Our inner worlds—memories, dreams, anxieties, dissociations—are rarely linear or easily explained. They emerge in flashes, loops, distortions, and silences. In comics, these psychological dimensions are not just described in text, but often rendered visually: through fractured panels, symbolic repetition, disorienting compositions, and surreal shifts in form. This unique interplay of image and sequence allows comics to portray mental and emotional experiences in ways that transcend conventional storytelling.

This thesis explores how comics represent psychological states—such as trauma, memory, obsession, disconnection, or altered perception—through their visual language. It moves beyond plot or character analysis to examine how the medium’s formal elements (layout, rhythm, spatial organization, and symbolism) construct subjective realities. In doing so, it asks: How can comics make the invisible visible? What does anxiety look like on a page? How does grief distort space, or obsession shape rhythm?

Drawing from works like Uzumaki, The Flowers of Evil, Opus, and Asterios Polyp, this research investigates how comics use visual strategies to narrate the mind, not just what a character feels, but how that feeling is structured and sequenced visually. These works do not just show emotion; they stage psychological experience through design.

The study is practice-based and includes the creation of an original comic that applies the findings in a creative context. This allows theory and practice to inform one another, testing how psychological nuance can be conveyed not through dialogue, but through the shape of a page, the silence of a panel, or the recursion of an image.

In a world where mental health is often discussed but rarely visualized meaningfully, comics offer a powerful medium to explore the inner self. This thesis positions comics as not only narrative tools but as architectures of perception, where psychology is not described, but drawn.