Comics, Jason Helms argues, are post-critical, reflexive, and figural, in that they combine image/text and visual/verbal elements in ways that illuminate a third, nonsymbolic rhetoric more appropriate for digital and heterotopic spaces. Blurring the line between form and content, Rhizcomics: Rhetoric, Technology, and New Media Composition offers readers a unique opportunity to engage in a rhizomatic alt-scholarship, in which the medium is the message. Rhizcomics manifests this ambitious concept by bringing together a variety of disciplinary traditions, from familiar continental theorists to ancient, modern, and postmodern rhetoricians, to comics and contemporary composition theorists. Helms calls for a decentering of typical binaries to form a rhizomatic approach to visual and multimedia rhetorics and uses comics as the main exemplar for the type of decentered writing for which he advocates.

Jason Helms is Associate Professor of English at Texas Christian University.