Search

In Thien Pham's comic Sumo, simple graphics, iconic figures and limited dialogue assist in efficiently conceptualizing the notion of the transitive, the ability to convey meaning, to allow images to translate concepts quickly, including that of transnationalism itself. Character Scott, a failed American football player, relocates to Japan to take up sumo. His physical transnational move and eventual accommodation to a new sport, new city and new friends are reflected in Pham's loose OuBaPo form: sections of the comic occurring in Japan and those in the United States follow a fairly strict panel count, diminishing evenly as the narrative progresses, suggesting Scott's amalgamation of and acceptance in the East from his arrival from the West. But neither is privileged in Pham's use of nearly equal numbers of panels representing Scott's past in the United States, present in Japan and future in a smooth amalgamation of football and sumo, East and West, strength and flexibility, failure and success. Sumo uses efficient visual approaches – the unique play inherent in OuBaPo as a drawing exercise in constraints, colour-coded panels and iconicity – to accommodate and unify race and national differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is informed by my current research in the communicative potential of animated elements within digital comics. Drawing on the writings of Thierry Groensteen and Barbara Postema, I adopt the viewpoint that comics are a complex system in which individual signs and multiple codes combine and interact to communicate meaning. From this foundation, I propose that animated movement can add additional layers of signification, contributing connotative meaning to mostly denotational images. Within the article I recognize that attempts to incorporate animated elements into digital comics have often inadvertently illustrated the difficult relationship and potential incompatibility between cinematic animation and the specific conventions of comics. This discord can be attributed to competing temporal qualities; cinematic animation is a linear time-based art form while time in comics is illusory and implied largely through space. Eschewing a cinematic approach to animation, my research builds on an observation by Daniel Goodbrey (2013) that animated elements are most successfully employed within panels as short animated loops. Unlike linear animated sequences, the indefinite timing of loops does not challenge comics' temporal code. As exemplars of this more harmonious application of animation to the comic form, Jen Lee's ThunderPaw: In the Ashes of Fire Mountain (2012–16) is discussed alongside my current studio work, Tepid Waters (Gowdy 2017), a digital comic in which the use of illusionistic movement is secondary to animated elements that communicate on symbolic or connotative levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A theory of multimodality helps to explain how meaning is created by readers of comics at the level of the page and how readers situate themselves in relation to specific comics texts. In this article, I want to build on that theory in order to argue that in reading a comics text making meaning also involves the internal and external linkages that are continually made and unmade for and by readers. That is, it is not only at the level of a particular sequence of panels or page layout that meaning is made by comics creators and readers, but also through the connections that are made between various parts of the comics text itself (arthrology) and between the comics text and external texts (transtextuality). This article seeks to extend theories of multimodality to Thierry Groensteen's arthrology and Gerard Genette's transtextuality, concepts that help explain both the internal and external linkages created within comics texts. In doing so, I wish to explore some questions regarding how readers make sense of a complex comics text such as It's a Bird by Steven Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen. What are the elements with which a reader must engage, at both the level of the page and the level of the text as a whole? How do these elements combine in the reading process? What accounts for the divergence of narrative meanings and textual interpretations between readers? In this article I examine how reading It's a Bird involves making sense of the multimodal elements of each page, the arthrological connections between panels at both restricted and general levels, and the multiple kinds of transtextual connections between this text and myriad other texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]