Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Are Rage Comics Really Comics?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

A couple of years ago, some of my undergraduate students and I were talking about comics, and one of them mentioned rage comics. I hadn’t heard of that before, so I was grateful to learn about them. In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a Redditor, and I don’t ever spend time on Reddit. But in August 2012, when I finally upgraded to a smart phone from my previous dumb phone, I downloaded the Rage Comics app. Every now and again, when I’m on the bus headed to work, I scroll through some of these comics.

Most of …

What Can Found Art Teach Us About Comics?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

When I first learned about found poetry, I was taught that we could encounter poetry anywhere we went. Any text could be considered poetry even if it weren’t meant to be seen as such. Later on, I learned that found poetry is also poetry that is cobbled together from other kinds of texts. There is even poetry constructed out of the speech of Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense.

Likewise, everyday objects that weren’t meant to be art can be transformed into art, one very famous example being a urinal ‘made into’ a fountain.

When Is A (Comic Book) House A (Comic Book) Home?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

I recently made a rather significant move from Omaha, Nebraska to Stockholm, Sweden. I accepted a visiting lecturer position in the English Department at Stockholm University, where I am teaching a variety of linguistics courses and supervising student research projects.

One part of moving is that I had to say goodbye to my home comic book store, Legend Comics in Omaha. I had to shut down my pull file, and I already miss being able to sit in the coffee shop there, browsing comics and getting my caffeine buzz on. Back in May, Legend also hosted my book release party …

How Do We Read Comics Of The Quotidian? (Part Iii Of A Series), Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

For the final installment of this series about comics and representations of everyday life, I will be considering a short comic by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá called “Happy Birthday, My Friend!” The collection of comics is called De:TALES and its subtitle isStories from Urban Brazil, which describes the setting of each story perfectly: city streets, restaurants, night clubs, homes, art museums.

To me, the idea of a birthday seems pretty routine. After all, everybody has a birthday and birthdays happen every day. On the other hand, each person has only one birthday each year (the complications of …

How Do We Read Comics Of The Quotidian? (Part Ii Of A Series), Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In my previous post on the textures of the everyday, I explored the blend of everyday occurrences during wartime. How do people who live during times of war construct their day-to-day lives?

In this post, I want to extend the notion of the quotidian to a popular web comic calledQuestionable Content. This daily comic, created by Jeph Jacques, is about the lives of urban twenty-somethings, some of whom work at a coffee shop or at a library, but all of whom are attempting to create and maintain friendships and romances as well as trying to figure out what …

How Do We Read Comics Of The Quotidian? (Part I Of A Series), Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In two separate posts on Pencil Panel Page, Qiana Whitted and Aaron Meskin have explored the way comics readers engage with images. (Click here to read Qiana’s post and click here to read Aaron’s.) Specifically, they engage Scott McCloud’s claim that readers identify with drawn images of human beings. To quote McCloud, “when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face–you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon–you see yourself” (36).

My question in this post has not to do with images but rather with narrative. When …

Does Alan Moore Have The (Untranslatable) Approach To Translation?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

We’ve all experienced it: that moment when we’re reading a sci-fi story or watching a sci-fi movie about alien contact and we realize that everyone is speaking the same language….usually English. Early Star Trek episodes are sometimes lampooned for this Anglo-centric stance. So the question for us is this: how does everyone know the same language?

Authors and artists approach the problem of cross-linguistic translation in multiple ways. (In this post, I’m conflating translation and interpretation under the term translation, but these are different linguistic processes.) Fans of Doctor Who, for example, know that the TARDIS facilitates the ‘automatic’ translation …

How Will We Manage The Alt Text?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

My interest in comics from an academic standpoint is how language codes function. Mostly I examine how dialogue is structured and how characters build their relationships and identities through their talk. This approach blends tenets of conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. (For an example of this kind of research, see my article on The Rawhide Kid in the journal ImageTexT.)

One methodological concern for analysts who do similar work is this: how is the language in the comic best prepared for analysis? To analyze dialogue, we can create a transcript to account for typical features of conversation. For …

Does Mooch The Cat Speak French?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

In the 1990s, I lived in Athens, Georgia, where I was a doctoral student in linguistics. I read the newspaper almost every day, and I started reading a comic strip called Mutts, by Patrick McDonnell. I loved the strip — the sweetness and good intentions of the dog, Earl, was paired with the slightly self-centered cat, Mooch, who also happened to be not quite as smart as Earl in many ways. These two characters are neighbors who live in an urban area that is best characterized as a city in the northeastern United States.

In the series that this …

Transgender Transitions: Sex/Gender Binaries In The Digital Age, Kay Siebler

English Faculty Publications

Contemporary representations of transgendered people often reinforce rigid gender binaries of masculinity and femininity, leading transgendered individuals to feel they must seek out hormones or surgery to “correctly align” their bodies with their gender. Cultural texts (e.g., films, television, Internet, digital texts) reinforce this “pre-op or post-op” ideology for trans identity. The pre-op or post-op MTF or FTM binary mandates an alignment with the heterosexual gender system (feminine female or masculine male). In this article, the author focuses on trans identities and how representations codify the need or desire for surgery and hormones and examines the paradoxical reification of gender …

How Do The Absurd And The Realistic Blend In Comic Strips?, Frank Bramlett

English Faculty Publications

One of my favorite webcomics is Wondermark, by David Malki !. What fascinates me about the strip is how mundane, ordinary elements get combined with unexpected elements to create a strong sense of the absurd, the fantastic(al), and the unreal. Generally, the physical setting of the strip is Dickensian, often involving not much more than two or three characters in a library, parlor, or dining room. Occasionally, the characters will interact in a scientific laboratory or public place, like on a street corner. Often it’s the language of the strip that creates the absurd. The characters broach topics that …

Linguistics And The Study Of Comics , Frank Bramlett

Faculty Books and Monographs

Editor: Frank Bramlett, UNO faculty member.

Chapter 8: Linguistic Codes and Character Identity in Afro Samurai, authored by Frank Bramlett.

Do Irish superheroes actually sound Irish? Why are Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons funny? How do political cartoonists in India, Turkey, and the US get their point across? What is the impact of English on comics written in other languages? These questions and many more are answered in this volume, which brings together the two fields of comics research and linguistics to produce groundbreaking scholarship. With an international cast of contributors, the book offers novel insights into the role …