Analyzing comics from a discursive approach — A look into the implementation of visual vocabulary within comic panels

This entry is part of a series of revised translated notes on a topic originally covered in my undergraduate thesis, which was originally written and published in Spanish, and can be found here.

Up to this point, this series has explained how comics are built as texts that sequentially organize both linguistic and graphical information to construe fully articulate messages. We have also observed how many of these processes take place inside panels, which have been presented as both the basic narrative structure and the main lexical-pictographic unit in these texts. With this understanding of panels as units that are functionally analogous to linguistic utterances, it becomes pertinent — or at least interesting — to ask yourself how do the elements that constitute panels collaborate to convey meaning?

In order to answer this question, we will once again turn to McCloud’s (1999) idea of visual vocabulary — which was covered in this series’s introduction — to distinguish between visual content of comics (like characters or settings), and its conventionalized visual components, which allow these texts to organize information in reader-friendlier ways. In other words, the visual register of a comic can contain both content pictures (which will work in a similar way to how content words do in linguistic texts) and functional visual components, that will fulfill roles related to the textual organization and sequencing of a particular panel. Going by Saraceni’s criteria, a panel can contain the following components: caption boxes, gutters, and speech and thought bubbles, all of which are explained in the following video.

Example taken from Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton (2006–2015).

Understanding that comic panels can represent both semantic and functional content through visual language is a necessary step to describe the way these texts employ visual units to express semantic content of different nature. For this research, the classification of this semantic content will be based on word classes traditionally studied in grammar, and it will include nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and pronouns. Since categories such as articles, demonstratives, possessives, and propositions do not express to semantic, but deictic information (this is, content related to relationships between entities, such as spatial positioning, possession, and so on), they will be excluded from this analysis.

Nouns and adjectives: traditionally understood as the discourse units that design entities (whether they’re individuals or groups, material or immaterial, people or other organisms, real or fictional, et cetera), nouns represent, within clauses, the different participants semantic processes (actions expressed in clauses) might require, as well as some of the circumstantial information surrounding said processes. In the case of comics, visual representation of entities can be considered the equivalent of nouns, since expressing something within the limits of a panel can be seen as the equivalent to linguistically referring to an entity by using nouns. Through this assumption, it is possible to propose that every visual unit that is not a functional component, and that is used to represent either participants or circumstantial information surrounding a semantic process, will be functionally equivalent to a noun, excluding from this group immaterial circumstances such as time and cause, which -as we will soon see- are visually codified in a way that’s functionally closer to adverbs.

Descender #02 by Lemire and Nguyen (2015). Within this panel, all of the distinguishable visual entities (be it characters or locations) will be considered visual nouns. If we focus on the boy at the forefront of the panel, we could describe visual features such as his height, his haircut or the colors of his clothes as visual adjectives attached to his character design.

Regarding adjectives, these are can be defined as units that modify nouns, thus adding more detailed aspects, properties or qualities to those. Given the fundamentally visual nature of comics, it is complicated to think of an entity’s modifiable features being presented as independent from said entity, which leads to the affirmation that, in the case of comics, adjectives will always work as features that are presented as part of a “noun entity”, meaning an entity’s most detailed features will always appear at least visually associated to said entity.

Verbs: lexically understood as units used to refer to actions (which can be broadly classified within the following categories: activities, realizations, consequences or achievements, or mental states), verbs are the units around which predicates are built, used also to express the time duration of a particular clause. Looking into the different elements that constitute the visual language of comics, there doesn’t seem to be a unit that is functionally equivalent to verbs; in their place, comics seem to codify visual semantic processes by establishing relationships between units that will act as participants (as well as with circumstantial information that may or may not surround these).

With this in mind, this analysis works on the assumption that verbs are not explicitly represented in the visual component of comics, but they’re rather inferred through the appearance within panels of elements like the participants or instruments that a specific process might require to be expressed. This assumption is a key axiom of this research, allowing us to study how several elements allow readers to recognize actions within the visual level of comics, despite there not being a particular unit meant to represent these in a way that completely overlaps with the functions of their linguistic counterparts. The following panel serves as an example of the way several of the visual elements contained within a panel can collaborate to convey processes that bring together several entities or participants:

Diario de un solo by Catalina Bu (2014). In this panel, the process of taking pictures can be recognized not only by the way several characters are drawn holding camera-shaped objects but because of the way the aliens are drawn in what can be described as posing. In addition to this, the little lines surrounding the cameras indicate how the process of taking pictures is a reiterated one, which makes it possible to affirm comics can visually represent aspect.

In addition to the previous description of semantic representation of visual actions in comics, it is worthy to mention that, according to authors like Gasca and Gubern (1988), comics have also conventionalized the use of speech bubbles in order to express actions related to speech, with cases such dotted lined bubbles expressing whispering, zig-zagged ones conveying yelling, and downward curved ones representing weeping being commonplace in these texts.

Adverbs: adverbs can be defined as words that modify or contextualize a phrase or clause, often by being attached to verbs (but also to adjectives, thus altering the way these modify nouns). In their text El Discurso del Comic (The Discourse of Comics), Gasca and Gubern (1988) describe several visual devices that functionally resemble adverbs, which they divide in three categories: kinetic symbols, which allow comics to represent in detail the temporal duration of a process, as well as the possible reiterations of said process; visual metaphors, used to represent characters’ perceptions or emotional reactions to events; and speech bubbles, which have already been described as devices that allow the modification of processes related to speaking.

Milena Manzana by Milena Tilli (2014). The lines around this character’s arm (meant to represent the course taken by a thrown object, which previous panels reveal to be a camera, in its way to crash against a table) match Gasca and Gubenr’s (1998) description of kinetic symbols. In addition to this trajectory, the visual representation of the camera crashing and breaking allows readers to infer that this object was thrown with enough strength to break it, which also makes it possible to recognize how the process of throwing now has an added manner to its semantic nature.

Substitution relations: for this final category, it is noteworthy that, in a way similar to verbs, there are no visual units meant to substitutes nominal entities in the same way pronouns can replace nouns. It is possible, however, to recognize some ways in which comics can partially introduce or reference visual entities, be it by showing fragments or parts of a previously introduced entity, or that its eventual appearance is teased by partially showing it. Both of these processes are similar, to a degree, to anaphoric and cataphoric constructions, which makes it possible to affirm that the visual language of comics is capable of representing some level of deixis.

Catboy by Benji Nate (2016). The first two panels in this sequence present the reader with partially obscured views of one of Henry the cat, whose full appearance is revealed in the third panel, along with his narrative situation.

The possibility of identifying multiple ways in which comics are capable of visually representing units somewhat equivalent to word classes makes ground for the assumption that comic panels are not only capable of representing entities, but also of implementing different resources in order to convey the ways said entities are capable of executing or participating in different types of actions within the limits of the panels they appear on. Based on this same assumption, the upcoming — and final — entry on this series will present an overview of the way the units described through this entry collaborate to represent different types of semantic processes.