Borrowing Abbott's two-dimensional 'Flatland,' habitual, standardized modes of perception trap us on a single plane where we accept inherited boundaries as the full extent of the possible. This flattening is not stupidity but a learned narrowing that mistakes one vantage point for reality itself.
Words unfold linearly in time while images present relationships all at once in space, and each mode structures a distinct kind of understanding. Combining them in comics lets meaning emerge from their interaction rather than forcing one to merely illustrate the other.
To unflatten is to deliberately occupy several vantage points at once, binding divergent perspectives into a stereoscopic view that reveals depth no single angle can supply. The method is not choosing the correct view but holding multiple simultaneously to generate dimension.
Making a scholarly argument in comics form demonstrates that how something is said is inseparable from what can be said; the visual medium performs its own thesis. The page layout, where the eye can roam nonlinearly, becomes an argument about non-hierarchical ways of knowing.
Between panels lies a gap the reader must fill, so comprehension requires the viewer to actively construct the connections rather than passively receive them. Meaning lives in the spaces and relations between units, not solely in the units themselves.
Seeing is not passive reception but an active, constructed act shaped by what we have been trained to notice, so our perceptual limits are contingent and can be reworked. Expanding what one can perceive is therefore a practice rather than a fixed capacity.