The stitch, the scratch, the stain, and the burn – the mechanically reproduced comics page as a site of embodied encounter with material indexes.

Reproduction technology has always framed the ways in which we encounter and experience comics. Bart Beaty has described European small press as an ongoing attempt to reinscribe the aura of the work of art into the mechanically reproduced object. As such, small press practice can be theorised as a set of continuously adapting inscription strategies responding to new technologies.


The widespread availability of photographic scanning and digital printing represent examples of methods which have enabled the translation and manipulation of the indexical trace of materials and bodies onto the surface of the comics page. Theories of haptics and embodiment help to describe ways in which surfaces of depiction can throw the reader’s attention back on their own bodies. The experience of reading comics can therefore be framed in terms of navigating sites of embodied encounter, producing readings which go beyond the iconic and textual and activating other senses, most significantly that of touch.

The use of photoshop and procreate, alongside the rising popularity of reading on screens, has further altered the relationship between the reading body and the drawn trace. Meanwhile, in handmade examples of small press, the index of the body in the making of the comic object, co-exists with the embodied trace inscribed in the surface of reproduction, producing multiple registers of embodied meaning.

Through a discussion of a range of comics alongside examples from my own practice, I aim to show that the analysis of comics can be updated to account for the reader’s embodied experience of mechanically and digitally reproduced haptic surfaces. I will argue that ways in which comics creators use materials and styles of mark making to facilitate embodied reading should be integrated into notions of comics as narrative networks.