The Work of Comics Collaborations: Considerations of Multimodal Composition for Writing Scholarship and Pedagogy. 6

ABSTRACT : Though multimodality is increasingly incorporated into our pedagogies and scholarship, explorations of collaborative multimodal composition are lacking. Existing literature on collaborative writing focuses predominately on texts either composed in singular modes or by a single author, neglecting the ways in which multimodal texts are composed collaboratively. Likewise, scholarship of multimodality largely leans toward digital texts/contexts in its examinations of such work. As a field, we need a more comprehensive grasp on the work of collaborative multimodal composing. This essay uses case studies about comics writers and artists to complicate our understanding of collaborative multimodal composition and to generate considerations for writing scholarship and pedagogy. Multimodal composers should (1) understand the audience as co-collaborators; (2) identify the genre of the deliverable; (3) develop custom production and feedback loops; and (4) foreground the work of multimodal composing. Understanding these four factors enriches our understanding of the disorienting phenomena experienced by those composing multimodal texts collaboratively. 56

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