The Language of Comics (review)

The language of comics is a user-friendly easy-to read book on the semiotics of comics, with special emphasis on both the interplay of visual and verbal information and on the reader’s inferential compensation of the information missing between panels. The book is published in a well-known Routledge series, InterText, specially designed to meet the needs of contemporary English studies and to provide students with hands-on practical experience of analysis. As such, Saraceni’s book meets these expectations, providing not only a clear picture of what comics are like, but also exercises, many of them supplemented with explanations by the author.

The book is divided into six units which progressively introduce issues and terminology in the analysis of comics. In Unit 1 (‘What are comics?’, 1–12) S answers the unit title’s question by providing a historical overview, commenting on the appropriateness of the term ‘comic’ as the label for a medium that is often devoid of any comical quality (e.g. the famous account of the Holocaust in ‘Maus’). Then, the author comments upon the main elements of comics: the panel, the gutter (the physical space between panels), the balloon, and the caption.

Unit 2 (‘Words and pictures’, 13–33) addresses the interplay of words and pictures in the panels. Both are located in a continuum between the highly symbolic (typically, words) and the highly iconic (typically, images). Since pictures can be very symbolic (e.g. the log with a saw to represent sleep) and words can acquire an iconic status (e.g. deformations of text to suggest the character’s emotions), comics typically function somewhere in between the symbolic and the iconic.

Unit 3 (‘Between the panels’, 35–56) is about the sequential organization of panels on the page. S addresses issues such as cohesion and coherence in panel organization and analyzes the inferential process of recovering the missing information between panels.

Unit 4 (‘The voices of comics’, 57–69) deals with the source of language in comics and how language is represented therein, the basic means being balloons (for characters) and narrative captions (for the narrator).

Unit 5 (‘The eyes of comics’, 71–84) is about ‘showing and seeing and how these contribute to the construction of meaning in comics’ (71). In order to account for that, S first addresses the notion of point of view, which can be divided into visual, conceptual, and interest categories. Point of view is important in understanding the narrator’s ‘voice’ in the story and the underlying ideological stance adopted.

Finally, Unit 6 (‘Comics and computers’, 85–95) explores the relationship between comics and computers, specifically how computers effect the semiotic quality of comics in aspects such as graphical user interfaces, word processing, and image creation or manipulation.

S has written a clear book on comics, which is very well illustrated and includes numerous activities. The topic is very relevant in a society like ours, one that is overwhelmingly dominated by the visual aspect of communication.