As an art form using both images and written word in its storytelling, the comic book poses unique challenges to semiotic study. It combines many a different sign system into one, and develops graphic conventions that are more or less unique to it: the speech balloon and the thought balloon, the frame, the different symbols for representing movement, moods and mental states, for representing sound and smell — etc.
Phenomenological perspectives offer themselves naturally in this study as the sign systems at work in comics convey not only “action-stuff” visible from a third-person point of view, but also “thought-stuff” which pertain to the subjectivity of the represented figures.
And so do cognitive perspectives: As a number of the papers in this seminar will show, the understanding of time- and space-representation is fundamental to understanding comics, and the general means of representing the “big categories” time and space in comics seem to be tailored to fit our specific, human way of conceptualizing these categories.
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