Exploration and specificity: a critical analysis of uses of comics as a method across qualitative research processes

Abstract

This article explores the uses of comics as a method in qualitative research, an area of growing interest across the social sciences, arts and humanities. It critically reviews a comprehensive range of studies using the comics medium as part of their methodological approaches to attaining informed consent, communicating with participants (beyond the one-way elicitation of information), transcribing data and disseminating research findings. In analysing these uses of comics not as one codified method but as multiple approaches, this article advocates for greater use of comics as a keyword to better advance a collection of distinct yet connected approaches used across phases of research projects towards divergent methodological objectives. In asking what a given use of comics is being used to do in a given study, this article emphasises’ research participants’ agentic participation in research and highlights the need to problematise assumptions of visual and creative methods as participative.

Introduction and literature review methodology

This article embraces recent interest on comics as a method in qualitative research and invites greater clarity of what the methods are doing in each case. In pushing for greater engagement with questions of specificity and rigour in qualitative research and research methods I build on recent exemplifications of comics as a method within this journal, including: Abbas et al. (2024) on consent; Davis et al. (2024) on coproduced composite narratives; and Meer and Müller (2023) on collaborative autoethnography. I analyse existing uses of comics in research as not a single codified method but multiple approaches with distinct (if at times underinterrogated) methodological interests and objectives. I consider what assumptions need to be made explicit towards better articulation of claims to innovation and participation in research methods, and of the role of that methodological innovation towards knowledge production. My article contributes to advancing considerations of the specific contribution to knowledge coming from research that uses comics (Hague, 2021: 308), foregrounding study participants’ agency and involvement in research processes. Critically analysing the purpose(s) of a comics-based method in a given study is thus a matter of rigour in qualitative research, here refracted through Baxter and Eyles’ (1997) evergreen discussion of how questions of rigour and quality manifest in qualitative research: in short, in ways that are not a mirror image of quantitative-based expectations of validity, reliability and objectivity.

My article's area of interest retains a connection with Kuttner et al.'s (2021) discussion of a range of comics created within and without research processes, as advocacy for the affordances that comics offer researchers and towards advancing this field. But whereas the term comics-based research indicated ‘research that integrates the comics form into one or more steps of the inquiry process’ (Kuttner et al., 2021: 196), their characterisation of an emerging field of practice rather than either a research methodology or a specific method might not have captured a diffuse field of uses of comics by researchers who present their work within a headline of not comics-based research but visual research methods, arts-based methods, participative methods and indeed as comics by any other name (including: graphic narrative, sequential art, graphic novels, storyboarding, cartoons, manga and more variations of the same comics medium). This article engages with a wider selection of literature across uses of comics as a method by researchers who do and do not claim specialist skills as comics artist-writers, and whose approaches to using comics include coproduction with research participants and collaborations with creative arts practitioners. The values and challenges of using comics as a method are a matter of ongoing innovation and exploration that benefit from targeted comparisons to connected visual and creative methods (particularly: video-, photo- and art-based methods), but should not be considered merely an offshoot of any one of these methodological areas.

Mindful of Hague's (2021: 309) encouragement to engage concertedly with the comics form rather than becoming entangled in attempts to justify its use, I give only a brief overview of the comics medium as it pertains to qualitative research. Barberis and Grüning's (2021) introduction to their special issue of Sociologica succinctly summarises the field of comics studies, particularly its focus on comics texts as objects of scholarly study, then offers advancements and connections pertaining to social sciences and humanities disciplines. I add the emphasis that comics is a medium, actualised in visual and verbal forms of language; comics is not itself a discrete language or a singular style. Comics is a medium of interdependent words and pictures in sequential form, which I expand as follows. As a medium, comics is broader and deeper than any single genre, style or format. By being comprised of interdependent words and pictures, comics’ communicative task is shared across visual and verbal marks that can work together to reinforce a stable presentation of content, and/or pull in different directions to destabilise the presentation of content. As a work in sequential form a comic is often but not always presented as a series of panels, with multiple possible reading paths through a given extract. I also note the awkwardness of writing about what comics is and what comics are. Grammatically, comics as a medium is an abstract noun, whereas a comic as a text is a concrete noun (plural: some comics). As such I state a belief that comics is a versatile and compelling medium, and equally that comics are both fun and demanding to make and read. To begin at a level other than this focus on a medium would evade a meaningful exploration of what the comics medium – as opposed to any given genre, theme, or artistic or writing style – can offer researchers and research participants.

My literature review methodology for this article exemplifies slow research (Berg and Seeber, 2016; Kuus, 2015) as an attempted bulwark against neoliberal crisis in academia (Fleming, 2021) and an unavoidable feature of work completed in the long shadow of Covid disruption. Over a longstanding interest in comics and research I have come to loathe even the most advanced keyword search functions of academic databases. In addition to trawling publications about comics as literary texts and artworks, searches often return texts which feature but do not analyse a specific published comic in a paper not otherwise about comics (for example Solomos et al., 1982: 31), or in which ‘comic’ is used to refer to performances by a comedic comedian (Mast, 1979), and often fail to capture the aforementioned comics medium by any other name. Although Gemelli et al.'s (2024) approach to searching for ‘comics*’ and ‘science’ in Scopus and Web of Science was somewhat fruitful, to engage with the complexities of a dispersed field my own strategy prioritised a combination of approaches over and above an ongoing interest in this area of literature, specifically: reading abstracts in comics studies journals (including: Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics; The Comics Grid; ImageText; Studies in Comics) and conference papers (Comics Forum; International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference); making requests for suggestions from the UK Comics Scholars JISCMAIL listserv and via a now-disused Twitter account, followed up by individual correspondence; and looking up publications citing, and cited by, key papers.

By focusing on comics as a qualitative social science method this paper touches on uses of comics as a method in health and population research (Al-Jawad and Czerwiec, 2019) but largely excludes uses of comics in clinical research, settings and interventions, a field amply signposted by the Graphic Medicine website and conference (Czerwiec et al., 2015). The integration of comics-form instruments with existing clinical research tools, methods and methodologies is a vibrant field that is however predominantly underpinned by quantitative and evaluative approaches to research. Examples include Likert-type scale questions to evaluate uses of comics in clinical settings (Furuno and Sasajima, 2015; Pincavage et al., 2015), an existing normed test used to evaluate a paediatric comics-form information leaflet (Kassai et al., 2016), and an experimental research design to evaluate the use of comics that present information about science (Spiegel et al., 2013). I also exclude uses of comics as therapeutic resources in healthcare practice, for example the Cartooning Teen Stories (Drew, 2016) resources used in art therapy approaches, as practice-based materials.

I present my analysis of the literature grouped across four broad phases of a generalised qualitative research process: Phase A Recruiting research participants and establishing informed consent; Phase B Working with research participants (agentic participation in research); Phase C Transformation of data (particularly through transcription and analysis); and Phase D Dissemination. These phases, and differentiations within and between them, are in no way definitive. I offer them as a structure familiar across a range of multidisciplinary social science research approaches, and also engage with the complexities of comics-based work that starts within a research process then leaves research behind. My intent is not to enforce a compartmentalisation that stifles exploration and innovation, but to make critical considerations available to colleagues working across (inter)disciplinary approaches, to encourage clarity and specificity in uses of comics as a method in qualitative research.

Phase A: Recruiting research participants and establishing informed consent

When the conversations, notemaking and for many scholars doodling involved in planning a research project give way to preparing for delivery, comics-based research methods have been used effectively in recruitment and informed consent processes. Text-based research consent forms can have drawbacks including appropriateness to participants’ literacy levels, conveying a sense of obligation, a potentially off-putting formalisation of participation and the appearance of being a legal document (Save the Children, 2004), raising the possibility that the multimodality and visual interest of comics could offer benefits particularly when seeking to involve children and young people as research participants. Giancaspro's (2020) acknowledgement that many people do not read written contracts drove their assessment of the legal validity of comics-form contracts in ways extending beyond research consent processes, usefully adding a question of whether differing interpretations of a comics-form document alone can satisfy a threshold of certainty.

Research teams may encounter a range of institutional responses to attempts to use comics-form consent materials, particularly when pursuing administrative processes for ethical approval of qualitative social science research that does not mirror the expectations and norms of clinical research and physical/natural science research (Wysocki and McLaughlin, 2022). There are nevertheless productive opportunities for creating and using comics-form materials as part of a suite of materials used to establish ethical and informed consent. My own creation and use of comics-form consent materials took a hybrid approach, first including a clear tick-box and statement requesting a signature in a comics-form questionnaire (Wysocki, 2019), to emphasise that this research instrument was not (only) a novelty comic but part of a formal project seeking to collect data. I then used comics-form participant information materials as a precursor to a conversation and a written consent form for participation in interviews (Wysocki, 2024). Considerations of how long a comic a potential participant is asked to read, and what information they are asked to process, are particularly relevant to research with children. Tatham-Fashanu's (2023) use of short comics contrasts with Grootens-Wiegers et al.'s (2015) choice to give 40-page comics to children to support their understanding of and assent to medical research as distinct from treatment. Grootens-Wiegers et al.'s work went on to use quantitative and qualitative indicators to establish whether children correctly answered questions about medical research participation and what it was that children liked about the comic, towards evidencing both that the desired information was communicated to readers and that this success had something to do with the comics format.

In creating a comics-based consent form with a women's group at a refugee and migrant centre in the UK, Abbas et al. (2024) emphasised a commitment to embodied research within an ethics of care framework, identifying as a researcher and migrant who began the research only after three months volunteering at the centre (fieldwork site). The researchers’ collaboration with a visual artist to make the comics-form consent form continued this foundation of trust, taking care in: choices of artist and art style; colour palette; skin colour of comic characters; complexity and quantity of text; use of symbols and ideograms; and use of multiple visuals to represent key concepts. As the team refined the comic to minimise misinterpretation of the instrument, challenges were ‘overcome through regular and open communication feedback sessions, which are based on respect’ (Abbas et al., 2024: 1205): although the comic was central to their consent process it was not a standalone tool. The point that consent is not one act but a process resonates in Botes and Rossi's (2021) iterative development of a participant information comic to build a trust relationship with adults from the San population of South Africa. Working with a community group who had been mistreated by prior research teams, the project used exploratory interviews and focus groups to better understand communication challenges then introduced a one-page comic, with a control group receiving a written consent form. Both formats were in Afrikaans, the only one of the participants’ primary languages of Afrikaans, !Xhun and Khwe shared with the researchers. Although the comic did not consistently improve communication of specific concepts and terminology, the process of engagement further raised awareness of gaps between participants’ and researchers’ understandings of key underpinning concepts. At participants’ request to make the comic accessible across a range of levels of education the researchers redeveloped the initial line-drawn comic to use full colour pictures but no words. Although the researchers did not report how they recorded participants’ consent, their account of discussions around the development of the comic indicates a process that asked participants how they would like to be respectfully addressed and depicted. This indicates value in using the production of a comic as a method of establishing ethical and dignified participation in research, within a process of negotiating what informed consent entailed in this context.

These uses of comics as a method of establishing informed consent were not standalone tools but part of consent processes. The rigorous multi-stage review and development of instruments for any consent process is particularly needed in uses of comics-form materials, and researchers could benefit from highlighting the thoroughness of this development process to institutional reviewers, and to potential research partners and participants. Given comics’ longstanding association with reading for pleasure, if comics are regarded as lightweight in their framing as ‘fun’ texts researchers must guard against obscuring serious consideration of the implications of taking part in research. Asking whether participants like a proffered comic may seem tangential to establishing whether it functions as a communicative tool, but can contribute to identifying sensitive and nuanced adjustments needed to make a given instrument appropriate to work with a target population. Having discussed uses of comics as a method in the introductory phases of a research project, I now proceed to consider uses of comics in participative and agentic approaches to qualitative research.

Phase B: Working with research participants (agentic participation in research)

In considering comics-based methods in social research that approaches people as participants in rather than subjects of research, I discuss two groups of examples seeking to enable meaningful and agentic forms of participation in research. In B1 I consider methods using elements of the comics medium without providing or creating a complete comic, reviewing researchers’ uses of panel grids and text bubbles particularly in research with child participants. In B2 I review methods involving participants of any age in making comics as part of a process of enquiry, emphasising a focus on the process of making over any assessment of the comics created.

B1: Research methods that use elements of the comics medium

Panel grids characteristic of (but not compulsory in) comics have been used in research methods and instruments, but as with the range of terms used to describe the comics medium there are many names for tasks predicated on a gridded sequence. Widespread uses of panel templates as a pre-production planning tool in film and animation are typically called storyboarding, whether or not also readable as comics complete in their own right; the equivalent early draft stage of a comic is typically called thumbnailing. Referring to the same sequence of panels as a storyboard rather than a comic can usefully prioritise interim sketches as a placeholder for further development and discussion, rather than expecting aesthetically ‘good’ finished artwork. Storyboarding as a research method has involved using templates to elicit and capture a planned sequence of events with an emphasis on the communication of ideas. Examples include: Scott et al.'s (2024) comic storyboards for data collection; Cross and Warwick-Booth's (2016) storyboarding, which used collaged images and words towards analysing the impact of an intervention; Wall et al.'s (2017) approach to using cartoon story boards; and Moraveji et al.'s (2007) involvement of an artist to elicit children's ideas through magicboarding and comicboarding. Comic-storyboards, storyboards, magicboards, and comicboards have nuances differentiating these approaches to using panels/storyboards as a method, but without a common acknowledgement that these are all still some form of comics researchers could risk developing disparate but similar methods. More widespread use of the keyword ‘comics’ could improve both the dissemination and discoverability of innovations in research methods by mitigating this risk of disconnected yet comparable specialisations.

Uses of speech- and thought bubbles in the comics medium can take multiple forms in indicating utterances, typically showing characters’ speech and thought rather than sound effects or narrative captions. Speech bubble outlines, as well as the font, spelling, and punctuation choices they contain, can convey changes in the volume, emotion, and prosody of what is said (Yannicopoulou, 2004). As an element of the comics medium, the speech- and thought bubbles used in Wallner's (2017) investigation into classroom practices in learning Swedish displayed sequences of talk, tone, voice and embodied actions. Contextualising their approach in both education theory and comics practice, Wallner went beyond earlier work on the use of speech- and thought bubbles in pupil views templates including Wall's (2008) use of speech bubbles and thought bubbles as writing frames to prompt and record pupils’ metacognition. Borrowing speech- and thought bubbles from their long history in the comics medium could as researchers have assumed indicate that these shapes carry sufficient meaning in themselves to prompt responses from pupils, but young participants do not inevitably engage with depicted differentiations between thought and speech as Tatham-Fashanu (2023) found in work with 4- and 5-year-olds:

…the idea that one language was meant to be represented in a thought bubble and the other in a speech bubble appeared to be a little too abstract for him (Tatham-Fashanu, 2023: 1721).

For work with adults the long evolution from speech scrolls in medieval paintings to comics speech bubbles described by Petersen (2010) might be widely culturally embedded, allowing an assumption of relative stability of meaning. But research on the more recent emergence of emoji includes Miller et al.'s (2016) finding that people interpreted the heart-eyes emoji in multiple ways with significant potential for miscommunication, raising further questions of whether it is possible to assume a consistent understanding of elements of comics used as frames and symbols isolated from the narrative context of a comic. The opportunity to explore decontextualised uses of elements of the comics medium is not a neutral endeavour. Forceville's (2010) exploration of grammatical approaches to classifying elements of comics risked assuming that all readers understand the same symbols in the same ways, and did not engage with deeper critical interrogation of why (for example) the Tintin series’ indigenous characters were shown as childlike drunkards. Social science approaches to using comics, and elements thereof, could advance such criticality.

B2: Research methods and approaches that involve participants in making comics as part of a process of enquiry

People making their own comics can form part of participatory and creative approaches to research. Comics and zines (self-created magazines) have particularly featured in feminist approaches to self-publishing, including Feigenbaum's (2012) analysis of the relationship between print culture and activism. I distinguish research methods where participants’ creation of comics is initiated as part of a process of enquiry from researchers’ interest in previously-produced zines, for example girls’ experiences in the Riot Grrrl subculture (Schilt, 2003) and patients’ graphic narratives of illness (Krishnan and Jha, 2022), and from researchers’ own creation of a comic for use as a discussion prompt with participants (Letizia, 2020).

When supporting participants to make comics is used as a participatory research method the do-it-yourself ethos, low cost, and low production values of making can help enable participation in arts-based practices by people who do not consider themselves artists. This was evident among medical students who expressed gratitude for “the opportunity to be bad at something” (Green et al., 2016: 479) and in Houpt et al.'s (2016) Write For You project where older adults in a care home co-authored zines with an art therapist, towards increased interpersonal connections, giving voice to overlooked residents, and challenging a medical model of care. These projects’ emphases on making comics as a participatory method foreground communication and participation over any judgement of the art created. There is also precedent in uses of hand-drawn communications by doctors who, though skilled clinicians, need not be technically good at drawing (Lyon and Turland, 2017; Moriyama et al., 1990).

Participative research projects have used working with artists to make comics as a method to enable historically disempowered groups’ involvement in research about social issues. McNicol (2017a, 2017b) worked with an artist to deliver workshops supporting women in the Bangladeshi community of Greater Manchester (England) to explore digital tools and create a comic. Partnering with a college and a trade union branch as community-based organisations framed making comics as a nexus for communicative skills that went beyond an immediate focus on storytelling towards supporting participants’ sense of empowerment. The Thorns and Flowers project (El Refaie et al., 2018) in Cardiff (Wales) used reading and making comics in work with a diverse group of Black Asian and Minority Ethnic women from nine nations and varying levels of confidence with spoken English to understand and raise awareness of experiences of infertility. The researchers proposed that the elicitation of visual metaphors and drawing revealed the meaning making of individuals and richly described their experiences, including challenges to dominant cultural ideas of infertility. Although these two projects had distinct themes, they demonstrate a common use of artist-led comics-making workshops as a method for researchers to engage with community groups and discuss potentially challenging topics. Both projects made participants’ comics available as part of a suite of project outputs, presenting the comics as creative artifacts from projects that also involved researchers’ further analysis and discussion of data from participants’ involvement.

In the instrumental use of making comics as a route to accessing the participation and discussion of a target group the creation of art can still be a principal or secondary aim of the research, but making art is not the sole purpose of the research. I differentiate El Refaie's (2018) and McNicol's (2017a, 2017b) uses of comics as a method of enabling adults’ participation in a larger research project from the following uses of comics making. In combining comics-making and map-making to publish an anthology exploring urban areas in Padua (Italy), Cancelleri and Peterle's (2021) collaboration between an urban sociologist and a cultural geographer-cartoonist prioritised experienced artists and researchers’ exploration of a theme through creative arts practice. I also differentiate from Meer and Müller's (2023) participatory work with the Qintu Collab, a group of young queer African artists who worked with professional artists to tell their own life stories as a collaborative graphic autoethnography. Whilst respecting arts-based research as paradigm that ‘recognises art as a form of knowledge (Leavy, 2017)’ (in Meer and Müller, 2023), these approaches differ from a visual research methods paradigm where the process of making art is a route to researchers’ engagement with participants in order to elicit and/or gather data of participants’ view on a given topic. Working with members of the Latino community to research lived experience and develop visual counter-stories to challenge racist narrative in the United States, Hidalgo (2015) created fotonovelas (a form of photostory comics) using a low-cost augmented reality app whereby a printed image triggered video to play on the user's mobile device. Alongside iterative work with a target population group, it was the researcher who made the fotonovelas: an approach giving the researcher considerable control over the final comics-form output and the further video content presented within it, but still an inherently participative creation process.

These projects raise and explore questions of whose voices and participation were sought by researchers, how their involvement was facilitated, what data were collected and used, and what creative works were made available as outputs of the research. Particularly in participative approaches to research, making comics as a research method must involve attention to processes of methodological and ethical decision-making about what comics are made, used, and shared by a project. As I move on from participation in research to researchers’ processes of data transformation, and later to the dissemination of findings, my article's structure across phases of a qualitative research process advances a steady analysis of comics as a method used at distinct stages whilst also recognising that phases of a research methodology flow together.

Phase C: Transformation of data (particularly through transcription and analysis)

A memorably effective example of comics as a method of transcription of video data is McLennan and van Dijk's (2021) depiction of a chimpanzee's use of a plastic bottle as a masturbatory aid. Whereas the field research team's video recording was shaky and partially obscured by vegetation, line drawings based on still images from that video gave clarity in depicting a rare behaviour in the wild, discussed in comparison to human behaviour. Using two sequential illustrations showed movement, going beyond what a single illustration can convey; although captioned by the authors as illustrations this inherent sequentiality is characteristic of a comic. Having established the communicative power of a two-panel comic, I now explore what comics can offer the transcription and analysis of evidence in social science studies involving humans.

Comics-form transcription and presentation of video data can be an effective method of presenting interactions as a static series of images. Laurier (2014) proposed a graphic transcript as combining video frames with conversation analysis transcription conventions but, as discussed in section B1 of this article, there is no singular grammar of the comics medium. The various verbal and visual styles of the comics medium enable researchers to make choices in how to represent video-based images of participants, with particular challenges in ensuring participants’ anonymity. Before the proliferation of image editing apps, Rogoff (2003) explored what still sequences extracted and/or re-depicted from video data can offer researchers interested in interactions: digital manipulation can erase the background and emphasise the foreground of an image, isolating an example of interaction without removing it from its context. Plowman and Stephen (2008) made digital videos of learners’ interactions into a comic by using the Comic Life app to arrange screenshots in pre-set panels and add text, creating photostory comics to focus a readership of education practitioners’ attention on non-verbal aspects of children's interactions. Woolhouse (2017) used photo elicitation in research with children on the topic of inclusion, then reconstructed children's responses as comics. Their consideration of how to represent participants highlighted dignity as well as confidentiality:

We tried blurring just the faces of those pictured or covering the faces with a black strip but found neither approach comfortable since the process appeared exploitative and objectified the individuals pictured. In the end, each photograph was scanned and cartoonised using a software package in an attempt to retain dignity while also protecting the identity of those featured (Woolhouse, 2017: 5).

‘Cartoonised’ here seemingly refers to choosing a cartoon-like rather than a photorealistic or line-drawn style (or indeed any further stylistic choice) but it is unclear whether this was the researchers’ desired visual style or merely the app's naming (and branding) of an image editing tool. Allen's (2015) point that this type and level of image filter does not offer full anonymity highlights confidentiality and respect in depictions of participants. Spencer's (2022) critique of claims that pixelation anonymises children's faces takes this concern further, locating adults’ choices in image editing in relation to the cultural politics of childhood including questions of the erasure of a child's individual and ethnic/cultural identity.

Making comics does not fix issues inherent in depicting research participants, but is an opportunity for researchers to choose and justify their approach. The preceding examples hinge on researchers’ choices in using widely-available photo manipulation tools whose practical possibilities for anonymisation are explored and discussed by online content creators, readers, and commentators as well as by qualitative methods scholars. As an example, consider yassifying: the memetic use of photo editing settings to make a person look artificially glamourous, a usage developed out of explicitly queer linguistic practices (William Leap, quoted in Pandell, 2024). Social journalism has quoted and critically analysed a viral example where the creator of a covertly-taken photograph of a stranger eating in public claimed to have ‘yassified her to maintain anonymity’ (quoted in Pitcher, 2023), having disguised the subject's face but not her distinctive behaviour. Uploading research image data to apps that are based on image recognition and data processing demand researchers’ close attention to new tools’ terms and conditions of use, particularly with the current prevalence of glossy sexualised images ‘made by’ generative AI tools in response to humans’ instructions and algorithm-driven churning of web-scraped data based on what sells, rather than on equitable and respectful forms of representation. Researchers’ choices in using image-making and manipulation tools for comics-form transcription of data can have great benefits but must continue to include appropriate opportunities for project participants and stakeholders to problematise and push back at options towards respectful depiction.

Exploring what comics-form transcription of data can offer both the researcher's process and participants’ involvement in research, the following studies all went beyond a novel process of transcribing key extracts from a qualitative dataset. Bailey's (2016) ethnographic study of a school-based Minecraft club used comics-form transcripts of video recordings of children's gameplaying to show the confluence of in-person and in-game interactions. Comics-form transcription made this rich information accessible to child participants and to adults without presuming a researcher's training in transcription notation conventions, allocating specific functions to text and image: colour-coded speech bubbles; speech bubble borders; special effects and sound effects; musical notation; captions to add or summarise context; and captions to explain analysis. The simultaneity of multiple static panels on a page and the amount of data presented also merit attention. Bailey specified the benefits of making comics for the researcher's processes of analytical engagement with data:

Firstly, the compilation of the transcript required repeated and focussed engagement with the data. Secondly, through the resulting “dynamic feedback between image and text” (Smith et al., 2015: 7) the use of a comic enabled an account of this hybrid space to emerge that would not be possible through a reliance on text alone. (Bailey, 2016: 64)

Having teased out particular functions of aspects of communication, comics-form transcription can enable not a simplification but an enriched exploration of the complexity of interactions, positioning uses of comics-form transcription as part of analytic interrogation and exploration of data. Tatham-Fashanu's (2023) iterative development of using comics in fieldnotes first progressed from written fieldnotes that described children's interactions to including stick figure sketches, attempting to engage participants in recognising themselves in the researcher's fieldnotes from repeated visits over a year-long ethnography of a primary reception class. After success in using a comics-form participant information sheet that gained some participants’ recognition (‘That's me!’) and elicited insights into participants’ multilingualism, the researcher drew comics-form sketches of classroom interactions, showed participants, then redrew the notes as digital stick figures. Tatham-Fashanu recounted how another child's dissatisfaction with their stick figure introduced a coproduction element to making fieldnotes:

After the game had finished, I showed the sketch to the children and ‘Cinderella’ pointed to the stick figure that represented her and exclaimed ‘that's not me!’. She then took my pencil and drew her own self-portrait proclaiming ‘that is me!’ (Tatham-Fashanu, 2023: 1723).

Asking children to draw self portraits which the researcher then digitally copy and pasted into redrawn fieldnotes enhanced the process of participatory research as well as its documentation. It became not a surface-level choice to make fieldnotes nicer to look at, but a structural choice that enabled the researcher to probe for detail of children's multilingual identities and their perspectives of their interactions with classmates. In Bonnaro's (2019) account of making drawn multi-panel fieldnotes, combining words and pictures pulled together aspects of the researcher's own multilingual identity and skills that had not coalesced in words alone:

It was as if the language of affect (Italian), anthropology (English), and ethnography (Greek) could never come together. Drawing became a mode of ethnographic translation. By translation, I refer to the process of expressing in academic language the variety of communicative registers, affects, and language(s) through which the ethnographer develops her relationships in the field. … Drawing helped me go beyond words, to recover and pin down details that I was not able to make sense of through assemblages of words (Bonnaro, 2019: n.p.).

Bonnaro's fieldnotes went beyond a visual-verbal form of notemaking into reflection on and analysis of unfolding events and emergent findings. Although stylistic and representational visual choices may feel more natural to an artist-writer, these are as constructed and interpretative as choices made in written and spoken accounts of research.

Making comics-form notes and transcripts can impact on researchers’ relationships with participants both in the moment and longer-term, making this a powerful but not yet fully explored method. Examples of the transformation of data through transcription and analysis exemplify social science research as an iterative process that extends beyond the identification and (re)presentation of a clear and well-contextualised sequence of action for analysis. There are multiple roles for comics-making in the close exploration of data: in researchers’ own reflective processes of engagement with data; when issues and findings are communicated to participants in ways meaningful to them; and in further digestion of ultimate findings and implications in preparation for wider dissemination. The comics medium can initially offer an accessible simplicity, yet also offers forms of representation that preserve some of the rich context and body language that can be lost in even the thickest description (Geertz, 2000) of written transcription and fieldnotes. Considerations of researchers’ own communicative habits and preferences, both tacit and overt, persist whether or not the researchers consider themselves artists. None of the examples in this subsection included the contracting in of a professional artist: the work was accomplished through researchers’ and participants’ own competence in drawing skills, with or without using software and digital tools. Having not made an aesthetic judgement of comics used as a method, questions of what additional artistic expertise can add to researchers’ own communicative abilities, and who researchers conceptualise as the target readers of their comics, now come to the fore as I analyse uses of comics as a method of disseminating research.

Phase D: Dissemination

Using comics to disseminate research has potential for impactful engagement with academic and non-academic audiences, and presumes at least a dotted line between the process of doing research and the sharing of completed parts of that research. I first analyse two relatively clear-cut groupings of comics that disseminate research to academic audiences, and that translate research for audiences beyond specialist academic and professional fields. I then consider a third, fuzzier and less neatly categorisable, group of comics that were to varying extents based in research but developed into something else.

D1: Dissemination to academic audiences

Paywalled academic publishers’ calls to adapt journal abstracts into graphical abstracts direct scholars towards comics by any other name:

For ease of browsing, the Graphical Abstract should have a clear start and end, preferably “reading” from top to bottom or left to right (Elsevier, 2019).

The cartoon abstract examples highlighted by publisher Taylor and Francis (n.d.; also Estelle, 2017) focus on natural and physical sciences, with narrative and visual style choices made in service to communicative clarity: referents could come from the fields of medical and technical illustration as much as from broader creative arts practice. The purpose of graphic, graphical, cartoon, comic, or otherwise visual abstracts is however not entirely clear. They might offer summaries that circulate beyond a journal though the full text of an article, whether paywalled or Open Access, remains written for a specialist academic audience; a reader might however reasonably presume that the whole article is in comics form. Visual abstracts, as with video abstracts, are as yet an example of competing for readers’, employers’ and funders’ attention in a marketised academic publication environment without inevitably adding value, but can offer researchers a first step in comics-form dissemination of research.

Academic publications in comics form are a large part of what Kuttner et al. (2021) term comics-based research and what Labarre and Priego (2017) term graphic science; both offer points of entry to a growing field of examples. I focus here on research publications wholly or almost entirely in comics form (allowing for written abstracts and references), rather than a comics-form piece presented or excerpted within a longer text article, or a creative practice output alongside a written commentary. Researchers seeking the principal publication of their new research in comics form must be clear what function their comics-form article serves, towards ensuring their manuscript meets (and exceeds) gatekeepers’ expectations of scholarship as a research report, literature review, position piece, or other substantive output. Scholars might also benefit from considering how their publication is equivalent to the expectations of a journal article, rather than being a valuable entry to major journals inviting shorter, creative arts-based, or otherwise non-standard submissions of research-adjacent notes and commentaries. As an early comics-form journal article Al-Jawad's (2015) headline claim that ‘[c]omics are research’ was energetic and intriguing, but the paper did not present or review research evidence, or strongly articulate what connection was being made between comics and research. Its claim for the use of comics as a psychosocial practitioner research method could risk slipping between conflicting understandings of what research is: a particular concern for researchers publishing in an interdisciplinary field of interest where enthusiasm and creativity abound, but so do competing uses of research terminology that might not always traverse disciplinary silos.

Comics-form academic publications add aesthetic considerations to standard considerations of audience, readability, clarity of communication, and quality of work. The requirements and procedures for publishing academic work largely predicated on the written word have as yet been not revolutionised but massaged to include comics-form papers. The format and argument of Sousanis’ (2015) book Unflattening, probably the first doctoral thesis in comics form, presents a compelling case for how comics can represent a complexity of meaning that can become flattened by words alone. Sousanis’ appended process notes also show that a comics-form academic text is not exempt from academic requirements:

I was required by the Office of Doctoral Studies to include a “List of Figures” at the front of the document to refer solely to the “figure” on this page [p.54] – the page on which I most directly break the fourth wall of what academic scholarship is supposed to look like. Their insistence upon having a list of figures to point to the sole page of text in a work made of figures quite poetically emphasized the point I was already making here (Sousanis, 2015: 162).

My own experience of publishing a comics-form journal article reporting empirical evaluation evidence (Wysocki, 2018) followed a typical draft, write(draw), submit, review, revise, resubmit, proof, publish process, but with consideration for the additional time involved in preparing artwork rather than a written manuscript. Editorial considerations can include the option to submit a full line (‘pencil’) art version of the article alongside a sample page of fully rendered artwork, to then finalise (‘ink’) artwork after incorporating reviewers’ comments, and scope to discuss how layout choices might be wisely influenced by the journal's standard margins, PDF formatting, and image processing costs. Processes of reviewing might evolve further with Woock's (2023) proposed rubric for the review of comics-form articles across subject specialisms, beyond only comics-specific journals.

D2: Dissemination beyond academic audiences

Comics continue to be used with great effect in research dissemination beyond the initial publication of new research, being offered to a range of audiences through non-academic comics-form publications and through events and creative collaborations. In reviewing examples of comics that are based on research to varying extents it is reasonably clear to exclude examples of comics by non-researchers that nevertheless include generalised aspects of research communication: see Padua's (2015) The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer, a non-fiction non-academic comic using cited and uncited information filtered out from research. I also note and exclude interdisciplinary mixed methods research exploring how comics can enhance insight into experiences of illness (Lo-Fo-Wong et al., 2014) and make public health programmes more effective (Dobbins, 2016; Li-Vollmer, 2018; Wang et al., 2017).

University research-based projects have created comics as accessible points of entry particularly for physical and natural sciences research, including Dreams of a Low Carbon Future (McKay, 2013) and Newcastle Science Comic (Wysocki and Coxon, 2015; Wysocki and Thompson, 2013): comics anthologies created with institutional support as interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers, comics creators (including experienced artist-writers and children) and communications professionals. Such comics-form research dissemination includes methods innovation and evaluation in its own right (Wysocki and Leat, 2019), and ‘intersects with older public information campaigns’ (Graham, 2011) precedent for comics that ‘can be considered both instructional and entertaining’ (Horton, 2018). A critical reading of explicitly informational comics or applied comics as ‘comics with a specific job to do’ (Wysocki, 2022), offers a focussed introduction for researchers curious about making comics to share their work with non-scholarly audiences.

Events and conferences’ use of live visual recording, as an improvisational form of comics, typically comprises:

the act of drawing a visual record in real time, combining words with imagery, in order to represent the content (and sometimes the visual characteristics) of an event, discussion or process’ (Mendonça, 2016: n.p.).

Live visual recording covers a range of practices from professionals offering a well-defined service to corporate clients, to event organisers asking a favour from friendly artists and/or event participants sharing informal sketched notes on proceedings. Mendonça (2016) also makes a crucial differentiation between visual recording and graphic facilitation as a research method. Despite the initial similarity of outputs these are distinct processes, contrasting an artist who produces a creative response to or record of aspects of an event, with a trained facilitator who carefully listens to and member checks what participants say as part of a method of visually recording responses. Despite a growing marketplace of artists offering visual recording services for professional events, both practices are as yet under-researched.

D3: Exploratory approaches

Whereas the preceding dissemination examples offered some differentiation between the research as process and the comic as communication of that process, comics have also been used in more exploratory areas of research and research methods. Much of the literature analysed in this article includes the researchers’ achievement of a richer understanding of what making a comic had enabled them to do once they had made that comic, advancing their work beyond what they had anticipated making a comic could achieve. In periodically allowing processes of making to unfold there is scope for researchers to continue to develop qualitative methods for more effective deployment in subsequent projects. In Davis et al.'s (2024) composite storytelling approach to working with an illustrator, making comics was a method in a project with participants recruited by virtue of themselves being researchers, as academics of working-class heritage working in UK higher education institutions. The project included discussing participants’ anxieties about the perceived credibility of working with an illustrator to tell their stories in comics form, with the comics-form outputs of the project later used by participants in their own research and teaching in ways that were not wholly envisioned at the outset. Staying with research about university communities, there is a need for researchers to be precise in describing and naming their processes and outputs towards specificity in what claims to knowledge are made and how a use of comics is described. Higher Fees, Higher Debts (Vigurs et al., 2016) was described by its authors variously as ‘a research-informed comic’, ‘a graphic representation of a research report’ and findings that had been ‘visually interpreted’ by BA Cartoon and Comic Arts students. These are not synonyms. A comic made as a creative response to academic work is indeed an interpretation of findings, but is a creative response and not a specific qualitative methodology for interpreting interview data. Priego's (2017) discussion with Vigurs about that project highlighted the gap from transcribed interview to comics adaptation, noting the expertise of colleagues in the role of ‘disciplinary “translator”’ (Priego, 2017: 7) familiar with both traditional academic writing and the comics medium.

It will be no surprise to academic colleagues that a research project might start as one thing and grow into another. Whereas Berthaut et al. (2021) were clear that they used research as a jumping off point for making works of fiction, presented as sociological fictions, researchers’ moves between processes and outputs are not always so clearly delimited. For Moreau and Galman (2020) a project initially about the translation of existing research soon went into a new and fulfilling layer of interpretation. Clancy's (2014) comics-form documentation of an activist project was indeed documentation of an activist project, until by also delivering comics-making workshop within that same project she crossed the streams of delivery and documentation. The multiplicity of purposes and processes in these examples loops back to Bonnaro's (2019) reflective fieldnotes in suggesting that whilst making comics can help fill gaps in translation (between world languages, academic disciplines, or from academic research into public engagement with research), visual representations are still subjective and are not a universal language. Particularly in the emergent and inherently interdisciplinary field of using comics as a method it is crucial to remain empathetic to the challenges of clearly stating what is understood as a research method, and indeed as research.

Discussion and conclusions

The examples I have critically analysed indicate vibrant uses of comics as a method across stages of qualitative social science research processes: a range extending beyond Kuttner et al.'s (2021) emphasis on linguistic and semiotic approaches to comics, and their brief interest in uses of comics in approaches to data and analysis. Whilst enthusiasm for ‘comics-based research’ is welcome advocacy for continued and potential areas of work, my specific interest in uses of comics as a research method has advanced a call for more meticulousness in accounts of where and how comics have been used in research. My emphasis on comics as a medium written and drawn in language (not itself a language) queries prior scholarship that has approached comics as if it were a distinct visual language (Cohn, 2013), or through a focus on functional aspects of communication (Davies, 2019): positions risking a truncated focus that could mistakenly imply a finite lexicon to be mastered.

Comics is a medium worth exploring further for qualitative research methods. Researchers have typically focussed on one or two aspects and affordances of the comics medium at a time, rather than demanding full immersion in and mastery of the medium. Skilled competence in drawing is not a prerequisite for researchers, and collaborations between researchers and comics creators can productively connect fields of professional expertise. There is scope to learn from researching the collaborative research process of creating comics in its entirety from conceptualisation to creation to readership, as I have begun to explore (Wysocki et al., 2021). Comics practice and research however remain distinct but compatible fields; useful ‘how to’ books by and for comics creators (Abel and Madden, 2008; Eisner, 1985; McCloud, 1993) are not interchangeable with research literature on comics creators, publications, and audiences. There is more to be unpacked in engagements between scholars and practitioners.

Having critically reviewed a disparate field, an insistence on clarity in accounts of uses of comics-based methods does not diminish the vital importance of continued interdisciplinarity and innovation. Arts-based research and visual research methods are paradigms that can be in productive dialogue, with benefits to visual methods’ specificity in asking what a given method is being used to do, and to arts-based emphases on making art as an activity complete in its own right. Across both paradigms it is crucial to not entirely presuppose what might come out of a process of making, especially as making comics is a research method that is ephemeral in multiple ways. The process of creating comics extends beyond the partially- or wholly completed records of that process, but discussions had whilst making comics might evaporate if not recorded as data (audio/video recording and/or field notes), as might the thoughts and emotions prompted by making and talking. Considerations of confidentiality, or the resources, skills, and inclination to share comics created primarily for a project's own purpose, can mean that physical and digital outputs from participatory projects stay with that group if they are kept at all. Comics that are shared might be the original image texts made by participants, or reproductions of those original artworks (Benjamin and Underwood, 2008). These are all navigable choices for researchers.

This paper has advocated making particular use of the comics medium across phases of qualitative research projects. It has identified specific examples, advantages, and risks of doing so across projects that used discrete elements of the comics medium, and projects that used comics making more holistically both in participatory work and in exploratory approaches to doing and disseminating research. Comics-based methods are not intrinsically participative or emancipatory, particularly given comics’ cultural history as a medium that includes uses of harmful stereotypes, verbal and visual jokes, and optical illusions, all with a rich mix of irreverence and sincerity. The comics medium is inherently no better or worse than any other creative medium in terms of authorial and artistic voice, including the risk that any specific aesthetic style or publication format could be appropriated by projects with a decidedly un-activist agenda. These are useful problems. Asking what counts as data and whose interpretations of those data are privileged is a route to addressing deeper question of whose voices are privileged. The perennial need for scholars to demand and provide clear explication of what a given method is being used to do in a context, and how the researcher/s navigated issues of ethics, quality, and rigour in research, has run through my analysis. Researchers’ innovations in comics as a method are in no way exempt from these issues, and this rich medium offers opportunities to be ever more clear in articulating and justifying the method and methodological choices of a research project.