Comic Pages Research Articles

‘You’re a refugee, are you not?’ ‘Extraordinary bodies’, monstrous outsiders and US refugee policies in superhero comics

In the 1970s and 1980s, comic book publishing giants DC and Marvel sought to diversify their cast of superheroes to better represent their US readership. While the publishers’ increasingly diverse cast of numerous US constituencies sought to reflect a shift towards greater representation, the flow of migrants/immigrants/refugees that marked the cold war years of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s remained largely out of the pages of mainstream comics. However, Marvel’s Chris Claremont and DC’s Marv Wolfman and George Perez introduced Vietnamese refugees to two teenage teams in the early 1980s. This article seeks to examine the way these characters, Marvel’s Karma and DC’s Thunder and Lightning, reflect US political rhetoric concerning the South East Asian refugee crisis in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Marvel’s and DC’s characters represent two poles of political thought concerning refugees; Karma is depicted as a victim of communism who is rescued by the United States, while Thunder and Lightning are villains who seek to upend US patriarchal relationships with Asian nations. Using comic studies’ scholarship and current discussions in critical refugee studies, this article argues that the depictions of these refugees reflect national discourse concerning the ideals of the United States.

Pelatihan Aplikasi Comic Page Creator Sebagai Media Pembelajaran Inovatif bagi Guru di Kota Medan

This community service aims to enhance teaching abilities by using mobile learning-based comic page maker applications as creative learning media. The execution of this service required planning, implementation, and assessment phases of training. Fourteen instructors from Madrasah Tsanawiyah in Medan participated in this service activity. The evaluation instrument used survey percentages and was analyzed descriptively. This service showed that 71% of teachers understood and could use the mobile learning-based comic page creator application in class. In addition, teachers were enthusiastic about exploring innovative skills and became creative using mobile/mobile applications. By mastering this application, the teacher can convey teaching material more concisely through pictures and text so that learning objectives are conveyed properly to students.

Development of comic page creator media based on Tumbuhkan, Alami, Namai, Demonstrasikan, Ulangi, Rayakan (TANDUR) learning for elementary school students

The demands of a teacher in this modern era in educating the nation's generation must be able to master IT to support effective learning activities. Data collection techniques used in this study were interviews, preliminary studies, observation, questionnaire collection, and documentation. This development research has gone through the validation stage with the acquisition of an average score of 96.36% from media experts with the criteria of "Very Eligible", material experts of 95% "very feasible", and linguists of 94.54% "very feasible" . In the limited trial the results were obtained, namely, for students at SDN Cikahuripan 01 the percentage of the questionnaire was 88% "very good" and SD Bojong Nangka 02 the percentage of the questionnaire was 90% with the "very good category". So that the comic page creator media based on TANDUR learning can be declared feasible to be tested on students.

Navigating the narrative: An eye‐tracking study of readers' strategies when Reading comic page layouts

AbstractIn multimedia stimuli (e.g., comics), the reader must follow a narrative in which text and image both contribute information, and artists may use more irregular layouts which must still be followed correctly. While previous work has found that the external structure (outlines) of panels is a major contributor to navigation decisions in comics, other studies have shown that panel content can affect reading order. The present studies use eye‐tracking to investigate these contributions further. In Experiment 1, the reading behaviors on six layout variations were compared. The influence of the external structure was replicated, but an effect of text location was also found for one layout type. Experiment 2 focused on variations of this particular layout, manipulating the location of text within critical panels. Panel content was a consistent effect for all variations. While most navigation decisions are made using the external structure, content becomes key when resolving ambiguous layouts.

Image over Text: "Visual Emphasis" and Understanding Comics

Beginning with its definition of comics, McCloud's Understanding Comics focuses on the medium's visual nature. Though the book offers a brief taxonomy of the word–picture relationship within panels, its emphasis on the image leads McCloud to overlook important ways that text can function on a comics page. Some of the book's most influential ideas, especially its theories of closure, panel transitions, and reader–character identification, are constrained, and at times undermined, by their visual emphasis. This essay argues that paying greater attention to text productively complicates McCloud's theories and expands our ideas about the comics reading process.

DESIGN OF COMIC BOOKS AS A MEDIA TO INTRODUCE CLEAN BEHAVIOR AND PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT FOR ELEMENTARY STUDENTS

Many of the damaged environment and pollution that occurs as well as the spread of disease is manmade. One of the factors is the bad habits of people who are not aware of the importance of maintaining cleanliness and the environment. Providing awareness about the importance of clean behavior and protecting the environment should be done from an early age to be more effective. Therefore, the purpose of this study project is to design a media to introduce clean behavior and protect the environment for children that is interesting and fun, namely through the medium of comics. The reason for choosing comics is expected to be able to overcome problems in understanding a material. The use of analogies and depictions of stories in life can help students to understand a material. In designing this comic book the author uses two techniques, traditional and digital. There are several stages in the design, the pre-production process including idea search, literature study, and analysis, then the production process including script and storyboard design, sketching, inking, scanning, and editing, and the last post-production is publication or exhibition. This design resulted in a comic book entitled "Cerita Andi dan Kawan-kawan", A5 size, and a complete of 55 black and white comic pages. The comic book is made with a softcover model using 260 ivory paper, while the contents of the comic book use 70 gram HVS paper. The results of this study project are expected to be able to raise the awareness of elementary students to protect the environment

Supergirl: Contemporary feminist reboot of a hapless DC Comic helpmate

The feminist heroine Supergirl aired in the CW Television Network and the series illustrates how a turn to the past or retro look can create new realities, although not necessarily authentically aligned with its original version. This article shows the evolution of the heroine from the pages of DC Action Comics in May 1943 through different mediums to the present day, discussing the impact of the different times and contexts of writers, producers and audiences.

A comic page for the first isomorphism theorem

Given a homomorphism between algebras, there exists an isomorphism between the quotient of the domain by its kernel and the subalgebra in the codomain given by its image. This theorem, commonly known as the first isomorphism theorem, is a fundamental algebraic result. Different problems have been identified in its instruction, mainly related to the abstraction inherent to its content and to the lack of conceptual models to improve its understanding. In response to this situation, in this paper, we present an illustration that explores the narrative and graphical resources of comics with the aim of describing the set-theoretic elements that are involved in the proof of this theorem.

No laughing matter!? Analyzing the Page Layout of Instruction Comics

ABSTRACT The study reported in this paper analyzes the specific genre of ‘instruction comics’ with regard to typical patterns of comic book pages. As a sequential-pictorial genre with a narrative as well as instructive character, ‘instruction comics’ have recently and increasingly been used in education as a novel way to communicate, for instance, health-related information. The corpus for this study includes 37 single-page first-aid comics that all show how to help a person who is choking, i.e. how to perform what is generally known as the Heimlich manoeuvre. To understand how this procedure is presented visually and how this presentation is similar to the layout of typical pages of comic books and graphic novels, the corpus is annotated with a multi-level annotation scheme that has been developed to annotate and analyse the page layout of visual narratives. The annotation scheme includes formal descriptions to synergistically analyse the complexity and variety of various comic genres, with specifications for typical comic page grids and the use of framing, inset panels, or captions. The paper presents and critically discusses the results of the corpus annotation with regard to the specific multimodal design choices in the corpus of choking comics.

How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

Automatic Comic Generation with Stylistic Multi-page Layouts and Emotion-driven Text Balloon Generation

In this article, we propose a fully automatic system for generating comic books from videos without any human intervention. Given an input video along with its subtitles, our approach first extracts informative keyframes by analyzing the subtitles and stylizes keyframes into comic-style images. Then, we propose a novel automatic multi-page layout framework that can allocate the images across multiple pages and synthesize visually interesting layouts based on the rich semantics of the images (e.g., importance and inter-image relation). Finally, as opposed to using the same type of balloon as in previous works, we propose an emotion-aware balloon generation method to create different types of word balloons by analyzing the emotion of subtitles and audio. Our method is able to vary balloon shapes and word sizes in balloons in response to different emotions, leading to more enriched reading experience. Once the balloons are generated, they are placed adjacent to their corresponding speakers via speaker detection. Our results show that our method, without requiring any user inputs, can generate high-quality comic pages with visually rich layouts and balloons. Our user studies also demonstrate that users prefer our generated results over those by state-of-the-art comic generation systems.

THE INTEGRATION OF PROJECT-BASED LEARNING (PBL) IN EDUCATION 4.0 TOWARD EFL STUDENTS’ ACTIVITIES

This research aims to realize the implementation and integrated project-based learning (PBL) activities in education 4.0 towards EFL students’ activities. This study uses qualitative methods as a framework for analyzing and collecting data. The data were obtained from observations and interviews. The results showed that the use of Google Classroom, Comic Page Creator, and Learning Apps can complement projects in the EFL class; the use of Google Classroom, Comic Page Creator, and Learning Apps can help students access the material and complete the Project; and most students integrating PBL into Education 4.0 can improve their English language skills.

"I Am Always Amazed About What I Find Out When I Get on the Ground": Joe Sacco On, Before, and After the Page

Joe Sacco was interviewed as a keynote event during the second Amsterdam Comics Conference Drawing Yourself in and out of It in 2018. The acclaimed Maltese-American cartoonist spoke with three interviewers, each focusing on a particular aspect of his artistic and journalistic practice. Aimee de Jongh, a successful comics artist from the Netherlands, started by inviting Sacco to talk about his work in the field and his research habits. Comics scholar Rik Spanjers then engaged with Sacco about the ways in which he creates comics pages out of his experiences in the field. Historian Kees Ribbens concluded the interview by inquiring about the impact of Sacco's work on the conflicts and histories that it documents.

The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes in Contemporary Comics

The Thought Bubble and Its Vicissitudes in Contemporary Comics Vera J. Camden (bio) In a 2017 New York Times article, Jonah Bromwich asks the question: "Why are all of our words in bubbles?" Pointing to the decision by Apple, Facebook, and Twitter to put all messages in the comics form of bubbles, he notes how the rounded edges convey a softer, more receptive graphic format in which to receive information. So, Bromwich consults comics expert Scott McCloud, who explains the psychology of such a graphic design decision: "bubbles created a consistent amount of negative space around words, which was desirable from a graphic standpoint." Bromwich then suggests, "The rounded edges of text bubbles also gave messages a soft, friendly connotation. That's an element especially useful in texted communication, where tone and body language are absent" (2017). Such negative space in the text bubble cushions the ambiguity or other anxious effects of uncontained text, softening the sharp edges of letters by friendly, rounded shapes. The rounded shapes of a Facebook Messenger or iMessage text derive from the comics page; the rounded shapes of thought bubbles and speech balloons draw forth "tone and body language." Yet the thought bubble and the speech balloon are quite distinct devices and serve very different functions in the comics medium. My discussion of the vicissitudes of thought bubbles pivots on the uniqueness of this comics convention. As I take up the particularly embattled fate of the thought bubble in contemporary comics, my claim will be that the current, demonstrable trend in mainstream comics publishing to banish this friendly and familiar vehicle of expression in comics not only limits the expressive range of comics as a medium, but also, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, reveals a reaction against and a purging of affect and thought itself from the comics page. I will conclude by gathering up a few [End Page 603] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Sina Grace, Nothing Lasts Forever, 2017, p. 77. [End Page 604] hopeful and creative examples of contemporary comics that deliberately resist the trends of corporate comics publishers. While keeping up with current comics style, these comics artists deliberately retain the centrality of the thought bubble and the complex internal life to which it points. The parallel grammar of comics and text messages juxtaposed on the page from Sina Grace's graphic memoir, Nothing Lasts Forever, shows the thought bubble and the speech balloon in spontaneous reciprocity (Figure 1). But this dynamic also highlights that the two devices are different: they come from different places in the comics' character and they work differently in the narrative progression. The thought bubble precedes the text message. It is literally in a bubble and private—we can see rotating bubbles when someone is typing a response to our message, suggesting the other person is now thinking. The text message encapsulated in a shape akin to the speech balloon records thought—as in diary keeping—but it is not thought. The text message has the status of speech in this comic. It aims to replicate speech with its back and forth pattern. Thought, on the other hand, leads to more thought, associatively, and unless it is put into words and speech, privately. The play between the thought bubbles and the speech balloons in this panel capture how the character's internal anxiety, desire for support, and hope for a response gets conveyed in speech in the immediacy of the move from internal to external. As suggested by this comics panel, Grace debates whether or not to text his ex-boyfriend, Cash. Through the dialogue of texts, he realizes that he needs Cash. The thought bubbles provide access to the internal pain of the character and his neurotic thoughts, while his texts translate almost instantaneously into text message "speech balloons" that reach out to his friend. Both devices reveal human motivation, both depict human desire, and both, as Grace says, "advance the narrative, in any event" (2017, p. 77). But this contemporary example clearly illustrates the contrast between the two different domains of process and product. Thought bubbles have traditionally functioned in comics to offer insight into the life of a character even...

CBCS - Comic Book Cover Synopsis: Generating Synopsis of a Comic Book with Unsupervised Abstractive Dialogue

Document analysis which aims at understanding the semantics of the document is an active field of research in today’s world. Growth of graphical novels such as comics is magnificent, by incorporating digitized and digital-born comics. This enables a machine intelligence to recognize the key elements present in a comic book story. Analyzing comic story book is complex as they contains text drawings, balloons embedded in a comic page and these elements are considered as key components of a comic The transition in digital era has made the people to have a different approach in reading out the books through comics and with the world moving towards automation, the proposed work incorporated deep learning approaches to analyze the key components contained in comics. This work aimed to design a model to automatically learn to extract the comic specific components and further identification of text has been done using pre-trained language recognition models. The main objective of the proposed work is to have quick and crisp understanding of a comic story. Hence, the proposed work designed to generate the unsupervised abstractive dialogues representing the whole story without losing the essence of it. The proposed work has attained an improved performance over traditional method for generating the abstractive summarized story and state-of-the-art method for comic component detection.

BİREYLERİN SOSYAL MEDYADAKİ KİMLİK PROFİLLERİNDE TOPLUMSAL CİNSİYET FARKLILIKLARI: AFGANİSTAN VE TÜRKİYE FACEBOOK KULLANICILARI ÜZERİNDE KARŞILAŞTIRMALI BİR ANALİZ

The development of technologies provides several changes to be held in the daily life of individuals. Today, social media is being used increasingly. However, the infrastructures of information and communication technologies of different geographies or different countries are not yet widely used. Their level of use varies in terms of features like individuals’ religious beliefs, thoughts, lifestyles, cultures, etc. For this reason, it display activity by reflecting different usage levels and visibility features within different social relationship patterns. Thus, many social relationships and interactions are maintained through information and communication technologies. Therefore, it is seen that individuals interact by changing their profiles for different reasons during the use of information technologies and social media. They give real and unrealistic individual characteristics information in the profile. In this context, the concept of identity becomes important. Many users can communicate with fake IDs by hiding their real identity. Therefore, it becomes important to investigate and reveal why and how fake IDs are used. In this study, the reasons and effects of creating fake identities are investigated by considering the gender differences of Facebook users in Afghanistan and Turkey. As a result of this study, as in other countries, Facebook users in Afghanistan and Turkey create fake identities and their reasons differentiate. Most of the young women in Afghanistan use fake identities and multiple profiles because of fear, family and community pressure, insecurity, while women in Turkey use fake profiles to follow their boyfriend, to enter comic pages and to engage in deceptive actions. Additionally, through photographs and other images used in advertisements in social media, social gender often introduces role determinants as social norms. However, it is one of the most interesting outcomes for users to express their gender differently in a virtual environment.

Experimental Narrative Strategies in Comics

The article is devoted to modern comics, which are considered as a kind of “laboratory” for experiments in the field of visual narratives, focusing on the construction and dynamics of their spatial-temporal continuum. The entire perceptual “space” of comics is significative (Fresnault-Derruelle); all elements of this space constitute the narrative. It is not only about the “space” of a book or a magazine; contemporary comics are intensely exploring new media, a key feature of which is interactivity. The article examines both the “classic” way of presenting visual material (comics in the form of book, “codex”), and the web-comics, which are similar to scrolls in their form, and have a new (compared to books) potential for interactivity. The article provides a systema­tic comparison of the ways of chronotope organizing in comics and screen arts (cinema, video art, media projects, etc.), and draws an analogy between the behavioral models of a comic book reader and a gamer going through the plot of a video game. One of the main theses of the article is the following: even though there are significant differences between the formats of comic books and web comics, there is a basic commonality in the nature of their impact on the rea­der. The images on the pages of comics and the spacings between them create an illusion of time through the mechanism of “closure” (S. McCloud). Therefore, the real interaction between space and time is pos­sible only with an active participation of the viewers who add their corporeality to this equation, matching it with the visual and textual register. In this way, in the process of the “assembling” perception of co­mics, the corporeal and the intellectual merge.

Comic-guided speech synthesis

We introduce a novel approach for synthesizing realistic speeches for comics. Using a comic page as input, our approach synthesizes speeches for each comic character following the reading flow. It adopts a cascading strategy to synthesize speeches in two stages: Comic Visual Analysis and Comic Speech Synthesis. In the first stage, the input comic page is analyzed to identify the gender and age of the characters, as well as texts each character speaks and corresponding emotion. Guided by this analysis, in the second stage, our approach synthesizes realistic speeches for each character, which are consistent with the visual observations. Our experiments show that the proposed approach can synthesize realistic and lively speeches for different types of comics. Perceptual studies performed on the synthesis results of multiple sample comics validate the efficacy of our approach.

New Choices of the Comics Creator

Theorisations of comics and graphic narrative have tended to focus on readership rather than creation. Even McCloud’s seminal Understanding Comics (1993) focuses on interpretation, though the later Making Comics (2006) pays more attention to the work of the creator. McCloud incorporates into his theory five ‘choices of the comic creator’: choices of Moment, Frame, Image, Word and Flow. However, these may not be the most salient choices for a creator to take; nor do they necessarily occur in that order. Using these alongside McCloud’s other notions (notably ‘transitions’) with a group of sixth form comics creators led me to reconsider approaches to comics creation, as well as reading, in my PhD research ‘Making Meanings with Comics: A Functional Approach to Graphic Narrative’. In this work, I take models of meaning-making from the functional linguistics of M.A.K. Halliday, and adapt that framework to specify how comics make meaning. As a linguistics-inspired approach, this takes seriously the production of meaning as well as the reception. In this graphic article, I give a brief illustrated overview of this view of comics meaning making, and present a set of new ‘choices for the comics creator’ which arose from it. These new choices include: Choice of Character Design, Choice of ‘Verb Style’, Choice of Framing, Choice of Density, Choice of Metonymy. I offer a critique of McCloud’s choices, and account for the proposed alternatives, indicating the theory that led to them with illustrative examples, drawn in the main from my own comics created in that sixth form workshop alongside students. The article is drawn digitally and incorporates extracts of comics pages as well as diagrams to illustrate the approach to comics that informs the five ‘choices’ described.