The Language of Comics: Word and Image / Edition 1

by Robin Varnum, Christina T. Gibbons

Overview

In our culture, which depends increasingly on images of instruction and recreation, it is important to ask hwo words and images make imeaning when they are combined. Comics, one of the most widely read media oif the twentitth century, serves as an ideal for focusing on an investigation on the word-and-image question.

This collection of essays attempts to give an answer. The first six see words and images as separate art forms that play with or against each other. David Kunzle finds that words restrict the meaning of the art of Adolphe Willette and Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen in Le Chat Noir David A. Berona, examining wordless novels, argues that the ability to read pictures depends on the ability to read words. Todd Taylor draws on classical rhetoric to demonstrate that images in The Road Runner are more persuasive that words.

N. C. Christopher Couch—writing on The Yellow Kid--and Robert C. Harvey—discussing early New Yorker cartoons—are both interest

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781578064144
Publisher:	University Press of Mississippi
Publication date:	08/31/2007
Series:	Studies in Popular Culture Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	222
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Robin Varnum, an instructor of English at the American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts, has been published in Writing on the Edge, Journal of Advanced Composition, Harvard Library Bulletin, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Christina T. Gibbons, an independent scholar living in Brattleboro, Vermont, has been published in Journal of Regional Cultures.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	ix
	The Voices of Silence: Willette, Steinlen and the Introduction of the Silent Strip in the Chat Noir, with a German Coda	3
	Pictures Speak in Comics without Words: Pictorial Principles in the Work of Milt Gross, Hendrik Dorgathen, Eric Drooker, and Peter Kuper	19
	If He Catches You, You're Through: Coyotes and Visual Ethos	40
	The Yellow Kid and the Comic Page	60
	Comedy at the Juncture of Word and Image: The Emergence of the Modern Magazine Gag Cartoon Reveals the Vital Blend	75
	Disturbing Comics: The Disjunction of Word and Image in the Comics of Andrzej Mleczko, Ben Katchor, R. Crumb, and Art Spiegelman	97
	"And Suit the Action to the Word": How a Comics Panel Can Speak Shakespeare	123
	Revealing Traces: A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation	145
	The Comic Book's Soundtrack: Visual Sound Effects in Asterix	156
	The Comics of Chris Ware: Text, Image, and Visual Narrative Strategies	174
	Notes	199
	Works Cited	205
	Contributors	213
	Index	215