The Pictorial and Linguistic Features of Comic Book Formulas

Neff, William Albert. 1977. The Pictorial and Linguistic Features of Comic Book Formulas. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Denver, Denver, CO.

Neff compares the patterns of formal properties for comics in different narrative genres of Adventure, Romance, Mystery, and Alien Beings or States. He analyzes the fields of panel shape (vertical, horizontal, square, circle), angle of view (lateral, high, low), and type of shot (close, wide) in comic panels. He also looks at pragmatic sentence types and parts of speech of stressed words from the text of comics.

His results show distinctions in the "formulas" of different genres, showing that different genres do use differing patterns for their distributions of these fields, and he then describes his interpretations for what those forumlas indicate about the genre (and vice versa).

While I don't doubt that such patterns for genres exist, this study had numerous problems. The categories for analysis were a little broad (only wide and close shots?) and often washed over in coding (diagonal panels were grouped as either horizontal or vertical). The interpretations of the genres' formulas also seemed a little like just so stories.

However, I take this entire study with a grain of salt because the sample size of his analysis is so small. For each genre, he uses only two comic books (pamphlets). While he does get statistically significant results using chi-squares, he pools frequencies across books, which eliminates any variation across books with no way to analyze it. Shouldn't he be using averages for this?

Two books per genre, and limited categories in the fields of analysis, are far too little to really get a sense of the patterns of an entire genre. His total number of panels in all was only about 530. In comparison, I consider my study comparing 300 panels in each of 12 Japanese and 12 American paperbacks (Cross-Cultural Space) to have been small in scope, and have just initiated a study of at least 200 books of varying genres and countries.

While I greatly appreciate the attempt at doing such corpus analyses (and am actively doing more), and especially like seeing it as a "hidden treasure" in the history of this type of study, this one unfortunately lacks the scope to be taken seriously.

Camera angles and meaning

Kraft, Robert N. 1987. The influence of camera angle on comprehension and retention of pictorial events. Memory and Cognition 15 (4):291-307.

Kraft explores the semantic associations made to different camera angles (high, eye-level, low) in a four frame photo story. Subjects were asked to rate the story along a 7-point scale, use a recall test for remembering the order, and then a recognition task. Each story used two characters, which were contrasted in each frame position with differing angles in different story sequence types.

Overall, results dramatically supported that angle does correlate with semantic meaning when comparing how characters were discerned. Low angles support senses of shortness, weakness, afraid, timid, and passive, while high angles were thought of as tall, strong, unafraid, bold, and agressive. A lesser correlation was found to value judgements like good/bad. Eye level angles did not contrast between characters. These results seemed to be sustained across several experimental tasks.

In recall tasks, analysis did show that camera angles influenced a connotative meaning for how characters were remembered.

Explanations for this correlation claim it comes from of our experience with the visual world, such as how looking upward at taller people gives them a sense of power (like children to adults). An alternative view says that the different angles allow the viewer to see different things in the images, from which they draw the semantic implications.

If these results extend to drawings, it would be interesting to do further study on the semantic correspondences. I find it dubious to fully believe both of the reasonings above, at least in a universal sense. There is no semantics attached to the aerial view in Australian sand narratives, nor do fixed high angles in Japanese children's representations or ancient Asian graphics have any semantic correlation that such a theory would require.

Rather, this may simply be a case of learned conventions. We've built up these meanings by continually viewing them, particularly in movies. Or... the "visual world" explanation could be valid, but only in systems that allow for flexibility in viewpoints, not those that have fixed perspective. To be honest, I had always had doubts about claims that camera angles had semantic meanings, so I'm glad there's actually work that backs it up.

Panels as Attention Units

I stumbled across this article recently about how current theories of perception are similar to what magicians have been exploiting for years. Essentially, the idea is that we can only "see" what our attention is focused on at a given time. They liken it to a "spotlight" which roams around and only let's you take in certain things under its view. Though in the case of vision all the things out of the "spotlight" are still within your visual field. You just don't "see" them.

As I discuss in this video, panels in the visual language used in comics serve to facilitate this same sort of focusing of attention. Most of the time though, panels serve to exclude all relevant information except for the elements that need to be focused on, or at least clearly distinguish what is relevant from irrelevant. This lets panels provide a graphic manifestation of this mental "spotlight," allowing the author to control that attention instead of the reader's wandering eyes (which is one of the reason's I formally call panels "Attention Units").

This ties into the argument for why you don't want to overload a panel with too much stuff, because it becomes too hard to disentangle the attentionally important from unimportant elements. (If you still want to pack info in, inset panels help facilitate this honing of attention).

Even more, when you have too much in several panels sequentially, it becomes too difficult to track all the changes and carry-overs from one panel to another. This is what gives way to things like "parallel cutting." By switching back and forth between two (or more) scenes, you can highlight the individual aspects of each in panels without risking it becoming overlooked for other information or overloading the system. Of course, doing so introduces other processing demands on the visual grammar, but at least your attention is focused exactly on what is intended to be conveyed.