AustLit

In this essay Christiane Buuck and Cathy Ryan 'discuss how introducing comics theorist Thierry Groensteen's ideas about visual repetition enriched their university students' ability to interpret the medium. First introduced in his 1999 classic The System of Comics and reinforced in his wiz text Comics and Narration, Groensteen's term "braiding" refers to a repeated element in a comic that draws the reader's attention to a particular idea or theme using images rather than words. The repeated element can be a page layout, the layout of an image in a panel, the repetition of a design, the figural placement of characters or objects on the page, but the key is that the braid requires the reader to be an active agent in the interpretative process (Comics and Narration 35). Buuck and Ryan demonstrate that many of the repeated elements—what they term "visual metaphors'—in Shaun Tan's The Arrival "offer opportunities for readers to superimpose their own lived experiences and cultural perspectives on the book's visual landscapes.' (from Introduction)