Comics, Linguistics, and Visual Language: The Past and Future of a Field

Abstract

Many authors of comics have metaphorically compared their writing process to that of language. Jack ‘King’ Kirby, one of the most influential artists of mainstream American comics, once commented, ‘I’ve been writing all along and I’ve been doing it in pictures’ (Kirby 1999). Similarly, Japan’s ‘God of Comics’ Osamu Tezuka stated, ‘I don’t consider them pictures … In reality I’m not drawing. I’m writing a story with a unique type of symbol’ (Schodt 1983). Recently, in his introduction to McSweeny’s (Issue 13) , comic artist Chris Ware stated that ‘Comics are not a genre, but a developing language.’ Furthermore, several comic authors writing about their medium have described the properties of comics like a language. Will Eisner (1985) compared gestures and graphic symbols to a visual vocabulary, a sentiment echoed by Scott McCloud (1993), who also described the properties governing the sequence of panels as its ‘grammar.’ Meanwhile, Mort Walker (1980), the artist of Beetle Bailey , has catalogued the graphic emblems and symbols used in comics in his facetious dictionary, The Lexicon of Comicana . Truly, there seems to be an intuitive link between comics and language in the minds of their creators, a belief shared by several researchers of language who discuss properties of comics in a linguistic light. Exploring these works can provide insight into the extent to which this comparison might hold, its limitations, and how it can guide future research. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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