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The BBC Explores the Visual Language Of Comics in Half-Hour Show

Published Tue, 07 May 2019 12:00:27 -0500

Michael Rosen has taken his radio show Word Of Mouth to look at the power of the language of comics, with comics theorist and cognitive researcher Neil Cohn, author of The Visual Language of Comics.

Can a series of images be 'read' like a series of words? What makes something a language? We have written, spoken and signed languages, but could the sequences of images we see in comics also qualify?

Produced for the BBC by Mair Bosworth, the half-hour show takes the language of comics used globally very seriously, from Dan Dare in the Eagle, to Joe Sacco's Palestine to how manga has different storytelling rues to Western comics, and how that's just like learning a language as well.

Neil Cohn, when studying language and communication, saw similarities with comic book structure and sees written language and comic book storytelling as using many of the same rules.

Such as how speech balloons, motion lines, love hearts work as affixes to drawn characters, to expand meaning, just as language uses them too. But in other languages, with changes of tense of plurality, the whole word can change, just as a character can suddenly have eyes change to hearts or dollar signs – internal substitution change meanings. And how identical lines can have totally different meanings – just as the word bank can mean a river bank or a money bank, depending on context.

Stuff like that. With pages like this…