Teaching People to Read Comics: The Impact of a Visual Literacy Intervention on Comprehension of Educational Comics

Evidence suggests that children’s abilities to comprehend information can vary, which may lead to miscommunication and impact on future life outcomes. Previous research suggests that visual literacy interventions may be helpful for children who need to interpret visual sources of information. Recently there has been renewed interest in the potential of comics as assistive tools in pedagogical settings, which are a highly visual medium. However, no research has yet investigated whether a visual literacy intervention can assist children in their comprehension of comics. The current experiment set out to determine if a visual literacy intervention constructed around comics would improve comprehension of educational comics in primary school children. The study consisted of a pre- and post-intervention procedure. Previous comic reading experience was included as a variable. In each session, comprehension and inferential understanding was assessed. Both comprehension and inferential understanding improved following the comics literacy intervention. These results demonstrate that visual literacy instruction can enhance comprehension of educational comics. Findings can be applied to educational settings and have potential for improving educational outcomes

Misty, Spellbound and the lost Gothic of British girls’ comics.

This article is a case study of the 1970s British girls’ comics Spellbound (DC Thomson, 1976–1977) and Misty (IPC, 1978–1980). These mystery anthology comics followed the more famous American horror comics from publishers like EC Comics - but were aimed at pre-teen girls. The article situates these comics with respect to Gothic critical theory and within the wider landscape of British girls’ comics. Firstly, it closely considers and compares the structure and content of their stories with respect to theories of the terror and horror Gothic. It discovers that both comics offer similar fare, with a subversive streak that undercuts established horror archetypes. The article then looks closely at both titles’ aesthetics and their use of the page to draw comparisons. It uses comics theory and Gothic cinematic theory to demonstrate that the appearance of Misty is more strongly Gothic than the aesthetic of Spellbound. Finally, it considers a selection of stories from both comics and analyses their common themes using Gothic critical theory. It argues that both comics rework Gothic themes into new forms that are relevant to their pre-teen and teenage readers. It concludes by summarising the study’s findings and suggesting that these comics offer a “Gothic for Girls” that is part cautionary tale and part bildungsroman. This article is published as part of a collection on Gothic and horror

Searching for a Common Ancestry: Linguistic and Biological Analogies in Comic Art

Sometimes comic book readers randomly encounter images in a comic that closely resemble images in other comics. This artwork could appear to the reader to have been copied, even directly 'lifted' from older or better-known comics. Sometimes, however, it does seem like any similarities have been generated independently, by chance or serendipity. In this note we draw on the work of Umberto Eco, William Lethaby, Walter Benjamin and Carl Jung to describe a multidisciplinary conceptual framework to analyse similar images using a heuristic approach involving two analogy concepts drawn from two different disciplines: linguistics and biology. When the origin of similarity between images is well documented, we propose the linguistic analogy approach can explain the phenomenon of recurrent images. When the similarity between two images appears to be unexplainable, or the result of mere chance, we propose that the concept of biological analogy can be helpful to explain the superficial resemblance of elements that have different origins

Braided geographies: bordered forms and cross-border formations in refugee comics

This article offers a close analysis of a trilogy of ‘refugee comics’ entitled ‘A Perilous Journey’, which were produced in 2015 by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, to conceive of comics as a bordered form able to establish alternative cross-border formations, or ‘counter-geographies’, as it calls them. Drawing on the work of Martina Tazzioloi, Thierry Groensteen, Jason Dittmer, Michael Rothberg and others, the article argues that it is by building braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces, both past and present, that refugee comics realise a set of counter-geographic and potentially decolonising imaginaries. Through their spatial form, refugee comics disassemble geographic space to reveal counter-geographies of multiple synchronic and diachronic relations and coformations, as these occur between different regions and locations, and as they accumulate through complex aggregations of traumatic and other affective memories. The article contends that we need an interdisciplinary combination of the critical reading skills of humanities scholars and the rigorous anthropological, sociological and theoretical work of the social sciences to make sense of the visualisation of these counter-geographic movements in comics. It concludes by showing how the counter-geographies visualised by refugee comics can subvert the geopolitical landscape of discrete nation-states and their territorially bound imagined communities

Putting humour on display

In the not-too-distant past, exhibitions allowed the public to see works of art which would not normally be accessible, displaying unique and precious masterpieces otherwise hidden under lock and key or uniting artefacts from far-flung and hard-to-get-to collections. But nowadays Hogarth, Rowlandson, and the artwork of their modern-day descendants are only a Google click away. Why then should we still mount exhibitions or, specifically, put the humour of comic strips on display? Initially, as Benjamin knew, there is always the allure of the authentic object whose presence crosses time and space. But with the comics world there are further possibilities that allow us to create interactive, three-dimensional experiences that play on the visitor as an intuitive component part. This chapter will describe these possibilities before assessing recent comics-related displays, including The Hunterian’s Comic Invention (Glasgow, 2016) and Kelvingrove’s Frank Quitely: The Art of Comics (Glasgow, 2017). Twenty-first-century exhibitions such as these need to bring humour of the past into the present and to do something that a modern stay-at-home laptop cannot

Segmentation of panels in d-Comics

\u3cp\u3eFor over a hundred years, comics is presented on paper-based carriers such as magazines and books. With the development of new technologies, the comics industry has the opportunity to embrace a new carrier—the digital environment in electronic devices. However, due to the difference of the carrier, there exist differences between d-Comics (digital comics) and printed comics. One main difference is how the carrier creates segmentation of a sequence of comic panels: the segmentation created by paper is static and exclusive, while the segmentation created by screen-based electronic device may not be static nor exclusive because the same comics can be accessed through electronic devices with different screen sizes. This article describes an online experiment conducted to investigate how panel sequences are segmented in d-Comics. By analyzing the collected data from 80 participants with 4 panel sequences, two types of segmentation of panels in d-Comics were identified and discussed. This finding will further contribute to the design of d-Comics.\u3c/p\u3