Pause, Linger, Imagine

Selecting five comics for Shenandoah and thinking about how comics hold time.

Howdy, friend.

Last year, I was selected as the first-ever Comics Editorial Fellow for the literary magazine Shenandoah, where I chose five comics from countless submissions. I didn’t go in with a specific plan for what I was looking for; I just knew I wanted to see pieces that pushed the boundary of how text, image, panel, and space talk to each other.

Turns out that making “just five” selections from that many incredible pieces was—shocker!—very difficult.

I found myself gravitating toward pieces that understood that some of the most powerful storytelling happens not in the panels themselves, but in the spaces between them.

That’s what I ended up writing about in my introduction to the issue, which went live this week.

Drawing on Scott McCloud’s idea of diegetic space—the world of the story itself, including the invisible gaps between panels that the reader actively constructs—I argue that one of the great strengths of comics is their ability to control movement through time.

"Controlling and restricting movement, guiding the reader to linger, is one of our most powerful tools."

That in-between space is where the magic really happens. For example, I made this two-panel cat comic for my intro.

Did the cat knock the glass over, or are we only seeing its reaction to something off-page?

As I write in my introduction:

"Both possibilities exist within the comic's diegetic space and that ambiguity, the quiet moment where the reader fills in what happened, is where comics truly come alive."

I won't spoil them here, but I hope you'll spend some time with the comics selected for this issue. They are all doing their own utterly unique thing with the form, and I'm delighted to have done my small part in bringing them together.

• “Star Projector” by Marnie Galloway

• “Overdub” by Andrew Kozlowski

• “Hold Your Breath” by Jennifer Murvin

• “Birds in the dark” by August Park

• “Flower Memory” by Sarah Shaw

If you’d like to read my musings on these selections, you can read my full introduction here: https://www.shenandoahliterary.org/volume-75-number-2/pause-linger-imagine-comics-as-time-and-space/

Read the full Spring 2026 issue of Shenandoah here: https://www.shenandoahliterary.org/volume-75-number-2/#guest-edited-comics

I’m grateful to have been part of this issue. I live for comics, and especially for getting them in front of people who might not yet know how powerful they can be. I hope these pieces move you the way they moved me. ♡

– RJR