On the track of visual style: a diachronic study of page composition in comics and its functional motivation

Abstract

Page layout is one of the most salient features of graphic novels and comics that readers encounter: even before engaging with specific content, an overall impression of the page composition will have already been communicated. In the critical literature on comics and graphic novels, it is also commonly claimed that page composition plays a significant role for narrative construction, pacing, and other aspects of reception. However, in contrast to this prominence, methods for engaging systematically with the analysis of page design in comics and graphic novels are still in their infancy. Empirical studies of the workings of visual page composition are rarer still. In this article, the authors report results, drawing on a diachronic, corpus-based investigation of page composition that illustrates how it is beneficial to approach page composition employing methods from corpus linguistics and multimodality. They show not only that it is possible to isolate trajectories of change in composition over time but also that such studies can be used to provide evidence of functionally-motivated variation in compositional choices.

Editors’ Introduction and Review: Visual Narrative Research: An Emerging Field in Cognitive Science

“…Corpus analyses have suggested cultures’ comics differ across narrative patterns (Cohn, ), page layout (Cohn, Axnér, Diercks, Yeh, & Pederson, ), motion events (Cohn, Wong, Pederson, & Taylor, ), and others. In addition, visual narrative systems have been observed to change over time in dimensions like layout, narrative, and multimodality (Bateman, Veloso, & Lau, ; Cohn, Taylor, et al, ; Pederson & Cohn, ). Other systems vary in ways significantly different from those used in comics, like the visual narratives drawn in the sand by Central Australian Aboriginals (Green, ; Wilkins, ).…”

The Multimodal Annotation of Gender Differences in Contemporary TV Series

“…For multimodal analyses, this has more recently been taken up and further developed for the annotation of static visual artefacts such as comics pages (see, e.g., Bateman et al 2016;Wildfeuer 2019;Bateman et al 2019), but, to the best of our knowledge, not for audio-visual artefacts such as TV series. However, as we have outlined in Wildfeuer (2019), by combining both more interpretative discourse analytical interests with empirically-driven corpus analytical questions, it is essential to develop an annotation scheme that allows a multi-level annotation with different levels of descriptions and that at the same time can be optionally expanded and adopted for diverse other corpora or research questions.…”

A Corpus-Based Approach to Color, Shape, and Typography in Logos

“…Each principal component can be thus interpreted in terms of the original measurements and related back to the analytical framework. In the field of multimodality research, PCA has been recently applied in a diachronic study of page layout in comics by Bateman, Veloso, and Lau (2019), who use PCA to reduce 52 variables describing page layout to just five principal components, a much more manageable number of variables that nevertheless cover 61% of variation in the original data. An analysis of the principal components revealed temporal changes in the page layout along dimensions that would not have been discernible otherwise.…”