Comics and Language
Comics and Language
Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form
It has become an axiom in comic studies that “comics is a language, not a genre.” But what exactly does that mean, and how is discourse on the form both aided and hindered by thinking of it in linguistic terms? In Comics and Language, Hannah Miodrag challenges many of the key assumptions about the “grammar” and formal characteristics of comics, and offers a more nuanced, theoretical framework that she argues will better serve the field by offering a consistent means for communicating critical theory in the scholarship. Through engaging close readings and an accessible use of theory, this book exposes the problems embedded in the ways critics have used ideas of language, literature, structuralism, and semiotics, and sets out a new and more theoretically sound way of understanding how comics communicate.
Comics and Language argues against the critical tendency to flatten the distinctions between language and images and to discuss literature purely in terms of story content. It closely examines the original critical theories that such arguments purport to draw on and shows how they in fact point away from the conclusions they are commonly used to prove. The book improves the use the field makes of existing scholarly disciplines and furthers the ongoing sophistication of the field. It provides animated and insightful analyses of a range of different texts and takes an interdisciplinary approach. Comics and Language will appeal to the general comics reader and will prove crucial for specialized scholars in the fields of comics, literature, cultural studies, art history, and visual studies. It also provides a valuable summary of the current state of formalist criticism within comics studies and so presents the ideal text for those interested in exploring this growing area of research.
Miodrag unflinchingly challenges what she considers to be the false assumptions of comics scholarship: comics are a kind of language, comics are a kind of literature, words and images are equivalent in comics. She undercuts these claims with compelling arguments about the significant differences between written language and visual language. But Miodrag is doing more than merely hurling brickbats. Comics and Language provides a new critical framework for understanding comics form.
Hannah Miodrag’s Comics and Language is a powerful corrective to failures in the existing literature of comics studies around the use of language and offers new avenues for engaging with the scholarship of comics. Her close readings of specific works are insightful and succeed at what good criticism should do. After reading this book, I wanted to go pull volumes of George Herriman, Lynda Barry, and Posy Simmonds off the shelf and start rereading with renewed enthusiasm and an expanded attention to the language at work in the comics.
Hannah Miodrag is a postdoctoral fellow of English at the University of Leicester. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Comic Art, Studies in Comics, and PEER English: The Journal of New Critical Thinking.
