ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an introduction to the visual narrative. It explores several issues raised by the phenomenon of visual narrative, that is, the use of visual materials in 'storytelling' and its particular consequences for shaping and using text-image combinations. One of the prominent fields of application of text-image relations is in the service of performing visual narratives. But telling stories is something which is taken as inherently requiring temporal development. The chapter considers narrative in general to consider two such newly emerging 'traditions' of narrative visual research, first, children's picturebooks, and second, comics, or 'sequential art'. It considers from the perspective of visual communication and visual narratives. The kinds of distinctions of perspective, the assertion of contingent causality, variations in choice of narrator and expressions of time that we have seen, all stand as basic strategies available for telling stories. The topological view makes it far easier to deal with the perennial banes of genre studies: hybridisation and change.
