It was while I was bent over my drawing desk, my face screwed up in an expression of profound grief, that my reading of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess changed.Footnote ¹ In this trial run for a proposed MA thesis project that would experiment with combining cartooning with academic research, I was several pages into an adaptation of the passage in which Chaucer’s dreamer retells the tragic narrative of Ceyx and Alcyone. While repeatedly drawing pictures of Alcyone’s suffering over the loss of her husband, I was surprised to find myself vicariously suffering as I made the same agonized facial expressions that I was drawing. (Figure 1)

Figure 1.

Two panels from the parallel comics adaptation of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone as written by Ovid, Gower, and Chaucer. Two panels from the parallel comics adaptation of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone as written by Ovid, Gower, and Chaucer.

Figure 1. Long description

The comic consists of two hand-drawn panels.

Left Panel:

* Top text: he tok his leve, and forth he seileth wepende, and sche hirself beweileth...

* Center: A woman with long dark hair and a crown sits on a bench, her head in her hands in a gesture of grief. To her right, an arched window shows a view of a dark cloud over a sea with waves.

* Bottom text: sche herde no tydinge

Right Panel:

* Top text: sche began in many wise, and to JUNO hire sacrifise...

* Center: The woman is now outdoors, kneeling on the ground with her hands clasped in prayer. To her right is a stone altar with a fire burning on top. Smoke from the altar rises toward a large cloud in the upper right corner. On the cloud, two figures look down; one holds a spear, representing the goddess JUNO.

* Bottom text: JUNO the goddesse hire herde

Social psychology might describe this experience through the “facial feedback hypothesis,” which suggests that our facial expressions do not just communicate our emotions to others; they also help to shape the emotions that we experience.Footnote ² Not only can our faces show how we feel, but how we feel can be influenced by the faces we make. Though the veracity of this hypothesis remains a debate amongst social psychologists, in my anecdotal experience, it rings true. Through the act of drawing, the words on the page took on an immediacy and relevance that hours of engrossed (if static) reading had not unlocked for me. Just as the dreamer appears incapable of reading the story of Alcyone “correctly” in my early readings of The Book of the Duchess, I, too, failed to adequately comprehend the grief (and the difficulties involved when attempting to communicate it to one who is not experiencing it) that form the core of the story. As the act of drawing brought me back to the page in a new, if emotionally uncomfortable, way, this suffering became palpable for me and, in turn, deepened my reading of the text.Footnote ³ This instance of dawning clarity brought on by creative practice is not a single occurrence, but one of many that have shaped how I think about my research and the approaches I consider when sharing it.

In this essay, I argue that the integration of my creative work, specifically making comics, into my academic practice has allowed me to deepen my readings, to communicate with diverse audiences, and to model an approach that encourages others to invite their own creative practices into conversation with their scholarship. These results are facilitated in part by the medium of comics itself, which functions in a particular way that sets it apart from other media thanks to the dual stories each comic contains: the story being told and the story of the making of the story being told.Footnote ⁴ This second story encapsulates the “physically demanding and time-consuming work of composing, penciling, erasing, inking, coloring, lettering on one hand; and the physical constraints of a narrative form that demands greater use of ellipses and compressions than a novel or film to tell even the most basic stories.”Footnote ⁵ In other words, the repetition built into the cartooning process as well as the condensation of information required by the form both place specific demands on the practitioner which necessarily shape the story being told through their impact on the teller, two demands which I consider strengths of this approach.Footnote ⁶ With this understanding in mind, I begin by outlining the progression of my academic cartooning practice as it has evolved, after which I turn to a broader exploration of what I think this work might make possible for myself and for other researchers interested in varied forms of creative-criticism. As I hope to show, the use of artistic media in scholarly work has the potential to open up new ways to engage with the medieval past even as it addresses contemporary conversations about creativity, attention, and community.Footnote ⁷

If “all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference,” creative-critical practice calls us to actively attend to this instant, to respond and see where it leads, then later to return to this instant with our critical eye engaged as we reflect more deeply on the creative response we had.Footnote ⁸ This critical questioning might include consideration of the textual element that initially grabbed the practitioner’s attention, the decision-making process that led the practitioner down a specific path, and interrogation of how this instant of “intuitive preference” speaks to the practitioner’s reading/understanding as a whole. In this practice, one of the earliest instances of decision-making one must consider is that of medium: with what approaches and tools might I respond to this text?

In my work, the answer is nearly always “comics.” I have been a cartoonist longer than I have been a medievalist: I began making diary comics in 2013 as I worked through an extended bout of postpartum depression. From the outset, then, I made comics as a way to record my experience, engage with my emotions, and process matters both mundane (what did I have for lunch?) and weighty (how has motherhood reshaped my sense of self?). Though I have dabbled in short works of fiction, autobiographical work spoke more deeply to my creative mind. Like Philippe Lejeune, I believe that “[a] diary is not only a text: it is a behavior, a way of life, of which the text is a byproduct,” a description that resonates deeply with my own experience and practice.Footnote ⁹ The habit of keeping a visual diary shapes the operations of my thinking and my memory in unexpected ways. Committing a moment to the page, or intentionally choosing to omit one, turns out to have a lasting impact on the ways these same moments lived on (or did not) in my head.Footnote ¹⁰ (Figure 2)

Figure 2.

Two panels from my comics diary capturing my first classroom experience with Middle English. Two panels from my comics diary capturing my first classroom experience with Middle English.

When I returned to university in 2017 as a “mature” student, it seemed only natural that I should grapple with my new environment and new field of study (having studied psychology as a bachelors student) via this same skillset. As noted above, the process of making comics is built around progression through repetition, with my approach involving both analog and digital means to plan, sketch, draw, redraw, and polish my pages. I value this in-built repetition for the way it keeps my attention on the page for an extended period of time, immersing me more fully in the text I am creating and the texts I am reading. Different stages of this creative approach prompt me to revisit the work from an alternate angle, a process further supported by an understanding of comics as a language of icons. This understanding shifts the focus of the image to its communicative properties rather than only its representational properties, meaning I think differently when I am making comics than when I am only writing or only drawing.Footnote ¹¹ The hybridity of the medium requires me to make connections and communicate ideas in a specific way, and the images I create do not just illustrate the textual aspects of my work but also seek to provide additional information and further the narrative.

I soon discovered that, if comics were my creative medium of choice, adaptation was my favored approach. Because Chaucer himself so often worked as an adapter of texts, it felt very organic to engage with his work via the theory and process of adaptation, embracing these texts as “incomplete, open, and subject to change, appropriation, and interpretation,” as described by Marion Turner.Footnote ¹² My adaptation of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone as told by Ovid, Chaucer, and John Gower (mentioned above) makes concrete the act of comparative reading by presenting the stories in parallel across pages cut into three horizontal sections, each one dedicated to a specific author. This format allows the reader to flip between retellings in order to compare and contrast, for example, how each writer dealt with the storm: how much narrative space each allowed this section; where each located it in their version; and how these decisions change the story being told. In bringing these differences to the forefront, this format also sought to highlight the adaptational decision-making behind each act of retelling. (Figure 3)

Figure 3.

Illustration of parallel comic adaptation showing three-tier format of pages, which was created to allow readers to manipulate the book in a variety of ways in their reading.

Figure 3. Long description

The illustration depicts an open book with pages fanned out, creating a sense of depth.

On the top-left page, text includes ‘A myth was happened’ and ‘Stop me’. Below it, a panel shows a turbulent sea with the text ‘swich a tempest that brak hir mast’.

The central foreground page features a character sitting at a desk reading, with a speech bubble containing ‘I force the more to read and eke to herke’. To the right, a character in a dark cloak stands before an altar.

The top-right page contains panels with characters in conversation. One speech bubble asks ‘can you now abandon your wife without some qualm or misgiving?’. Another panel shows a figure in a landscape with the text ‘chilled to the bone, she immediately turned as pale as the wood of a boxtree’.

The bottom-left section shows a panel with a character in bed and a diagram with arrows pointing to various elements, labeled with text like ‘withinne his chambre if I schal touche’ and ‘thus can Y R I S into this hold’.

The bottom-right page features a character in a long dark robe. The text reads ‘the firste of hem was M O R P H E U S the whos nature is for to take the figure of what persone that him liketh’.

The drawing style is expressive and sketchy, utilizing high-contrast black and white tones.

My next adaptation was Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” from the Canterbury Tales, told in comic form as part of my master’s thesis.Footnote ¹³ Building on what I had learned from my previous experimentation, I approached this adaptation with an eye to the beginner’s experience of reading Middle English as well as a desire to incorporate elements of my research on contemporary adaptations of this tale. I hypothesized that adapting a medieval text as a comic might enhance the readability of Middle English for inexperienced readers, with the images taking on the role of a visual gloss. The narrative itself was shaped by my observation that the decisions made by several contemporary adapters in condensing the text inadvertently removed elements that Chaucer himself had added to his source material, which led me to make these Chaucerian additions the focal point of my adaptation. Among these elements, I was particularly interested in highlighting the role played by the tale teller in the telling of the story and in showcasing in greater detail the contents of the debate about dreams, which is often heavily compressed by later adapters. By highlighting Chaucer’s moments of invention, treating images as a form of visual glossing, and using color to indicate different layers of the tale for greater clarity, I designed my adaptation to offer a closer retelling that would be accessible to a non-expert reader. This comic formed the backbone of my practice-based thesis alongside my research and theorization on the adaptational process.Footnote ¹⁴ (Figure 4)

Figure 4.

Two panels from my comics adaptation of Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale.”

Though I knew my doctoral dissertation would require a more traditional scholarly approach, I remained interested in exploring my research through comics.Footnote ¹⁵ I decided to combine my interest in autobiographical work with the research I was completing and began a process memoir titled Repainting the Lion, which put my comics avatar directly in conversation with a cartoon Wife of Bath. Taking further inspiration from Chaucer, this Wife had quite a bit to say about her literary afterlife, which I, the hapless narrator, needed to be talked through even as I struggled to navigate the process of completing my doctoral studies. In this work, I continued my earlier experimentation with aesthetic choices designed to enhance clarity, in this case using color to indicate the era of the different adaptations featuring the Wife of Bath from the Middle Ages through the early 21^st century with which I was working. (Figure 5)

Figure 5.

Two panels from my process memoir Repainting the Lion.

Figure 5. Long description

Panel 1: A character with light hair and a dark shirt sits at a desk with an open book. They ask, ‘so what changed?’. Two small figures stand on the desk, and a thought bubble to the right contains abstract scribbles.

Panel 2: The same character is shown in the bottom left corner, looking upward. To their right are two stacked inset illustrations and two speech bubbles.

* Top inset: A figure in a red dress points to a small portrait of a bearded man in a crown.

* Bottom inset: Two characters appear to be in a heated discussion or argument.

* Top speech bubble (orange): ‘for one thing, in the Prologue, i am talking about him... “glossing” him even’. The word ‘about’ is underlined.

* Bottom speech bubble (green): ‘in the ballad “i” am talking directly to him.’

While numerous writers from the Middle Ages through the modern era might have found their souls “congenial” to Chaucer himself, this type of a response was not what drew me into illustrated conversation with the fictional Wife of Bath.Footnote ¹⁶ Instead, I saw in this character shades of the friend I might have been forbidden from interacting with in youth—the loud voice at the back of the room, disruptive in a way both appealing and appalling; the girl in the lunchroom who has no need to chase popularity and, consequently, is popular. I am not loud or brash or brave; I view myself as risk-avoidant, someone who fears conflict. By designing a comic that combined autobiographical elements with fictitious ones to reflect on my doctoral process through conversation with my version of the Wife of Bath (functioning as a version of my shadow self), I found space to experiment with a voice that I could never naturally inhabit.Footnote ¹⁷

Through this project, as I sought to share the works I was encountering through the pages of a comic, I was challenged by the finite dimensions of the page, by an awareness of the fleeting nature of reader attention on social media (where the comic was shared), and by my own artistic skillset and limitations. Sitting at my desk, I would ponder unanticipated questions, such as “how might one summarize the whole plot of a broadside ballad, a form generally meant to be experienced aloud, as a single image on a static page?” Though this plot was only tangentially important to the thought I wanted to share (“the issue is not the Wife’s sinful nature, it’s her volume”), I suspected most curious readers would still want a basic understanding of what this text actually said. In answer to this question, I settled on the image of a childhood game board with a start point and a goal toward which one might progress, a format that allowed me to focus on the repetition of the Wife’s and highlight the Wife’s verbal (mis)behavior through descriptive phrases in each board game space.Footnote ¹⁸ This page serves as just a single example of the kinds of critical thinking that have been inspired by integrating comics creation in my research and its communication. (Figure 6)

Figure 6.

Illustration from Repainting the Lion exploring an early ballad featuring Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.

Figure 6. Long description

A black and white ink drawing of a board game.

* Top Section: The title reads let’s play The Wanton Wife Wants In! At the top left is an ornate gate labeled START with a NO sign. At the top right is a cut-out character of a woman in a wide-brimmed hat and wide dress with a dotted line labeled CUT DOTTED LINE. Next to her is a rectangular stand labeled STAND B with instructions to CUT and FOLD.

* Left Section: A list of RULES states: You need a six-sided die. 1. Place your Wife at the START. 2. For each turn, move ahead a single space then roll the die. If you roll any number from 1-6, congrats - you ‘won’ your chat with that Authority. Any other roll and the Authority wins. Repeat 12 times. Hey! You got into Heaven!

* Game Path: A winding S-shaped path connects the START gate to the FINISH gate. The 12 spaces contain the following text in order:

1. insult Adam

2. cajole Jacob

3. harass Lot

4. cut off Judith

5. sneer at David

6. scoff at Solomon

7. still scolding Solomon

8. talk to Jonas

9. berate Thomas

10. speak gently with Mary Magdalene

11. accuse Paul

12. snap at Peter

* Final Space and Finish: The final space before the end is labeled argue with Christ?! and shows a small silhouette of a figure. The path ends at an open ornate gate labeled FINISH with a welcome! mat and three joyful figures inside.

Like academia, making comics involves specific challenges, skill sets, and audiences. It also brings with it a rich, vibrant, and supportive community of fellow practitioners bonded by a shared understanding of these qualities. In addition to bringing my creative work and my scholarly work into metaphorical conversation, I have also dedicated myself to bringing these two communities of practitioners into literal conversation through public engagement, event design, and collaborative projects. I have done so because, like my collaborator Christopher Fletcher, I believe that “it’s imperative that scholars make cultivating more diverse communities of “medievalists”—that is, communities that accurately and responsibly use medieval culture for purposes beyond producing scholarship or teaching in a classroom—a central task of the field.”Footnote ¹⁹

Since 2025, one way I have been developing new opportunities for such collaborations is in the form of academic events such as the “Cartooning the Medieval” symposium co-organized with Fletcher and the inauguration of the “Newberry Medieval Minicomic Prize” prize. I am also coordinating another community-crossing experimental project: a short anthology of comics based on medieval sources created by paired scholar-cartoonist teams and slated for release in late 2027. One thing that this creative-critical experimentation has taught me is that Chaucer and his work are more than just my field of research; they are also the tool, the context, the case study I call upon as I seek to address both research questions and contemporary concerns. The creation of these exploratory collaborations responds, in part, to the particular challenges and anxieties surfacing in my communities, both creative and scholarly, and to the despair, fragmentation, and disconnection fueled by increasing political instability around the world as well as global challenges such as the climate crisis.

As I ponder these anxieties and concerns, it would be facile to say that “comics” and creative response more broadly is the panacea, though this likely is how I would respond were we sitting across from each other over a coffee. Over the past several years, reading and thinking about Chaucer has given me a place to go and a way to reflect when the everyday world feels overwhelming. Most mornings I head to a café, my coffee arrives, and I crack open whatever book or article I am currently reading and lose myself in this text. The care with which these texts (both medieval poetry and scholarly argument) are crafted draws me in and soothes my mind. This comfort, coherence, and calm are exactly what my first forays into creating comics brought me: a paradoxical sense of subjective closeness and objective distance coexisting on the page. A primary value of creative-critical practice that remains under-addressed is the way that working as a creative reminds us that the authors whose work we consider were also creatives and artists. Creative-critical experimentation grounds us in this fact and forces us to contend with the more unknowable aspects of the creative process, a process that is always personal.

Responding creatively to a medieval text reminds us anew that each text is the result of a creative process inflected by a particular lived experience, filtered through memories and sensations that we can never know, to create something new, something moving, something that speaks. By making comics in which I visually portray myself in conversation with the characters and ideas into which I have come into contact in my reading, I translate these experiences for a wider audience even as I dig deeper into them for my own understanding.Footnote ²⁰ This practice continues to prompt me to make new connections, to ask new questions, and to ask them differently, which has made my reading and writing richer and stranger in ways I could not have imagined. In a world in which we see a growing reliance on digital tools that operate by predicting the next statistically expected word, phrase, sentence, or idea, strangeness and richness remain qualities worth seeking. Just as comics present a dual narrative of story and teller, bringing creative practice into conversation with scholarly work offers a mode in which the teller can become part of the story and make clear the profoundly human nature of the work we set out to do. (Figure 7)

Figure 7.

Panels from my comics diary.

Figure 7. Long description

The comic consists of four panels.

Panel 1 (top-left): A character with wide eyes and a grin stands next to a chair. To the left, the word LEAP is written vertically in red. To the right, a red arrow points upward, indicating the character is jumping.

Panel 2 (top-center): The character is in mid-air, hands reaching toward the edge of a desk. Below the desk, another person is seen falling backward out of a chair in surprise.

Panel 3 (top-right): The character lands on the desk in a crouched, predatory position. The word POUNCE is written in red across the bottom of the panel.

Panel 4 (bottom): A wide panel showing the character crouched on the desk, looking at two people on the left who appear startled. A blue speech bubble from the leaping character reads, You were talking about Chaucer?? On the far right, another person sits at a desk looking confused.