No laughing matter!? Analyzing the Page Layout of Instruction Comics

Janina Wildfeuer*, Ielka van der Sluis, Gisela Redeker, Nina van der Velden

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)
159 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The study reported in this paper analyzes the specific genre of ‘instruction comics’ with regard to typical patterns of comic book pages. As a sequential-pictorial genre with a narrative as well as instructive character, ‘instruction comics’ have recently and increasingly been used in education as a novel way to communicate, for instance, health-related information. The corpus for this study includes 37 single-page first-aid comics that all show how to help a person who is choking, i.e. how to perform what is generally known as the Heimlich manoeuvre. To understand how this procedure is presented visually and how this presentation is similar to the layout of typical pages of comic books and graphic novels, the corpus is annotated with a multi-level annotation scheme that has been developed to annotate and analyse the page layout of visual narratives. The annotation scheme includes formal descriptions to synergistically analyse the complexity and variety of various comic genres, with specifications for typical comic page grids and the use of framing, inset panels, or captions. The paper presents and critically discusses the results of the corpus annotation with regard to the specific multimodal design choices in the corpus of choking comics.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)186-207
Number of pages22
JournalJournal of Graphic Novels and Comics
Volume14
Issue number2
Early online date21-Mar-2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

Keywords

  • comics
  • first-aid instructions
  • multimodality
  • annotation
  • page layout

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