Contract Comics and the Visualization, Audio-Visualization, and Multisensorization of Law

Abstract

Contract comics are relatively new on the legal horizon. They have attracted attention from various disciplines and from legal practice. Their novelty and growing significance open up numerous questions: biographical, terminological, classificatory, methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary. They also raise questions about technology and media, codes and communication, and the senses. My findings are threefold: first, contract comics implicitly challenge the predominantly text-only approach to contract law. As such, they need to be understood and anchored in a broader legal discourse, one that extends to and draws on established basic legal disciplines (eg, legal iconography, legal theory, legal semiotics, law and the humanities) and on emerging ones (eg, multisensory law and its branches visual law and audio-visual law (working terms)). Second, contract comics can be associated with other visual, audio-visual, and multisensory legal phenomena. Third, contract comics, indispensable to non-verbocentric communication, also provide an excellent example of representing and communicating non-contractual legal contents.

Keywords: contract comics, visual law, audiovisual law, multisensory law