this entanglement with tools and memory to build a comic material aliveness. As children move through life, they have a faint sense that affects are there. The act of drawing – a physical engagement with materials stretches thinking and allows for deep immersion with affects which develop empathy and self-compassion.
To cite this article
Vicky Grube (2021) Comics as enchantment: For the sake of affect and imagination, FORUM, 63(3), 76-86. https://doi.org/10.3898/forum.2021.63.3.09