Comics as Communication

This chapter lays down the groundwork for the book, considering comics and their relation to communicative action and narrative drawing. It discusses in some detail the idea of treating comics as a language and surveys some approaches to this strategy. It frames some key questions for the book: How can images do what words do? How do comics communicate processes? How do they incorporate the abstract? How do they cohere as a unified text? The chapter makes a case for treating comics as ‘utterance’ and outlines the Hallidayan basis of the conception of language to be used in the book. It ends with a guide to the book’s structure.

This chapter outlines an approach to interpersonal engagement and the intrusion of the self into the comics text which follows the structures outlined by Halliday in his systemic functional accounts of language. This is presented as a form of interactive ‘play’, borrowing some of the approaches to terminology, though not all of the commitments, used by Eric Berne (1967) in describing human interaction. The core interactions of language are presented conceptualised as a set of ‘games’ in which comics texts propose to engage the reader, as a vivid way of describing the array of possible core interactions as mapped to Halliday’s account of language functions. Comics offer information, but may also expect the reader to work for this, playing games of spot-the-difference, Where’s Wally? and Rebus, each requiring different ways of attending to what is conveyed. Comics may demand information from the reader, requiring them to complete the image, at least in principle, and whether they actually do so or not: from the possibility of questionnaires, often in concert with linguistic forms, through Spot-the-Ball interpretations of the dynamics of the image, to Join-the-Dots connections of incomplete line and Colouring-In of black-and-white images. They may also demand action of readers: whether this is done by the eye or mind, following paths as in Maze or sequences as in Follow-the-Numbers, or connecting elements to form a larger whole, as in Jigsaw; or by potential action on the material of the book, from physical dismantling of the page in Cut-Out-and-Make, or more frequently manipulations such as Turn-the-Page, or Fold. The final possibility, the offer of goods-and-services, is represented in the totality of affordances of the graphic narrative text: it adopts the other forms and presents itself as good and as service.

This chapter discusses the involvement of the creator, the creator’s attitudes and opinions, in the text; the resources available in comics form to communicate firstly the reality status of what is drawn, secondly the creator’s affective relationship to what is drawn and thirdly to whom we should assign the content of what is drawn—how directly we are to attribute this to the beliefs and experiences of the creator, as opposed to a narrator or the participants represented in the diegesis. It recaps the interpersonal system in comics and then introduces the resources for ‘modality’ as it is accounted for in language by Halliday and Matthiessen. It then outlines a development of this resource as systems of ‘appraisal’, using the work of Martin and White. It recaps and expands upon a range of dimensions of abstraction, each operating on a ‘cline’, a continuum of variation, and outlines a mapping of these as realisations of the modal functions of comics communication, illustrating with a range of examples. Finally, it considers colour as a resource in comics, showing not only how it may operate as a modal resource, but how it works multifunctionally, bringing together ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings. The chapter ends with more specific discussion of abstract enclosures as a general category.

This chapter explores the third major metafunction of comics, the textual function. It situates this function in relation to the other two, the ideational and the interpersonal, and draws parallels and contrasts with other approaches to the application of cohesion, in particular, to graphic narrative visual texts. The textual function breaks down into patterns of information structure, on the one hand, and cohesion on the other; the chapter will especially dwell on patterns and resources for cohesion, subcategorising and exemplifying these with a range of comics extracts. I propose an approach which integrates visual and verbal narrative resources and identifies forms specific to graphic narrative, taking into account both verbal and visual means of cohesion, ways in which these interact and the interrelation of these means to the work of the other metafunctions in Halliday’s model of language.

This chapter explores the logical function of graphic narrative, a second component of ideation alongside the experiential component. It stresses the hypotactic nature of comics, particularly its ability to project nested ‘text-worlds’, over against the paratactic sequentiality of the medium. Parataxis rests on adjacency and sequence, and so the chapter considers some approaches to determining sequence in graphic narrative structures. It offers some critiques of existing approaches, in that they operate largely at the level of the panel, rather than considering lower levels of organisation in the rank structure of graphic narrative, and that they prioritise determinate order over understanding of dependencies. The chapter describes the ‘cluster’ as a potential unit of reading analysis and argues that enclosures are always already ‘speech balloons’, in that they outline and project text-worlds. Transgressions beyond enclosing borders may be used to indicate immediacy, contact, a reaching out of textual elements into the phatic space of communion between creator and reader, the ‘discourse-world’ in which both collaboratively make meanings. The nested structure of comics discourse, its ability to present worlds within worlds and to shift from one level to another, is presented as an essential resource of comics meaning-making.

This chapter turns to types of metaphor rather than metonym and considers ways in which these contribute to the making of meaning in comics. It briefly makes the distinction between the two tropes and points out that in comics metonymy is fundamental. It explores different types of metaphor in comics, leading from the notion of ‘grammatical metaphor’, which is less well considered in the literature on visual metaphor. This leads to considering the idea of grammaticalisation in the comics image, comparable to the transformation of metaphor from ‘live’ to ‘dead’. It considers how traditional metaphor has been applied to images and used in comics. It argues that metaphor is essential to comics and tentatively draws a connection between the literary concept of ‘magic realism’ and the mode in which comics operate. It concludes by offering a close reading of some short graphic narrative, employing all the ideas the book has used to describe how the comics work.

As we search for a way to discuss comics and how they work, as we write criticism of comics as an art form, so we clutch for the language in which to describe what we see and read, as a language is not yet decided for us. We need metaphors for the action of comics, since we have not yet agreed on what would not be metaphor. Off the peg, we can reach for the language of film, such as shots, angles, zooms, the camera and so on. But we should bear in mind that this is indeed metaphor, and a metaphor which has not fully been formalised, which may contain disanalogy as well as analogy. We can reach for languages built metaphorically on literature, and on art and on other forms. In proposing functional linguistics as a model for a critical language of comics, as a model for describing how comics function, I am aware I propose a further metaphor; but a metaphor which has been worked through with some care and with consideration for the mapping of appropriate ‘parts’ of language at an appropriate level of description onto the ‘parts’ of comics.