Arts and Humanities Commons^™

How Do Song And Speech Go Together In Comics Panels?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In my last post, I wrote about simultaneous talk in comics, exploring the way that speech balloons can be positioned in a panel to convey a sense of overlapping talk. This post continues the series on the possibilities of simultaneous discourse. However, this one asks how visual and verbal cues might tell us something about the way readers are supposed to imagine hearing the production of both speech and song in the same panel.

The first example is drawn from Full Color, a graphic novel by Mark Haven Britt. I have taught this book a couple of times, …

How Do Comics Artists Use Speech Balloons?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

This post is the first in a series on how comics artists represent talk in comics. I’ll be writing about speech balloons and how the discipline of conversation analysis (CA) helps us understand how creative these artists can be when they try to show the intricacies of everyday talk.

Consider the following two panels. These are from the webcomic Scenes from a Multiverse by Jon Rosenberg. (Click on each of the titles to see the full comic.)

What Are Conversation Systems?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

The study of conversation as a serious field of inquiry began in the1970s when sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson first turned our attention to the way people talk to each other. Interestingly, they began looking at talk not for the sake of talk itself but instead as a way to understand social interactions. They collected samples of conversations and analyzed them to help answer questions that sociologists (not necessarily linguists) are interested in answering. For instance, how do people manage their daily lives through talk? How do people establish, maintain, improve and end relationships with each other …