Narrative is a “mimesis” of human action, as defined by Aristotle. Mimesis is achieved by means of discourse, the combination of expressive signs available in a medium. In graphic narratives or story-manga, discourse utilizes three primary elements: image, word, and panel, with various expressive techniques developed for each. The actual signs of discourse, however, serve only as a starting point. It is by utilizing imaginative supplementation that the reader is able to interpret events, receive impressions, understand temporal and spatial transitions, and grasp the overall structure of the narrative world, that is, the story. The cognitive process of the reader can be broken down into three hypothetical phases: micro-, meso- and macroscopic. This chapter provides an outline of each phase in order to demonstrate the distinctiveness of manga as a narrative medium in terms of its expressive means and the resulting narrative experience.

The most-cited progenitors of manga (and, in part, anime) are medieval picture scrolls (emaki), Hokusai Manga, and 18th-century graphic fiction called kibyōshi. This chapter revisits them from the perspective of modern story-manga. It analyzes textual and material affordances of a manga-typical reading experience, stretching from devices of visual storytelling to publication formats and participatory culture. The emphasis is on demonstrating that correlations of today’s manga with aesthetic traditions may be highly instructive depending on how they are performed, in particular, on which type of manga is compared to which art form from the past against which set of contemporary concerns. As part of this endeavor, the historical contingency of “manga” comes to the fore: as visual art based on line drawing, but also as visual narrative realized through sequenced images and facilitated by transdiegetic devices; as fiction but also non-fiction narratives and non-narrative manuals; as not necessarily “cinematic” but also “theatrical” graphic narratives; and as defined by textual properties but also (sub)cultural practices of use.

Chaney investigates the "changing same" of visual self-presentation in African American autobiography, history, biography, and fiction, paying attention to two forms: frontispieces and illustrations of the nineteenth-century ex-fugitive and comics from twenty-first-century African American artists and writers. The bridge between these two zones of history is not to be erected or traversed in the name of a naïve comparison, nor is it to be drawn from the coincidence of similarity arising from the fact that all the texts involved are partly visual. Rather, the gulf separating Frederick Douglass and Matt Johnson, for example, and their time periods is itself an assumption that the graphic works discussed in this chapter all seek to dismantle. Insofar as the traumatic Black subject is nearly always also a historical one in contemporary entertainments, African American graphic novels reclaim the past in the name of the present: through a style, voice, or look that is unavoidably "presentist" in its approach — since even a comic designed to resemble antebellum illustrations always does so in a manner that contrarily flaunts what is more contemporary than historical about the text.