In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

169 Chapter Seven Asterios Polyp and the Structure of Visual Images Much reference has been made to the broad analogies critics often make between linguistic and visual signification. There exists a marked critical drift towards framing the distinctions between visual and verbal as somehow specious. Both the simplified, abstracted pictorial style of cartoon drawing and the comics medium’s disparate non-pictorial elements (such as speech bubbles, panel borders, and the like) are suggested to function like language. These elements are often seen as being “as abstract and symbolic as words” (Hatfield 2009: 133). For many critics, when an image’s iconic resemblance is pared down and schematized, and/or where a high degree of convention underpins a visual sign-form, then the distinction between images and language diminishes, with the cartoon visual sign being recognized and read like a word (McCloud 2000: 2, Raeburn 2004: 7, Cates 2010: 96). (There is an interesting logical leap, noted by Cohn [2005: 239–41], between this proposition that certain kinds of conventionalized abstracted images are comparable with words, and the follow-on claim that the comics form itself is therefore a language, somewhat akin to treating the system of the English language and the literary form of the novel as synonymous.) But, as we shall see, important distinctions persist between the sorts of conventionalized, abstracted shorthand used within comics and the system of verbal language. There can be identified, within discussions around convention, abstraction, and arbitrariness in these signifying systems, a certain lack of precision that facilitates suggestions that abstract or conventional visual signs operate in a manner akin to words. A closer focus on the facets of the visual system alluded to throughout— namely its continuously gradated, rather than discrete, nature, and relative lack of constraint by a preexisting langue—thus enables a convincing challenge to be brought against such claims. I have already argued that language’s constitution in arbitrary minimal units and its constraining langue are both crucial to explaining how Images as Language 170 certain literary operations work, but such assertions necessitate a counter -demonstration that visual signification is constituted differently, and that this formal makeup is equally pertinent to its workings. The aim in undertaking this is to show how the conventions of cartooning, and the ways we read and interpret texts that utilize it, are misrepresented by critical accounts that equate the structural models of the verbal and visual modes. As already mentioned, attempts have been made by some critics to delimit “units” consisting of individual marks or groups of marks, which have an identifiable signified within the complex of a whole picture , such as the eyes or mouth of a character, and which can be likened to the phonemes, morphemes, or sentences of verbal language.1 These attempts to decompose continuous visual forms into discrete units are, at least, precise in their invocation of the original semiotic model—perhaps in keeping with the structuralist focus of 1970s-era European approaches to the comics form. Such exercises are rarer within Anglophone scholarship , although Harrison (1981) creates categories of “picts,” “pictoforms,” and “pictophrases” that map onto language’s double-articulated building blocks and larger semantic units—but without ever actually explicating what items, forms, and figures within a picture he sees as corresponding to these hypothetical levels. Attempts to find discrete, minimally meaningful units within the continuous gradations of visual signification have obvious problems, though the lack of such attempts within Anglophone scholarship might be argued to relate to a muted interest in the minutia of semiotics, which Francophone criticism was already moving past when Anglophone comics criticism began to emerge. Thus, the already-established fact of comics’ semiotic similarity to language is much vaunted, but little explored within the latter field, which demonstrably tends toward broad interpretations, positing codes, conventions, and representation as adequate qualifiers of language; the precise semiotic specifics might well seem to be a done deal. But significant objections can be raised against this widely embraced tenet, against both the nebulous understanding of linguistic structure that facilitates such broad comparisons and the more detailed attempts to descriptively force images—and comics’ cartoon images in particular—into the semiotic model of language. Drawing on Mort Walker’s tongue-in-cheek “dictionary” of cartoon shorthand, The Lexicon of Comicana, it can be shown how far these partially motivated, partially conventionalized signs can be likened to the arbitrary signs of language. The distinction between...

Share