Visual Analysis: Representational and Interactive Meanings in The Remarried Empress

Abstract

Following the trendy visual designs, webtoons are a recent industry of arts that flourished as webcomics. They are broadly available with innovative stories in various genres. The visual elements in webtoons are vivid and prosperous in a way they can attract a linguist to shift away from interpreting the usual verbal content to the investigation of meanings beyond these non-verbal designs. For that purpose, this study aims to apply Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) framework to discover meanings beyond panels from The Remarried Empress webtoon. Six panels from the 1 st episode of this webtoon are analyzed in two dimensions: representational and interaction. The paper discusses how are the main characters represented, and in what way they are interacting with the viewer in these panels. The findings show that The Remarried Empress webtoon is like any other literary story that intends to be dynamic through narrative representational processes. Moreover, it builds relations with the viewer through gazes and gestures drawn by the creator, framings, and angles within the panels and proves the reliability of these relations by indicating high values of modality markers.