Dr John Miers
Faculties, deparments and locations
- Kingston School of Art
- Department of Illustration Animation
- School of Design
Senior Lecturer in Illustration and Critical and Historical Studies
- Email:
- j.miers@kingston.ac.uk
About
I am a cartoonist, illustrator, teacher and researcher. My primary interest is in narrative illustration, particularly sequential forms such as comics. My comics work is represented in Tate Publishing's survey of the artform Comics Art, and I have been invited to present it at events across the UK and in Amsterdam and Chicago. My wider practice spans a variety of contexts including branding and promotional design and illustration in the editorial and publishing sectors, including work for The Guardian, Reader's Digest, The Idler, Foyles, Paragraph Publishing and Centaur Media.
My research has been published in British and European peer-reviewed journals and volumes. I am an active member of the comics studies community. I sit on the organising committee of the Transitions symposium (Birkbeck, University of London) and am a founder member of the UAL Comics Research Hub (CorH!).
In addition to my primary role as senior lecturer in illustration at KSA, I am a visiting lecturer at University of the Arts London and the Royal College of Art, and external examiner for BA Cartoon and Comic Art at Staffordshire University and BA Comics and Graphic Novels at Teesside University
With Maggie Gray and Nick White, I co-run the Kingston School of Art Comic Club.
Qualifications
- 2011-2018: PhD Graphic Communication, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
- 2003-4: Postgraduate Diploma Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London
- 1997-2001: BA Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London
Domains
Qualifications
- Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, November 2020
- Best Postgraduate Teacher, Union of Kingston Students Academic Impact Awards 2020
- 2003-4: Certificate in post-compulsory education, University of Westminster
Courses taught
My approach to the creation and analysis of graphic communication is guided by my interest is how drawing style creates narrative meanings by guiding audiences' expectations regarding genre, mood and character. I explored this from a theoretical perspective in my PhD (Visual Metaphor and Drawn Narratives, Central Saint Martins, 2017), which developed a synthesis between philosophical understandings of depiction and visual metaphor.
More recently I have applied this approach in the field of Graphic Medicine: my Researcher in the Archives residency at London College of Communication resulted in the production of an autobiographical comic book in which I adopted the styles of other artists in order to express and process aspects of living with multiple sclerosis. This publication is now held in the Wellcome Collection, the UK's leading institution exploring the connections between art and health, and was named as "Best One-Shot" in the 2020 Broken Frontier awards. I have continued to publish new autobiographical comics drawing on the archival research conducted during the residency, as well as broadening the scope of this work in comics that explore the contribution graphic medicine can make to disability studies and public health discourse.
I am a passionate advocate of creative practice as a research method and form of dissemination; my most recent peer-reviewed articles have been in comics form, and my most recent written outputs include original drawings created as demonstrations of their theoretical arguments.
I welcome applications for PhD or MA by Research study in comics studies, metaphor studies, illustration history, practice and theory, and the intersection of healthcare with visual arts and design.
Publications
Triangulation (Being the record of a discussion of comics theory conducted on 2nd May 2018, transcribed into words and then comics in the period since.)
Miers, John, Chessum, Thierry and Davies, Paul F., 2022, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (13), 1, pp 110-127
Conflict or Compromise? An imagined conversation with John Hicklenton and Lindsay Cooper about living with multiple sclerosis
Miers, John, 2021, Biography (44), pp 25-38
Making the invisible visible : hyperlinked webcomics as alternative points of entry to the digitised Gertrude Bell Archive
Wysocki, Lydia, Jackson, Mark, Miers, John, Webster, Jane and Coxon, Brittany, 2019, International Journal of Heritage Studies
Depiction and demarcation in comics : towards an account of the medium as a drawing practice
Miers, John, 2015, Studies in Comics (6), 1, pp 145-156
Conflict or Compromise? An imagined conversation with John Hicklenton and Lindsay Cooper about living with multiple sclerosis
Miers, John (2022). In: La Cour, Erin, (eds.) and Poletti, Anna, (eds.), Graphic Medicine. Honolulu, U.S.: University of Hawaii Press
Media
Miers, John (2022). In: La Cour, Erin, (eds.), Grennan, Simon, (eds.) and Spanjers, Rik, (eds.), Key terms in comics studies. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 190-191
Mediation
Miers, John (2022). In: La Cour, Erin, (eds.), Grennan, Simon, (eds.) and Spanjers, Rik, (eds.), Key terms in comics studies. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 192-192
Metaphor
Miers, John (2022). In: La Cour, Erin, (eds.), Grennan, Simon, (eds.) and Spanjers, Rik, (eds.), Key terms in comics studies. Cham. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 196-197
Psychologies of perception : stories of depiction
Miers, John (2022). In: Gray, Maggie, (eds.) and Horton, Ian, (eds.), Seeing comics through art history : alternative approaches to the form. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 75-95
Representation
Miers, John (2022). In: La Cour, Erin, (eds.), Grennan, Simon, (eds.) and Spanjers, Rik, (eds.), Key terms in comics studies. Cham. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 274-275
Stylistic analysis, or “sweating the small stuff”
Harrington, Bill, Rumeu, Jaume, Round, Julia, D'Arcy, Geraint, Miers, John, Horton, Ian and Pursall, Dona (2021). In: ., ., (ed.), Misty Presents : the Jaume Rumeu Collection. Oxford, U.K.: Rebellion, pp 120-122
Picturing national and personal acts of violence : modes of depiction in Barefoot Gen
Miers, John (2019). In: Mickwitz, Nina, (eds.), Horton, Ian, (eds.) and Hague, Ian, (eds.), Representing Acts of Violence in Comics. Abingdon, U.K. and New York, U.S.: Routledge, pp 19-34
Bacon and the cartoonist : the emergence of the figure through two opposing diagrams
Miers, John (2017). In: de Assis, Paulo, (eds.) and Giudici, Paolo, (eds.), The dark precursor : Deleuze and artistic research. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, pp 375-385
Dispossession: time, motion and depictive regimes
Miers, John and Grennan, Simon (2015). In: Grennan, Simon, (eds.) and Grove, Lawrence, (eds.), Transforming Anthony Trollope. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, pp 33-54
Collaborating with ‘Experts by Experience’ : stroke survivors as co- teachers for postgraduate students in art and design
Jakob, Anke, Miers, John, Kulnik, Stefan Tino, Mohapatra, Sushmita, Addo, Mercy, Hamer, Victoria and Harrap, Duncan(2024). In: Design 4 Health 2024 Internatinal Conference, 25-27 June 2024 :Sheffield, UK
Exploring AltNarrative in HCI imagery and comics
Lewis, Makayla, Sturdee, Miriam, Miers, John, Davis, Josh Urban and Hoang, Thuong(2022). In: CHI 2022: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 30 Apr - 05 May 2022 :New Orleans, U.S.
The state of the (CHI)Art
Sturdee, Miriam, Lewis, Makayla, Gamboa, Mafalda, Hoang, Thuong N., Miers, John, Šmorgun, Ilja, Jain, Pranjal, Strohmayer, Angelika, Alaoui, Sarah Fdili and Wodtke, Christina R.(2022). In: CHI 2022: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 30 Apr - 05 May 2022 :New Orleans, U.S.
Issues of inclusion when archiving and displaying mini-comics from the Les Coleman Collection
Horton, Ian and Miers, John(2021). In: Bandes dessinées hors-champs = Comics on the Outside, 2 - 4 Jun 2021 :Université libre de Bruxelles (held online)
If epilepsy is a dragon, multiple sclerosis is a…
Miers, John(2018). In: Drawing Yourself In and Out of It : The 2nd International Amsterdam Comics Conference, 15 - 17 Nov 2018 :Amsterdam, The Netherlands