Metaphors go boom!

Derek Kirk Kim uses a fun and common conceptual metaphor in today's installment of his ongoing series "Praxis & Allies" (which you should be reading). Here, the character's head explodes on discovering his crush actually likes him.

"Conceptual metaphor" is a notion that's been prevalent in some circles of linguistics for the last 30 years, and is a phenomena where one domain of ideas is mapped onto another. The metaphor that Derek uses is "Emotion is Hot Fluid in a Container" — the emotion constitutes "pressure" in the head (the container) that then can "erupt" when it "overflows." Emotion isn't actually hot fluid in a container, but we map the idea of emotions onto the domain of a container.

There have actually been several papers written on this topic with regard to comics, usually describing Anger. The common visual sign of smoke coming out of an angry character's ears directly links into this "Anger is Hot Fluid in a Container" metaphor. But, here Derek uses it just for an emotional overload. A similar usage was done years ago in Journal Comic by Drew Weing.



As has been argued by many, using these sort of cross-domain metaphors is a great way for the graphic form to visually portray things (like emotions) that aren't otherwise visible.

Review: Metaphor and Metonymy in Comics Storytelling

Kukkonen, Karin. 2008. Beyond Language: Metaphor and Metonymy in Comics Storytelling. English Language Notes 46 (2):89-98.

This paper from the literature point of view explores meaning-making in comics, particularly from metonymy and metaphor. It argues that the "semiotic" approaches of European comics scholarship that dissect parts into structrualist "minimal units" are insufficient to capture the complexity of comics' meanings, and is thereby a tacit argument against viewing "comics as a language" in the semiotic sense.

(Groensteen takes this same perspective against minimal units, though maintains the "comics as a language equation. I actually think that "minimal units" are *kind of* there, but it's beside the point, since linguistics hasn't really been concerned about "minimal units" since around the 1950s...)

While she does explain and support the cognitive linguistics view of metaphor taken from Lakoff and Turner, she does not actually use it in exposition. Most of the examples of metaphor and metonymy she cites are through a close reading of Watchmen, involving large scale metaphors on the scale of plots, themes, and motifs, and doesn't ever cite the correspondences of one "coneptual domain to another" that conceptual metaphor entails.

Her view of metonymy is equally broad. For part-whole metonymy she cites scenes where a whole understanding of an environment is given across multiple panels. This would imply that all instances where multiple characters are shown in their own panels but part of the same broader environment (what I call "Environmental-Conjunction") are metonymic, because they construct a broader whole by only seeing the parts. This is a curious proposition that I (mostly) like, though one that seems at least partially limited by not having a robust view on the broader narrative grammar for how sequential images are comprehended.