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13 1 How to Analyze Comics Cognitively The first Sunday installment of Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon series (1947– 88) presents readers with a formidable density of narrative information: from patterns of black and white on the page, readers can construct an entire story. They identify characters, understand what motivates them and how they relate to each other, and connect their actions and words into a narrative. How does this process work? And how can we harness insights into the cognitive processes involved when reading comics for analyzing them? Milton Caniff, one of the comics authors who set the standards for storytelling in the medium in the 1930s and 1940s, will be our guide as I propose to outline how to analyze comics storytelling cognitively. Caniff’s Steve Canyon has performed this service before in Umberto Eco’s article “A Reading of Steve Canyon” (1976). Eco is interested in the same questions as I am (how do we make meaning from the black and white patterns on the page?), but he arrives at a very different set of answers from the ones I am going to propose. Eco looks for codes, that is, conventionalized signs that we can read because we know, from our cultural context, what they mean. I look for clues, that is, elements on the page that prompt readers to draw particular inferences which, in turn, can be based on our cultural knowledge or psychological capacities. Eco focuses on how this comic (primarily) reproduces and modifies cultural conventions to tell its story. I propose to focus (primarily) on how it engages readers’ everyday cognitive capacities for making sense of the world. On Eco’s semiotic account, comics form a system of signification in which readers need to be competent. On my cognitive account, comics dynamically play into our cognitive predilections and put them to particular narrative and literary use. By shifting the emphasis from culturally defined codes to cognitive clues and inferences, I do not mean to discount the importance of cultural contexts and textual traditions. Rather, I propose developing an ac- 14 How to Analyze Comics Cognitively count of how they are employed as the clues steer the reader, rhetorically, through the text. The semiotic encoding and decoding are opened up to reveal the dynamic nature of meaning-making. I do not offer a system of comics, but rather a pragmatics of their textual effects, that is, the complex combinations of clues and gaps in the text that interface with the cognitive process our mind runs when reading fiction. These textual effects can then be used to reconceptualize ideas such as intertextuality, storyworlds , and fictional minds as encounters between the readers’ minds and the features of the text. Such a cognitive approach then connects the meaning-making of comics with the literary endeavors in the medium. 1.1. The Semiotics of Comics and Its Problems From Eco’s account in “A Reading of Steve Canyon” to scholarly works laying out an entire system of signification for the comic, such as Ulrich Krafft in Comics Lesen (1978) and Thierry Groensteen in Système de la bande dessinée (2006; The System of Comics), comics semiotics has worked toward a comprehensive outline of meaning-making in comics. Based on the Saussurean model, comics semiotics can draw on a rich methodological tradition that seems to be applicable to both words and images . It has established useful classifications for the elements of the comics texts in its endeavor to isolate the smallest meaning-carrying unit and to develop a differential system of signification in comics. Groensteen’s The System of Comics has outlined how panels relate to each other on the page, creating multiple reading paths, and how patterned repetitions of panels are meaningful. Many of the insights from Groensteen’s System can contribute to our understanding of meaning-making in comics, and his “neo-semiotic” approach, which takes into account the readers’ processing of the text and the rhetoric within it, seems akin to my approach informed by cognitive psychology. However, even though both approaches are “semiotic” in the sense that they are interested in meaning-making , there are a number of fundamental differences between what Eco proposes in his reading of Steve Canyon and what I propose in mine. When Eco reads Steve Canyon, he stresses from the outset that his understanding of comics storytelling is couched in the framework of semiotic codes: “we can attempt to decode his [the author’s] message, paying special attention to its...

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