Introduction

A researcher reads Lydia Wysocki, Paul Fisher Davies, Nick Sousanis, Marcus Weaver-Hightower, Rachel Marie-Crane Williams and they decide to create a “research comic.” They begin with character creation, as Davies recommends (Davies 2019), then they script the comic, as per Wysocki “applied comics” steps (Wysocki et al. 2021). They plan where to transmediate text into visual metaphor, inspired by Sousanis (Sousanis 2015), and they consider the ethical implications Williams warns about (Williams 2012), vowing to be truthful and unassuming in the presentation of their results, or honest about their own subjectivity. They provide a substantial methodological appendix, following the example set by Weaver-Hightower (Weaver-Hightower 2017), to explain their reasoning and choices, and to legitimize the methodology. The researcher draws in a realistic style, though wary of photorealism, with a sober color palette, and citations dangling off the edges of speech bubbles and captions, in the hopes that this evokes rigorous academic writing.

This researcher, dear reader, is me. And perhaps you as well, as we all move forward with comics-based research (CBR) as a field. As a discipline there is great enthusiasm for allowing scholars to experiment with formats to communicate their research results, and arts-based research methodological handbooks now include clear instructions on how to realize the aim of illustrating one’s research results. It is no longer unusual to see a research comic in an academic journal, or to read the graphic edition of a popular non-fiction text, for example, Nora Krug’s images made for Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny (Snyder and Krug 2021).

As a field, there are not yet clear guidelines on how to read and evaluate research comics. There have been many fabulous guides on how to read comics as literature, from the introductory level up to models of advanced critical analysis. There are also methodological guides on the creation of research comics within CBR and applied comics fields. More serious, technical questions arise there as well regarding rigor and best practice, both from the side of publishers providing guidelines and from the side of scholars using those guidelines while composing their research comics, and peer reviewers are expected to have the needed subject-matter expertise but may require extra orientation in the comics format. While journals accept graphic submissions, submission guidelines for research comics can often be unclear or irregular, with each proposal treated as a special case.

Considering the workflow of submitting research, if the final article will be in graphic form, it is strange to submit a traditional text proposal when the proposal and abstract could be graphic as well, but there are no conventions for how to correctly structure a graphic proposal. The author of a research comic often has to seek out extra information about image dimensions and resolution for the publication, not to mention other issues such as an illustrated title and abstract, handwritten references, how to cite sources, and other labor-intensive details which are frustrating to change after the fact. Once submitted, despite being an expert in the relevant field, the peer reviewer may not feel prepared to criticize the graphics, will be hesitant to ask the author to redraw significant portions, or be unsure how to verbalize the issues they see with the graphics. Personally, with each research comic that I create, my greatest fear is that the graphics will be treated more as art than argument and skipped over in favor of providing feedback on the more comfortable textual plane. The most urgent issue in my eyes is peer review because it affects the ethics of the publishing process, thus that is what I will try to address most through this text and the proposed rubric.

This article is organized as follows. To provide a background of the issue, I will establish the need for a possible rubric which would focus the reader’s attention not only on the text of the research comic, but on the images first and foremost. Then, I will review the current guidelines for submitting research comics for peer review, which are used by the prominent journals in comics studies. In the Methodology section, I will describe the criteria I used to establish the “Form that Functions Rubric for Research Comics” which is aimed at peer reviewers who have not previously evaluated research comics or students who are learning how to read research comics. The proposed rubric will be presented in full, and then I will give three case studies to represent a range of types of research comics which can be seen in the field: a traditional, narrative research comic, a non-narrative research comic, and a research comic with substantial visual abstraction. I will conclude with some considerations for the further development of such tools to optimize their utility in the field.

Background

Reading academic authors’ reflections on their work process is rare, but when it appears it is very illuminating. The very first speech bubble in Rachel Marie-Crane Williams’ “Can you picture this?” (Williams 2012: 87) spirals into worry if she can “make work that is congruent with the pressures of the academy?” The methodological appendix to “Losing Thomas and Ella: A Father’s Story (A Research Comic)” (Weaver-Hightower 2017: 226–229) also immediately addresses the precarity of making a research comic, saying “a comic purporting to be ‘research,’ or research-based, resides in a sort of limbo […]” (Weaver-Hightower 2017: 226) later elaborating in an echo of Williams’ concerns:

Can a comic be rigorous, informative research and be aesthetically pleasing or entertaining simultaneously? How might one best navigate tensions between producing comics and producing academic research (Weaver-Hightower 2017: 226)?

In these cases, the author-illustrators are solely responsible for creating a work which is acceptable by the academy, while the academy has not stated what the guidelines for acceptability are. Paul Kuttner, Nick Sousanis, and Marcus Weaver-Hightower note this issue in “How to Draw Comics the Scholarly Way,” questioning “Who are the appropriate ‘peers’ to review CBR articles” (Kuttner et al. 2017: 412)? However, I would argue that the more essential question is how the peer review process for comic-format research can be accessible to scholars outside of the CBR field, because “peers” need to be able to step into the role, not pre-exist as a hypothetical. Kuttner, Sousanis, and Weaver-Hightower note the dual demands of credibility and authentic representation of the research in tandem with the “standards of aesthetic quality” (Kuttner et al. 2017: 412) suggesting that a reviewer or reader must also be ready to judge the artistic merit of the work, again without further guidance on what are acceptable graphic norms. Their chapter is not, however, focused on the peer review process, or on how to bridge gaps between experts in a field and the research comics they are asked to read. They conclude that:

Whatever their paradigm, CBR practitioners should be able to explain their approach (whether visually or textually), helping readers understand how to interpret the relationship between the comic and the studies phenomenon (Kuttner et al. 2017: 412).

This again redirects the burden creating functional peer review to the author-illustrator, who is provided only some examples of research comics which have been accepted in the past, though popular wisdom cautions that each research comic is different, so these models may not apply to their work. In the approach suggested by this chapter, the author-illustrator must not only communicate their research, but also prepare a process for the peer reviewers to handle and judge their work. Weaver-Hightower tries to do with a four-page methodological appendix (Weaver-Hightower 2017, pp. 226–229), while other CBR scholars like Paul Fisher Davies decline from performing this step and provide no paratextual explanations of the graphic work (Davies 2019). With some scholars providing explanations, and others leaving the reader to decide, a peer reviewer who gives feedback on one research comic is not necessarily any better prepared to give feedback on another, creating a cycle where each new research comic is “peerless.”

The aim of this article is to poke and prod at how we read and evaluate research comics. I hope to see more research comics published, read more responses to research comics, and watch heated graphic debates arise with full-color rebuttals. I would like to propose a simple rubric, inspired by Michael Pagliaro’s rubric for assessing the literary quality of graphic novels (Pagliaro 2014: 41–42), which could be used as a framework for evaluating research comics in such a way that gives equal weight to the academic rigor of the visual plane. The “Form that Functions Rubric for Research Comics” combines aspects seen in the ‘best practice’ models presented in “How to Draw the Scholarly Way” (Kuttner et al. 2017) and elements adapted from Davies’ “New Choices for the Comics Creator” (Davies 2019) to direct the readers’ attention, while creating clear “form that functions” metrics for readers to consider how the visual plane contributes to the veracity, authenticity, and argument of the research. Such a rubric could be a starting point for peer reviewers or students who are evaluating a graphic proposal for the first time, or for new scholars who know how to work critically with literary comics and would like to expand to non-fictional and research comics.

Across the majority of journals dedicated to comics studies, there is a lack of clarity on how to submit a research comic – I would like to separate these from the ‘visual essay’ format which is more likely to contain reflections rather than formal research – how it will be peer reviewed, or what a peer reviewer should consider when looking at such a proposed article. I do not mean this in an accusatory fashion, but rather I am trying to connect data to my own anecdotal experience and anxieties about the publication process. When deciding where to send my first research comic, I chose to submit it to Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship because there was a clear framework for submitting, whereas I had no way of knowing how other journals, with no stated parameters or guidelines, would handle such a submission. It is understandable why some editorial boards do not create guidelines, perhaps citing that they do not get so many graphic submissions to merit the extra guidelines, but I loosely hypothesize that this could be a vicious cycle where would-be authors do not see a pathway to submit graphic contributions, and thus it seems too risky for such a time-intensive project. Colleagues in the field, who I will quote anonymously, have had similar experiences, stating that it seemed a journal “kind of waved [the research] through,” or more depressingly that they do not try to submit research comics “to be honest as there is no point.” What the editors may see as a system which works for them may be a system which discourages submissions.

A survey of current guidelines yielded the following overview. Among the major comics studies journals in the field, I have found that Comics Grid has the strongest guidelines for submissions, which include additional materials for authors who may be illustrating for the first time. (“Submissions” n.d.) The peer review note states that the editors “will make sure that reviewers are aware of these submission processes,” noting also that the special nature of graphic research “does not guarantee that submissions will go through the peer-review process successfully.” (“Submissions” n.d.) The peer review process has an additional filter, in that all graphic submissions must first gain approval by the graphic editor Nicolas Labarre, which is also an opportunity for Dr. Labarre to provide specific feedback and direction on these submissions before the final project is submitted to anonymous peer review. As a past contributor to this journal, it was my personal experience that the peer review feedback did include extensive notes about the graphic content from one reviewer who seemed especially prepared to analyze graphic submissions, which was separate from the standard system form used to organize peer review feedback on the journal’s online submission management service.

The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics states submission guidelines for an optional “graphical abstract:”

This is an image to give readers a clear idea of the content of your article. For the optimal online display, your image should be supplied in landscape format with a 2:1 aspect ratio (2 length x 1 height). Graphical abstracts will often be displayed online at a width of 525px, therefore please ensure your image is legible at this size. Save the graphical abstract as a .jpg, .png, or .tiff. Please do not embed it in the manuscript file but save it as a separate file, labelled GraphicalAbstract1 (“Submit Your Article to the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics” n.d.)

This could be extrapolated to technical guidelines for a whole research comic, but full guidelines are not stated, and there is no public information about the peer review process for graphic submissions. Studies in Comics has a similar approach, where the technical parameters of images are specified, and graphic submissions are identified as “creative work” rather than being research-related, stating:

Creative work should be relevant to some aspect of comics, although there are no other thematic or stylistic restrictions. Metafictional submissions that deal with the processes and theories of comics creation are encouraged (“Studies in Comics” n.d.).

The peer review guidelines are those of Intellect Books, which are based on the COPE framework which I also use in this article. Neither the Intellect Books peer review instructions nor the COPE framework provide specifics for how to approach the graphic plane as anything more than a fringe element or space for visual examples (i.e., a photo or other single image).

Inquiries about the peer review process to editors of other major journals showed a strong willingness and interest to receive more graphics submissions, but these journals had not yet developed any systematic guidelines for submitting or peer review, as an anonymous editor confirmed: “As the graphic contributions to our journal have been few so far (though they are always welcome), we have not yet created official submission guidelines for them.” Regarding peer review guidelines, I will begin with journals which state that they accept graphic submissions. One anonymous editor of such a journal, who I will quote anonymously, stated that their journal currently has no special guidelines for graphic submissions, but is currently looking into creating separate submission criteria. Regarding the peer review of graphic submissions, they:

seek out peer reviewers who have demonstrated experience in publishing both comics essays and academic writing. We ask for feedback on the content, design, and clarity of the piece, and the suitability of the subject for [the journal’s] readers.

This was echoed by two other journals, who seemed confident that they were able to find peer reviewers who are both subject-matter experts and comfortable with reviewing comics-format submissions. Another anonymous editor noted that the peer review guidelines are the same for all types of submissions, however, they offer definitions of different review decisions to cover “accept,” “minor revision,” “major revision,” “reject and resubmit,” and “reject.” Other journals related to comics-based research do not mention graphic submissions at all in their instructions for authors and did not provide any statement about peer reviewing graphic submissions publicly. Some journals did not respond to private inquiry about the process, and in the case of a lack of response, this cannot be understood as a sign that they have no process, I am only noting the failed attempt to gain that information for the sake of transparency. The experiences between editors willing to receive research comics and scholars seeking to submit them seems to differ in satisfaction with the peer review process.

The field of comics-based research is not yet large, but it is growing. The discrepancy that I would like to address here is the imbalance between the surge of instructions on how to make research comics, and the lack of clarity on how these submissions will be received and reviewed. It is possible that authors are making a similar choice to the one I made, preferring to submit where there is a clear pathway, leading a journal such as Comics Grid to amass a small collection of research comics. I would like to focus only on the issue of reviewing the visual elements of the graphic submissions, because I believe that is the factor which has received the least attention, and the present moment is the best time to initiate wider conversation about how graphic submissions should be processed both by readers and by peer reviewers. Some journals will surely be content with their current process, as one anonymous editor noted that even without guidelines they have “always received high-quality, specific, actionable feedback from these reviewers on both the text and image components of the submissions.” I intend this rubric to be useful also in a pedagogical environment, but it will not be a useful tool for all instructors in all contexts, nor should it ever be. Most importantly, I warmly welcome any other extensions to this conversation, including and not limited to discussions about the submission process itself, clarifications about technical parameters for print and digital journals, debates about redrawing as quotation, considerations for the use of animated gifs, and so on.

Case studies

I would now like to present short summaries of published research comics which make use of the “Form that Functions Rubric for Research Comics” criteria and evaluative scales. The initial responses on the form have been synthesized to text for readability and to create the sort of text which may be used in peer review feedback. The purpose of the rubric, again, is to provide a reviewer from a non-CBR field with useful language and steps to approach the visual plane a research comic, from the assumption that a non-CBR scholar will naturally favor the textual plane and may avoid a deeper analysis of the graphics without this tool. The technical content of the research comic, and the validity of the research results, are not addressed by the rubric and are at the discretion of the reviewer and their expertise.

Accordingly, the sample research comics here were chosen because they represent a wide range of variables which influence the graphic plane. This includes number of authors, distribution of illustration work, interdisciplinary perspectives, subject matter, audience, visual style, differing layouts, different publication formats, and a range of communication strategies. A single image has been reproduced here for illustration and analysis, but I would like to clarify that the summaries take into consideration the whole comic, not just the excerpt shown here.

Usage with a ‘classic’ comic format

Figure 1

Helen Kara, Stuart Medley, and Bruce Mutard, 2021, “Scholarship in Action,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 13: 319. Image used with permission.

The first research comic (Kara et al. 2021) is an interdisciplinary collaboration with a clear division of labor between the authors, and formatted for print in a traditional A4 paper size. Helen Kara, who specializes in research ethics and methodologies, composed the text, Bruce Mutard contributed layout and pencils, and Stuart Medley finished the inks and colors. The content is co-authored by all and comprises a summary of one day at a conference. The content was composed “in real time” (Kara et al. 2021: 310), and centers around the question: “Is history fiction” (Kara et al. 2021: 311)?

Judging by first impressions, the comic has a very clear flow between panels on the page and follows a regular pattern of presenting a narrative caption and a contextualizing image in most frames. The images are clear and uncluttered, and it is easy to read. At a first glance through the comic, the subdued color palette appears appropriate and neutral for a research comic, but the images include visual metaphors and occasional comedic abstractions which lighten the tone of the work – for example, the boat “S.S. Panel” and an octopus with a scholar’s head (Kara et al. 2021: 316) – and strengthen the subjective appeal of the text. The comic is fluid and multimodal, making use of a wide range of semiotic tools.

The artistic execution of the work is clear and pleasant, and the argument develops over the course of the comic in a way that is easy to follow. The images contribute meaning through contextualizing ideas in visual metaphors or offering lively examples of ideas, or by visualizing statements from authors by depicting the quoted scholars themselves. Neither text nor image dominate the page, and they are well balanced. The depiction of the “characters” are realistic illustrations of actual scholars (for example with Golnar Nabizadeh, Wibke Weber, and Hans-Martin Rall), and state positionality only implicitly. The citations are inserted as numeric superscript, but the numbers are slightly too large for the font, and the actual endnotes are not embedded in the comic, so if the research comic is downloaded or read out of the context of the journal issue, the endnotes are lost.

The overall impression is that the visual and textual planes are well integrated, presented in a traditional comic book layout which will be comfortable for most readers. The organization of the comic is loosely narrative, representing the flow of thought over the course of the day as ideas develop. The graphics and text are both of a high quality, and the visual plan significantly contributes to the presentation of the research – the effectivity of the research communication would be significantly diminished if this were presented as a text-only article.

Usage with a non-narrative comic

Figure 2

Paul Fisher Davies, 2019 “New Choices of the Comics Creator,” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 9(1): 3. Image used with permission.

The second research comic presents a completely different trajectory. The aforementioned “New Choices of the Comics Creator” (Davies 2019) is made by a single author-illustrator and presents a non-narrative comic which is however navigated by the author’s avatar, and reflects the typical organizational layout of an academic article. The research comic’s structure implies that it may have been composed on separate pages, but the presentation in the digital journal is as a single image of limited width but continuous length. The flow of the panels can be confusing to my eyes, as the comic is not explicitly divided into pages, and the panels are both densely packed and irregular, as the panel sections regularly jump between macro- and micro-layouts, one embedded into the other without a predictable pattern. The handwritten text is aesthetically pleasing but may take some readers more time to decipher. The colors are subdued and tasteful, mostly acting to highlight text or images, which helps clarify the layout. Davies uses the visual plane to physically organize his argument, to present example graphics from his research, and to include visual metaphors and visualization of his ideas.

While reading the research comic, it is clear that while the visual plane contributes an abundance of useful information and context for the communication of the research, the density of the panels can sometimes be disruptive or obscure the flow of the argument. The comics places slightly more weight on written communication, but the graphics are essential for meaning making. The citations are noted through narrative captions, which are sometimes lost due to the use of small narrative captions for a variety of purposes: side comments, explanations, bibliographic information, or labelling. In some cases, the text is too small to read, and it is unclear if it is essential information, or only parenthetical gloss.

The overall impression after reading is that the visual and textual planes do support each other, and the visual density of the graphics forces integration. The comic is aesthetically cohesive, but for my eyes I would wish for more clarity in the text and less density. The graphic plane is essential for the presentation of the research and is well executed overall.

Usage with a comic including visual abstraction

Figure 3

Boglárka Littner and Eszter Szép, 2020 “Lines and Bodies,” Sequentials 1(4): n.p. Image used with permission.

The final comic is another multi-authored piece, this time without clear divisions of work credits between composition of text and graphics (Littner and Szép 2020). Both Eszter Szép and Boglárka Littner are known to both illustrate and write research, so I can only guess that they contributed equally to all parts of the research comic. This comic is easy to take in at a first read, the panels are clearly structured and divided, and the layout is a regular pattern of narrative caption at the top of the panel and a corresponding image within. The graphic style is clear and uncluttered, done in black and white line drawing with a violet watercolor wash for accenting. The authors make use of visual metaphors and abstractions, as well as standard multimodal elements such as speech bubbles.

The handwritten text is clear and easy to read, and the graphics support the text, though through affect rather than explicitly contributing new information, and there is a balance between the text and images. The idea flows easily over the pages and panels. There are realistic figures in the graphics, but these do not state an author’s positionality. Citations are included as parentheticals to the narrative captions, in a Chicago style author-date in-text citation format. The references are embedded into the final page of the comic.

The graphics and the text support each other, but they are not always fully integrated, rather the graphics add context to the text, but would not be able to stand alone. The art is aesthetic and of good quality, but the text is in many ways richer and denser. The graphic plane is a welcome source of additional context and due to the subject matter – it is a research comic about reading comics – and the graphics are essential for the overall presentation of the research.

Conclusions

The “Form that Functions Rubric for Research Comics” comes with the caveat that it will not be appropriate for all situations. As seen in the examples of the rubric applied to specific research comics, a certain field may find that the visual plane dramatically influences the communication of the research results, or even generates a second level of data, and a higher level of description and scrutiny would be merited. The rubric references back to Davies’ “New Choices for the Comics Creator” article which offers more elements to consider and supplies linguistics-derived terminology, which could be comfortable for non-CBR fields as it focuses on the effectivity of the communication rather than the quality of the aesthetics. However, for some journals the aesthetic quality of a research comic may be the most important metric and will be underserved by the rubric. The rubric presented here is only a proposal and is intended to be a starting point for discussion while journals and researchers refine tools to aid in the publication process.

To sum up, while CBR methodological research has provided substantial insight into the creation of research comics, and there are many useful guides to support researchers wishing to communicate their results in a comics format, there is little guidance for the other parts of the publication workflow. This article outlined the diverse metrics for evaluating research comics, adapted the language of these metrics into an “easy-to-use” tool intended to support reviewers in describing the visual plane, modelled the types of evaluations which could arise from using this tool, and contributes a final proposal for a rubric which could be used within peer-review or a pedagogical environment. Hopefully, this will help peer reviewers from outside CRB-related fields fulfill their ethical obligations to provide a full evaluation of the visual plane at an equivalent level to their capacity to evaluate the field-specific results and textual composition.

This process has shown that specific metrics for evaluating research comics are diverse and fluid, which I argue is a strength and should encourage different fields to solidify clear metrics and style guides which serve the same purpose as style guides for traditionally formatted publications. As research comics gain popularity, clear style guides and evaluative frameworks would support the existing literature which provides methodological advice on the creation and project management issues of authoring a research comic. The growing interest in CBR is exciting, and research comics will continue to generate interesting debates over aesthetics, communication, rigor, and validity in the years to come.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.