From Comics to Picturebooks: the Reading Moment as Focus for Devising Hybrid Narratives

This article presents findings from ongoing practitioner research that
looks closely at the relationship between comics and picturebooks as I
attempt to synthesise these forms in my work. I embarked on this study
as a visual storyteller working principally in comics, having found this
medium best suited to the kinds of narratives I wanted to make, and the
way that I wished to communicate them. One of the reasons for this is the dramatic, dialogic mode of the comic, which has no need of a
narrating text or ‘voice’ (though such a voice may also come into play).
The motivation for conducting this research was a wish to find ways
of making picturebooks where direct speech is viable as the only text, i.e. it should work as part of reading a picturebook out loud.