Summary Of Nick Sousanis Unflattening

Nick Sousanis’s comic Unflattening is a philosophical look at the importance of expanding perspectives beyond a fixed viewpoint. He made the unusual decision to present his dissertation in the form of a comic not only because the dual perspective of images and words coincides with his message, but also to show the potential for the application of comics beyond society’s preconceived ideas of the form. Comics offers a unique combination of the verbal and the visual that can be applied to both narrative and scholarly uses.
Sousanis chooses to present his dissertation as a comic because the affordances of the medium allow him to present the material in a unique way that supports his thesis. Sousanis advocates viewing ideas and approaching problems from as many different perspectives as
He suggests that comics are the ideal form for showing multiple aspects of an idea and offer “a means to capture and convey our thoughts in all their tangled complexity” (Sousanis 67). The medium of comics provide a way to combine both images and text in a way that fulfills Sousanis’s goal of presenting ideas from different perspectives. Words and images can express the same idea in different ways and “[t]he complex nature of this combination allows for much flexibility in the manipulation of meaning” (McAllister 3). Being able to express ideas in more than one way gives an author more control over the reader’s interpretation of their work. A textual description can leave much left to the reader’s imagination, while images provide a concrete idea of the author’s own perception of his or her subject. Depending on the purpose of the work, the author can utilize theses different characteristics to their advantage. As Scott