Buildings used to tell us stories. Before mass printing or text materials were common, many structures possessed visual components that worked sequentially to convey information and stories for a community of people. In this regard, those structures share a basic principle with how comic art works, as Scott McCloud suggests: “Comics are juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

My thesis project seeks to explore the use of space as an integral narrative component in comics. By creating a sequential narrative space that ties into a traditional comic narrative, I am exploring the possibilities of how a spatial narrative can be read and how form and content affects and support each other in the process of interpreting it. The initial research for this thesis combines and compares methods of spatial way-finding and narrative way-finding alike, and makes use of the similarities between physical elements of structures and comics.

One of the strengths of the comic medium is that it requires active participation in the reader to flip the pages to further the narrative at a pace of their own making, much like how one would traverse and find their way through structures and spaces. By involving readers in a space within which they can read and experience, their involvement may have the potential to become more tactile, opening doors for various other ways of interpreting and enjoying the narrative.