R. Kikuo Johnson's Kaua'i-based adolescent drama "The Night Fisher." Art Spiegelman's Holocaust memoir "Maus: A Survivor's Tale." Frank Miller's seminal "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns." Lynda Barry's autobiographical "One! Hundred! Demons!" Katsuhiro Otomo's cyberpunk classic "Akira."

These titles are all examples of a form of expression generally labeled as "comics" or "graphic novels." They vary widely in style, content and target audience, and represent a fluid jumble of histories, cultures and consumer demographics. However, they have one thing in common: powerful storytelling delivered through a marriage of text, image and time. It is a wholly unique approach to visual communication that has and continues to inform, absorb and bridge all traditions of human expression. This is the art of sequencing images, and comics author-theorist Scott McCloud will stop at the Doris Duke Theatre on Tuesday to talk about the depth, vitality and experimental force of comics. It's part of his "The Making Comics 50 States Tour" that he's been on with his family since September 2006 to celebrate the release of his book "Making Comics" from HarperCollins.

Some don't need to be convinced that comics are art — for them, Jack Kirby and Osamu Tezuka are on par with any Renaissance master. For others, comics are "low" culture, immature in form and content. It really depends on what societal forces one believes things should be evaluated against: the enshrined standards of institutions and canons vs. the chaotic flow of common peoples' lives. If these two extremes are imagined as two panels in a comic strip, then McCloud provides "closure," or the invisible information that links them as a sequence.

McCloud will demonstrate this closure in a multimedia format of several hundred rapidly delivered slides accompanied by his deeply informed and highly accessible presentation style.

McCloud, who lives in California, has been writing and drawing comics since 1984, but it was his pioneering interest in exploring their history and mechanics through the medium itself that gained him recognition and widely acknowledged respect as an artist and a theorist.

He packed nine years of research into his 215-page 1993 comic book "Understanding Comics" (Harper Paperbacks). The book not only serves as a text of visual history, but also explores the common structures and mechanics of sequential art in general.

For McCloud, visualizations of the stations of the cross, Mayan hieroglyphics, the work of Max Ernst, and airplane evacuation instructions are all related historically and functionally.

Our desire/aversion to see what happens in the last frame of our favorite comic strip is a kind of ritual. But these are not merely visual narratives where the "punch line" is about sacrifice, dynastic history, surrealism or catastrophe. McCloud is more concerned with how sequential art generates a participatory energy with the viewer. These comics activate and are activated by our actual experience with, for example, the unlikely event of a water landing. Through McCloud we understand that we literally put a part of ourselves into all comics in a way that other mediums don't allow for. This is why we love them and why he believes that the form will not die out. And yet their visual vocabulary and grammar is taken for granted — McCloud calls it the "invisible art."

Comics have trained us to anticipate and digest all manner of explorations in line character, visual effect, emotional representation, typefaces and narrative. They constantly inject new life into other media: films rely on storyboards for pre-visualization; characters and textures of comics form the foundation of much contemporary painting and sculpture; commercials use "cartoon" aesthetics that flatten spaces and people; Spider-Man and the X-Men have become multimedia franchises; and the image-for-image translations of Frank Miller's "300" and "Sin City" have produced radical experiments in filmmaking which McCloud calls "fever dreams."

Comics as invisible art indeed! Their influence is hidden, ancient and infinitely renewable. When asked why, McCloud, speaking by phone from San Diego, offers an interesting explanation: He points out that comics are unlike any other medium in that viewers can easily shift their attention to absorb individual panels, fill the gaps between them, and take in entire pages as unified expressions. Most of the comic is already in our heads.

Like a sculptor, the author/illustrator chisels away at uncarved blocks of our memory to reveal new images. To play the human imagination using the specific terms of a given artist's style of form, line, color and narrative is to access the representational power of photography, the expressive flexibility of painting, the seduction of narrative, and the space-time relationship between viewer and sculpture in a single mode of expression.

McCloud asserts that "human beings appreciate a biodiversity of narrative media, we like to be able to re-enter the world we live in through more than one window at a time." This theory speaks directly to the diverse specifics of Hawai'i's unique visual culture. We absorb all the models and modes of Western comic imagery, Polynesian graphics, and the Japanese aesthetics of saucer-eyed beauties and fighting robots. This is the visual ecology that every local kid grows up with, that appreciation never goes away. Don't miss this opportunity to honor, enrich and recognize it in a broader context.

David A.M. Goldberg is a cultural critic and writer. He is a lecturer in art, art history and American studies at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.