How to Cite Comic Books

Here are draft instructions for creating MLA citations for comic books, without having the MLA handbook in front of me. To be revises and expanded to include Chicago/Turabian citations. 

 

For the works cited:

 

• Basic MLA guidelines
• Suggested expansion - very helpful discussion.  

 

Things get tricky for the inline citations. You've got a number of relevant data points:

 

• For collected editions, volume number
• For the individual issues volume number (different from collection volume) and issue number
• In either case, page number and panel number (determined either by counting left-right up-down or by row-number+column-letter. 

 

The MLA rule that you're referring to for "no page number" applies, I think, to texts which have no pages, e.g., electronic sources. What you're looking at has unnumbered pages, and I would just count in from the first comics page (earlier pages could be given lowercase-roman numbers). 

 

I think it is up to you whether you want to cite according to the collection or according to the original issue numbers. If you're citing from the collection, you can just do something like (Whedon, "Gifted" 119) (supposing you only need page and not panel number). If you are instead doing it by issue, you might do something like (Whedon 3:12.3B). 

 

For much more detailed discussion:

 

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~esrabkin/GNCitationStyle.htm