My doctoral thesis argues for an attitude in comics research that is based on working between disciplines. The following assumption informs my understanding of a contemporary comics praxeology: the production of knowledge in comics research takes place in an increasingly media-rich and informationally dense environment. To a great extent, any professional expertise in the industry of comics is an aggregate operation requiring a multiplicity of epistemic regimes and the exploration of extra-disciplinary territories. Echoing Francois Laruelle’s urge to “make a tabula rasa of the future” (Laruelle 2012), the epistemic liberation in working between disciplines in comics research, contributes to more than simply revealing hidden intersections of research fields; working between disciplines has an operational constructive intensity similar to what Laruelle calls “futurality”, defined as a specific kind of relation to the future that is not tied to the past, neither proceeds through cycles of constant revolutions. Through my own books, and the conceptual comics archive, I tempt to sketch a praxis for a comics praxeology predicated on Generic Epistemology: the construction of a generic space of research where comics professionals work between disciplines and where the production of new insights does not depend on any established models or any single methods of research. For that to happen, a comics praxeology needs to put in place genuine mechanisms of disciplinary cohabitation in order to start accounting for future, speculative, unclaimed or impossible forms in the medium.
2017-2021, School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Aalto University, Helsinki. Supervisor: Bassam El Baroni, Doctoral Advisor: Craig Dworkin
