Representing experience in comics: Carnet de Voyage

Comics offer distinctive approaches to representing experience, combining the modalities of the visual and the verbal in compatible ways. In his Carnet de Voyage -- created during a trip publicising Blankets (2003) and researching for Habibi (2011), and later published as "a little snack" to cover the long wait between these books -- Craig Thompson uses a range of approaches to render his travel experience in words and pictures, ranging from the recognisably comics-like to more diaristic and sketchbook modes, similar to carnets published by l'Association. This article uses Thompson's Carnet to illustrate a variety of ways in which human experience, internal and external, is construed in images as in language, and how those modes interact. I employ a framework for describing how experience can be rendered in graphic narrative, based on a Hallidayan functional model of language similar to that explored in Kress & van Leeuwin's Reading Images and O'Toole's The Language of Displayed Art.