Unflattening embraces visual references from Paleolithic cave prints to James Bond films, and verbal ones from Bruno Latour to Wallace Stevens. Sousanis draws the imagery of these worlds from TV, movies, the classical canon of art, and scientific diagrams.
Over eight chapters, Unflattening follows an anonymous, sleepwalking figure as they step out of a regimented life and take flight to explore new worlds. It is a deep interrogation of comics as both an art form and a critical practice. The imprimatur of Columbia and Harvard University Press surely confers Unflattening with added respectability for general readers and critics from outside the comics world, yet Sousanis’ thesis also presents a defiant challenge to conventional Western thinking about words and images. Unflattening demonstrates the viability of a comic book as doctoral scholarship in its own right, rather than a separate work requiring some accompanying critical paratext. This quest began with Possibilities ( 2005), a shorter piece which helped secure Sousanis’ entry to Columbia’s doctoral programme. Originally created as a doctoral dissertation for Teachers College at Columbia University, this PhD thesis-as-comic is the latest stop in a journey by its author to explore scholarly essays in comics form.
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