Definitions should pin an object down, put a finis around it.

Marshall McLuhan saw in this moment comics’ participatory power—the reader is forced to interact with the comic more consciously than with a traditional text.

visual and verbal modes have become inextricable

Meaning is created through connections.

I stress these differences not to disparage Sousanis’s book, which is innovative, fascinating, and much more of a “pure” comic than my own.

In his recent comic monograph Unflattening, Nick Sousanis employs the metaphor of parallax vision to discuss the relationship between image and text in comics (31)

lifeline for those uncomfortably adrift.

Of course, this can leave readers with the feeling of being thrown in the deep end (or even the ocean, to continue Deleuze's example).

After a bit of testing, I realized that what readers wanted wasn't more organization, but more of a feeling of organization. This difference is subtle but important.

Based on comments from my reviewers, it was clear that the initial draft of this book felt disorganized. In my own mind it was actually a little too organized (especially for something with rhiz- in the title)

Even the ultimate antidogmatic image, the rhizome, can become dogmatic.

“Perhaps we must say that all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space.” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 486)

We assess only those features that we really don’t care about: mechanics, structure, how much it looks like the platonic ideal of an essay in my head.

the teacher will be hard-pressed to form rigid evaluative guidelines for assignments that experiment, whose very goal it is to break out of academic prose.

we sanitize them and make them just more academic discourse.*

Choosing a medium is a rhetorical decision, and one Shipka advises her students to make carefully.

While many are content to see multimodal composition as a new phenomenon, Shipka exposes its secret history, with motivations and questions lurking in Quintilian and a robust literature arising in the 1970s and 80s coming out of calls for more expressive writing.

Yancey reminds us that the move toward new media in composition does not mean a move away from the written word. Digital and print overlap. They depend on each other and remediate each other.

Text may call to mind words only, but I am indicating the woven nature of this thing, distinct modes overlapping in a unique composition but also the various other texts (discursive and nondiscursive) to which this thing responds.

Neil Gaiman