On Quilted Comics and the Representation of the Tactile

From Scott McCloud’s writings on the Bayeux Tapestry to the common usage of the sewist’s lexicon in comics criticism and theorizing, like embroidering and braiding (cf. Groensteen), the comic studies field has often looked to the technical language of the textile forms to define itself. While approaches at the intersection of textile art and sequential storytelling are still scattered, they nonetheless hold the promise of an intermedial posture able to expand comics' consideration into the fields of folklore and womanhood, offering alternative timelines to their respective practices.

In the 2000s, Michael P. Graves researched traditional Quaker tapestry using McCloud’s approach to closure and page layouts. In 2003, Craig Thompson used the motif in his seminal work, Blankets, where he told his coming-of-age story through the form of a drawn quilt. More recently, Kate Evans produced the Austen Tapestry project, a real-life ten-metre-long embroidery that was scanned and used as the basis of her book Patchwork, a graphic biography of Jane Austen (2025).

Looking beyond those contemporary reinterpretations of textile works by comics scholars and artists, this paper will propose a closer study of 19th century figurative quilts. Harriet Powers’s Bible Quilt (1885-1886) and Pictorial Quilt II (1895–1898) will be used to reflect on the visual entanglements between 19th century quilts and comics, through their use of narration, both textual and visual. Drawing from this corpus, and in parallel to my research-creation practice, I will argue that comics can indeed engage with the textile medium of quilting and make use of its constraints to play with structure, layer forms, and balance the figurative and the abstract in a deterritorialized context. By doing this survey of works that weave together comics and quilting, I also wish to reflect on the ontological paradox of representing storied and striated textile textures within the smoothed materiality of book printing, confronting the idea of an auratic original with a mass-produced copy. Aesthetically, I am also interested in how comics create time through the structure of panels, while quilts create visible and invisible storytelling through the layering of many complex structures, starting with the fabric, then the blocks, all the way through the piercing patterns of the quilting thread.