Two Per Cent of What? Constructing a Corpus of Typical American Comic Books

Beaty, Bart; Sousanis, Nick; Woo, Benjamin

doi:10.4324/9781315185354-2

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…As always with corpus construction, however, several issues of design need to be addressed prior to collection. Corpora can either attempt to achieve broad-scale representativeness of the materials they are covering, as in, for example, Beaty et al’s (2018) aim of systematically covering a randomly selected but nevertheless diachronically balanced ‘two per cent’ of all the comic books published in the US between 1934 and 2014 (the total figure of which is calculated by Beaty et al on the basis of several standard publication databases at 176,275), or be more focused towards specific genres, cultures or periods. Substantial corpora of the latter kind have been developed by Cohn and colleagues (see Cohn et al, 2017a; Pederson and Cohn, 2016), including both cross-cultural collections for contrasting US, European and Japanese styles, and more focused collections of US superhero comics published from the 1940s until the present day.…”

Section: A Diachronic Corpus Of Comics Page Layoutmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Bateman

Veloso

Lau

2019

Visual Communication

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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.

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Section: A Diachronic Corpus Of Comics Page Layoutmentioning

confidence: 99%