The Patterns of Comics: Visual Languages of Comics from Asia, Europe, and North America

Comics are a global phenomenon, and yet it’s easy to distinguish the visual styles of comics from Asia, Europe, or the United States . But, do the structures of these visual narratives differ in more subtle ways? Might these comics actually be drawn in different visual languages that vary in their structures across cultures? To address these questions, The Patterns of Comics seeks evidence through a sustained analysis of an annotated corpus of over 36,000 panels from 350+ comics from Asia, Europe, and North America. This data-driven approach reveals the cross-cultural variation in symbology, layout, and storytelling between various visual languages, and shows how comics have changed across 80 years. It compares, for example, the subtypes within American comics and Japanese manga, and analyzes the formal properties of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes across its entire 10-year run. Throughout, it not only uncovers the patterns in and across the panels of comics, but shows how these regularities in the visual languages of comics connect to the organizing principles of all languages. Cover Halftitle page Also available from Bloomsbury Title page Copyright page Dedication CONTENTS FIGURES AND TABLES PREFACE CHAPTER ONE Visual Language 1.1 Visual Language Theory 1.2 Hypotheses for structure across modalities 1.3 Organization of the book CHAPTER TWO Corpus-Driven Comics Research 2.1 Data-driven analyses of comics 2.2 Visual Language Research Corpus 2.3 What can this tell us? CHAPTER THREE Morphology 3.1 Morphological structures 3.2 Morphology within and across cultures 3.3 Carriers 3.4 Motion events 3.5 Conclusions CHAPTER FOUR Page Layout 4.1 The structure of layouts 4.2 Panels per page 4.3 Panel properties 4.4 External compositional structure 4.5 Layout complexity 4.6 Assemblage structure 4.7 Conclusion CHAPTER FIVE Situational Coherence 5.1 Situational changes 5.2 Situational Runs 5.3 Situational coherence and layout 5.4 Conclusions CHAPTER SIX Framing Structure 6.1 Attentional framing structure 6.2 Paneling structure 6.3 Subjectivity and framing 6.4 Conclusion CHAPTER SEVEN Narrative Structure 7.1 Visual Narrative Grammar 7.2 Complexity in visual narratives 7.3 Narrative and framing structure 7.4 Conclusion CHAPTER EIGHT Visual Languages Across Time 8.1 Layout 8.2 Storytelling 8.3 Multimodality 8.4 A shifting visual language 8.5 Implications CHAPTER NINE Cross-Cultural Visual Languages? 9.1 Visual languages? 9.2 Japanese Visual Language(s)? 9.3 American Visual Language(s)? 9.4 European Visual Language(s)? 9.5 Comprehension 9.6 Implications CHAPTER TEN The Visual Language of Calvin and Hobbes 10.1 Hobbes 10.2 Layouts 10.3 Storytelling 10.4 Multimodality 10.5 Conclusion CHAPTER ELEVEN Towards a Visual Language Typology 11.1 Visual languages 11.2 Typology and Universals 11.3 Permeability 11.4 Comprehension 11.5 Towards a visual language typology NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX