Queer Temporality and Chronotopia in Comics

Queer Temporality and Chronotopia in Comics examines how queerness reshapes comics time and how heteronormative linearity conditions narrative design. Bringing queer theory into dialogue with comics studies, it charts the possibilities of non-linear chronology for storytelling.

Using a multimodal toolbox, it investigates temporality through Past, Future, and Present, tracing chronotopic relations across panels and pages within the hyperframe. Through close readings of works by Alison Bechdel, Tillie Walden, and the collaborative worlds of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, alongside three extended case studies of Grant Morrison, it shows how comics queer time to produce affect, invite co-production of meaning, and simulate empathy. It sets out practical methods for analysing pacing, recurrence, and the elasticities of page, frame, and gutter, and explores how queer futurity unsettles sequential norms.

This book is ideal for students and researchers of LGBTQ+ comics across Gender, Literature, Sociology, Media, and Comics Studies. It also serves scholars of narratology and visual culture, and advanced undergraduates seeking tools to analyse time in sequential art.