Speech Balloons Research Articles

Analisis Elemen Visual Pada Komik “Pupus Putus Sekolah”

Digital comics are currently gaining popularity among many people, especially teenagers. Not only serving as a form of entertainment, they can also be utilized as a means of conveying information. The objective of this research is to understand the use of visual elements in conveying messages and information through the comic "Pupus Putus Sekolah." This study employs a descriptive method, illustrating specific situations and describing facts and their relevance to the researched visual elements applied in the comic "Pupus Putus Sekolah" in a factual, detailed, sequential, and precise manner. The research relies on illustrative data, and the data collection technique involves observation or scrutiny of the visual elements used. The researcher utilizes the method of observation, listening, and reading the entire season and episodes of the comic "Pupus Putus Sekolah," noting essential information for data collection. Meanwhile, the analysis involves classifying the collected data into its types, analyzing and interpreting the data, presenting the analyzed data, and drawing conclusions. Based on the conducted analysis, the findings reveal that visual elements such as panels, perspectives, gutters, speech balloons, sound effects, illustrations, story, splash, motion lines, symbolism, and storytelling play a crucial role in influencing how the comic's narrative content is conveyed.

Automated inpainting of Tex Willer comics: adapting manga techniques for western comic transformation

Comic inpainting is essential for language localization and adapting comics into animations, involving the removal of speech boxes, textboxes, and sound effects while maintaining artistic integrity. This paper introduces an automated approach leveraging the Manga inpainting method by Xie et al., adapted for western comics like Tex Willer. Tex Willer comics, known for their fusion of Italian art and American Western imagery, pose unique challenges due to their distinct styles. Customized Manga Restoration and Structural Line Extraction codes are employed, along with automated mask generation using deep CNN-based speech balloon detection and segmentation. Our contributions include the development of a precise model tailored to Tex Willer Comics, resulting in visually coherent inpainting results. The paper follows a structured format, covering State-of-the-Art, methodology, results, and conclusions, aiming to streamline the process of western comic inpainting for professionals in the comics and animation industries.

Interview with Translator Edward Gauvin

Abstract In this interview, award-winning translator and author Edward Gauvin reflects on his practice as a translator of over four hundred graphic novels, including works by major French comics artists, illustrators, and scriptwriters, such as Gébé, Marjane Satrapi, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Emmanuel Guibert, Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Zeina Abirached, Christophe Blain, Philippe Druillet, Enki Bilal, Blutch, and so on. He discusses how he approaches the theoretical and practical problems he has encountered as a translator—from well-trodden topics like speech balloon fit to his dynamic understanding of genre fiction. He also offers an insider's perspective on translators’ (often precarious) position within the larger the comics industry and talks about his favourite translations, as well as his current and future projects.

Message Reaction As a Nonverbal Elements of Communication for Empathetic Conversation in CMC: Focusing on KakaoTalk ‘Speech Balloon Sympathy’

Message Reaction As a Nonverbal Elements of Communication for Empathetic Conversation in CMC: Focusing on KakaoTalk ‘Speech Balloon Sympathy’

Brogues and Blarney

Abstract From the earliest days, Irish characters have played a prominent role in American comics. The hero of Hogan’s Alley, the first American comic strip to feature a speech balloon, was an Irish child named Mickey Dugan, a.k.a. “The Yellow Kid”. Likewise, the star of Happy Hooligan, the first US comic strip to employ speech balloons on a regular basis, was Irish. Thus, not only are Irish characters important in the early history of American comics, their speech is too. The way that this was represented resembled existing portrayals in pop culture, involving respellings, non-standard grammar and lexical items deemed typical of the variety. While some of these continued to index Irishness in comics, others also emerged. Building on previous research, this study examines a corpus of American comics from numerous genres and publishing houses to offer the most comprehensive overview yet of Irish speech in the medium.

“Fourth‐wall breakiness or whatevs”: Presumed self‐awareness in American superhero comics

AbstractStudies on reflexivity in the field of comics studies have been scarce and, more often than not, disconnected from each other, which has resulted in overlapping, and sometimes even contradicting, classifications of reflexive devices. Therefore, this article analyzes different instances of self‐awareness in American superhero comics, as it has become quite a popular feature in recent years. In order to systematize the corpus of American comics which feature self‐aware characters, Pardo's theoretical model of reflexivity results highly advantageous due to the fact that its transmedia categories provide a useful framework to explore those elements which are particular to comics narration, such as panels, speech balloons, splash pages, and more of the like. At the same time, this theoretical model connects comics' self‐consciousness to the larger storytelling tradition of Western culture—after all, some of the most important studies on reflexivity stem from literary and film studies, from scholars such as Alter, Hutcheon, Waugh, and Stam, to mention a few. This article, then, provides a theoretical review of key definitions from the field of reflexivity before applying said categories to a corpus of American superhero comics which includes titles such as The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Black Hammer, and Empowered, as well as some Bat‐Mite strips and a few Deadpool and Harley Quinn issues. The analysis mainly focuses on the diegetic disruptions that self‐aware characters trigger in comics—particularly considering the formal elements of the medium—to prove that reflexivity, despite having been deemed as a tool to tackle serious existential and ontological issues in canonical works, operates as a bridge which brings readers as close as possible to the fictional realities in their favorite superhero comics.

LA TRADUCCIÓN DE LA NOVELA GRÁFICA: PERSPECTIVA SEMIOLÓGICA Y MULTIMODAL

LA TRADUCCIÓN DE LA NOVELA GRÁFICA: PERSPECTIVA SEMIOLÓGICA Y MULTIMODAL

Analysis of Maxim Violations on Japanese Comic Strip “Kariage Kun” Vol 49 and its Indonesian Translation

Humor could be created by violation of maxim of the cooperative principle as proposed by Grice. In Kariage Kun, a well-known Japanese humor comic, it is challenging to analyze what maxim violation is explored to create humor, as it represents a co-interplay between a series of images and text. This study aimed to analyze the pattern of maxim violation in source text from Kariage Kun vol 49 (from word level to sentence level) and to compare whether the pattern of maxim violation is similar or shifting in the Indonesian version. The result of this study shows that the author of the comic explored the violation of maxims to create humor. The violation took place on a single or combination of the maxim of quantity, the maxim of quality, the maxim of relevance, and the maxim of manner. Compared to the target text, there are not many (less than ten percent) shifting of the pattern of maxim violation in the target text. The shifting mostly occurred when the violation dealt with the ambiguity of typical cultural load in the source text, preservation of acceptability and readability for target readers in terms of translation technique, and limited space of speech balloon.

ЖАНРОВІ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ КОМІКСІВ, ЯКІ Є ТРАНСФОРМОВАНИМИ ВАРІАНТАМИ КЛАСИЧНИХ ТВОРІВ

In comics as multimodal narratives visual and verbal modes interact to create meaning. Colours play an important role in comics, the choice of warm or cold colour palette, as well as bright or muted, influences a reader’s perception and attitude to the described events. Comics have a number of narratological, stylistic, structural and other characteristics. Events in comics can be presented both with the help of a narrator (extradiegetic or intradiegetic) or nonnarratorially by means of images. Strategies of verbal representation, characteristic for comics, include narration boxes, speech balloons and thought bubbles. The temporal structure of the narrative in the analysed comics is linear with some flashbacks. Spatial indicators are incorporated into both verbal and visual components. Mediated focalisation is signaled by such cinematic devices as the over-the-shoulder shot and eyeline match. The analysed comics, which are transformed variants of classic fairy tales, contain modified initial and final fairy-tale formulas and well-known dialogues. Stylistic peculiarities of comics include onomatopoeia and ideograms, i.e. certain symbols with fixed meaning. Quantitative analysis of panel transition types in the analysed comics has demonstrated that in comics with a dynamic plot the action-to-action transition prevails, while in comics containing a detailed description of only several actions the moment-to-moment transition is the most widespread.

The shape of European jazz: On mute, mutable and pedagogical musical representations

Readers of comics can easily call to mind images of musical notation they have seen on the page. It is a cliché of the medium that a speech balloon bearing a pair of quarter notes usually hovers near a singing bird, and it is no less common that floods of eighth, quarter, half and whole notes emanate from a turntable speaker or the bell of a saxophone drawn inside the panel borders. Yet the ways in which musical notation and musical expression take shape on the comics page are highly contextualized. For those comics that move beyond stereotypical depictions of musical sounds, how musical notes and emanations are depicted on the page are closely connected with the theme, critical aspirations and sociocultural context of a given work. Focusing on the representation of Black American jazz music in particular, and its transatlantic resonance in Europe (Germany, France and Spain) during the twentieth century, this article investigates three divergent manifestations of this phenomenon. By analysing innovative examples of musical representation from Berlin (Jason Lutes), Total Jazz (Blutch) and Montoliu Plays Tete (Gani Jakupi and Miquel Jurado), a basic typology is offered of mute, mutable and pedagogical representations of music in which comics form, audience reception and social context are interconnected.

Lines from the Margins: Gond Artists Engage with McCloud

Studies on Indian comics have burgeoned by productively engaging with comics and scholarship from the Global North. Within this, however, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is commonly restricted to comics from the Global North, making critical voices from the Global South indistinct. Our paper attends to this gap by studying two Indian comics, Babasaheb Ambedkar (2021) and Bhimayana (2011), side by side. While both the comics are based on Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a crusader against the Hindu caste system, they follow disparate visualization. Babasaheb has a clean grid-gutter approach to represent its action-oriented, exciting story. Bhimayana, on the other hand, is drawn by Pardhan Gond artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam. Borrowing the metaphors from their ecosystem, the Vyams divide the page into panels using Digna, a border style used in Gond floor art. To identify character traits, they draw animal-imposed human bodies and bird- and scorpion-tail-shaped speech balloons, which are close to what Randy Duncan calls "hermeneutic images." In our essay, we show that through training in floor and wall art painting and commitment to the Gond way of living, the Vyams envisaged comic tools' utility differently and, in the process, expanded the definitions that McCloud provides.

COMIC READING ANDROID APPLICATION

Comics are a medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically takes the form of a sequence of panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia can indicate dialogue, narration, sound effects, or other information. The size and arrangement of panels contribute to narrative pacing. Comic-Ray is a Comic and Manga reading app in which a wide range of comics and mangas (many genres) will be available in pdf format. Comics have been around since at least the 19th century. The term manga is used in Japan to refer to both comics and cartooning. Outside of Japan, the word is typically used to refer to comics originally published in the country. In Japan, people of all ages read Manga. The medium includes works in a broad range of genres: action, adventure, business and commerce, comedy, detective drama, historical, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy sports and games, and suspense among others.

Japanese sound-symbolic words in global contexts: from translation to hybridization.

This paper explores the global reception and development of the artistic expression of onomatopoeia and mimetic words in modern and contemporary Japanese literary texts adopting the method of comparative literature. By analyzing sound-symbolic words and their translations in modern Japanese poetry and contemporary comics, the intercultural dialogues of these texts are examined and the emergence of hybrid onomatopoeia in global comic works is illuminated. The Japanese language is often noted for its richness of sound-symbolic words. In the literary world, modern poetry adopted and elaborated the use of these words from the late 19th century in its quest for a new style of poetry. In the early 20th century, poets developed the artistic expression of sound-symbolic words and succeeded in giving musicality to the "new-style poem". However, the translation of Japanese sound-symbolic words has always been problematic. Experimental uses of these words in modern poems were often untranslatable, making the translations incomprehensible or dull. Nevertheless, graphic narratives and their worldwide distribution changed that situation. Japanese comics (manga) has particularly developed the artistic expression of sound-symbolic words. Usually placed outside speech balloons, these words are elaborately depicted and are important elements of the panel/page layout. Notably, the global popularity of the genre developed a new phase of intercultural dialogue. As not every word has an equivalent or is translatable in the target language, translators have left sound-symbolic words untouched in the translated versions, putting translation aside. Thus, the combination of Japanese and the target language seems to influence the visual comprehension of sound effects among the readers. Through the examinations of some cases, this paper brings to light the emergence of some hybrid onomatopoeia and reveals that the "Third Space" formed by the translation and hybridization of manga is a dynamic field that creates a new culture.

Japanese sound-symbolic words in global contexts: from translation to hybridization

This paper explores the global reception and development of the artistic expression of onomatopoeia and mimetic words in modern and contemporary Japanese literary texts adopting the method of comparative literature. By analyzing sound-symbolic words and their translations in modern Japanese poetry and contemporary comics, the intercultural dialogues of these texts are examined and the emergence of hybrid onomatopoeia in global comic works is illuminated. The Japanese language is often noted for its richness of sound-symbolic words. In the literary world, modern poetry adopted and elaborated the use of these words from the late 19th century in its quest for a new style of poetry. In the early 20th century, poets developed the artistic expression of sound-symbolic words and succeeded in giving musicality to the “new-style poem”. However, the translation of Japanese sound-symbolic words has always been problematic. Experimental uses of these words in modern poems were often untranslatable, making the translations incomprehensible or dull. Nevertheless, graphic narratives and their worldwide distribution changed that situation. Japanese comics (manga) has particularly developed the artistic expression of sound-symbolic words. Usually placed outside speech balloons, these words are elaborately depicted and are important elements of the panel/page layout. Notably, the global popularity of the genre developed a new phase of intercultural dialogue. As not every word has an equivalent or is translatable in the target language, translators have left sound-symbolic words untouched in the translated versions, putting translation aside. Thus, the combination of Japanese and the target language seems to influence the visual comprehension of sound effects among the readers. Through the examinations of some cases, this paper brings to light the emergence of some hybrid onomatopoeia and reveals that the “Third Space” formed by the translation and hybridization of manga is a dynamic field that creates a new culture.

The Divergent of Ideational Metafunction Realizations in Novel Graphic Translation

This article is a translation product oriented study designed to investigate a systemic way of analyzing the divergent of Ideational metafunction realizations in novel graphic translation using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The objectives of this study are to identify divergent of ideational realizations in the translation and what cause them. The study is a descriptive qualitative with an embedded case study. The linguistics data of this study included all the lingual units of translation namely clauses, phrases and words in the monologue and dialogue of the main character in graphic novel V for Vendetta: Europe After Reign by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The content analysis is used to determine the divergent of Ideational metafunction meanings in translation by comparing the source texts and target texts. The results show the divergent of Ideational realizations in the translation occur in (1) experiential meaning (transitivity structure and lexical items) (2) logical meaning. The divergences in transitivity structure and lexical items are caused by idiom phrases, politeness strategy, and intertextuality. The logical subtype divert in clauses interdependency which caused by two factors namely (1) the translation not maintaining the structure of the source language by downgrading in clause rank and (2) the limitations of the speech balloon format.

Japanese sound-symbolic words in global contexts: from translation to hybridization.

This paper explores the global reception and development of the artistic expression of onomatopoeia and mimetic words in modern and contemporary Japanese literary texts adopting the method of comparative literature. By analyzing sound-symbolic words and their translations in modern Japanese poetry and contemporary comics, the intercultural dialogues of these texts are examined and the emergence of hybrid onomatopoeia in global comic works is illuminated. The Japanese language is often noted for its richness of sound-symbolic words. In the literary world, modern poetry adopted and elaborated the use of these words from the late 19th century in its quest for a new style of poetry. In the early 20th century, poets developed the artistic expression of sound-symbolic words and succeeded in giving musicality to the "new-style poem". However, the translation of Japanese sound-symbolic words has always been problematic. Experimental uses of these words in modern poems were often untranslatable, making the translations incomprehensible or dull. Nevertheless, graphic narratives and their worldwide distribution changed that situation. Japanese comics (manga) has particularly developed the artistic expression of sound-symbolic words. Usually placed outside speech balloons, these words are elaborately depicted and are important elements of the panel/page layout. Notably, the global popularity of the genre developed a new phase of intercultural dialogue. As not every word has an equivalent or is translatable in the target language, translators have left sound-symbolic words untouched in the translated versions, putting translation aside. Thus, the combination of Japanese and the target language seems to influence the visual comprehension of sound effects among the readers. Through the examinations of some cases, this paper brings to light the emergence of some hybrid onomatopoeia and reveals that the "Third Space" formed by the translation and hybridization of manga is a dynamic field that creates a new culture.

Performance beyond the panel: (S)exploitation and trafficking in Ram Devineni’s Priya and the Lost Girls

ABSTRACT Positioned at the intersection of comics studies and gender studies, this article examines the process in which the ‘performance’ of Ram Devineni’s comic Priya and the Lost Girls (2019), with a honing narrative intertwined with Augmented Reality, sensitizes its readers towards the issue of sex/human trafficking in India. Throughout the enigmatic journey, Priya, the superheroine in the narrative comes to rescue several women who have fallen into the trap of the sex trafficking racket either due to economical vulnerabilities or some other issues. Priya, in the leading role of a ‘Messiah’ liberates these victims and provides message at the end. The compelling visual metaphors, designs, speech balloons, and the audio elements in this comic pose compelling questions pertaining to the castrated and unsusceptible position of victims in the society and encourage maintaining healthy social relations among people. Within the postulates of gender studies, comics studies, and visual studies, our reading focuses on how comics medium in Ram Devineni’s Priya and the Lost Girls contributes to the process of social sensitization and extend awareness on the prevention, protection, and prosecution of sex trafficking in South Asian countries, especially in the Indian subcontinent.

‘It’s just a comic’ - Or is it? Addressing the past in Rutu Modan’s The Property

In this paper, we study Rutu Modan’s graphic novel, The Property (Ha-Nekhes in Hebrew), as a work which engages in a double exploration. First, we show how the story of Mica and her grandmother, who travel to Poland to reclaim a property lost in the Holocaust, is used by Modan to reflect on her medium and the artistic means it offers such as colour, speech balloons and onomatopoeic icons. Second, we analyse her self-conscious use of the toolkit of the comics artist to reflect on the past and its impact on the present. We investigate her conception of the past as a multilayered story, which consists of several individual stories that complement but also contest with each other, insinuating that there is no one authoritative version of the past. Finally, we argue that beyond the individual stories there are emotionally and politically charged national conflicts, which Modan evokes without referring to them directly. Our analysis sheds light on both the uniqueness of her work and the way it relates to other media texts which deal with similar topics.

Actualization of interjections’ potential in the English-language multimodal text (based on ‘Disney Magic Kingdom Comics’)

In the article the author analyzes interjections as signals of emotions in order to determine their functions in creating the perlocutionary effect of comics, which is especially relevant in the era of ever-increasing emotionalization of the global communicative space. The research is based on 'Disney Magic Kingdom Comics' anniversary collection, which presents comics created by various authors and artists, which thereby indicates the objective nature of the research. The block of empirical materials includes both interjections that autonomously form the speech acts of comic book characters, and those which pragmatic potential is revealed in combination with verbal and iconic components. The research is carried out on the basis of linguistic description methods of the qualitative-quantitative and functional-semantic characteristics of interjections. In the course of the study the author is revealed that interjections are able to participate in the formation of speech acts of comic book characters. Interjections in the imperative function represent directive speech acts. However, the most numerous and variable group is made up of interjections expressing the emotional state of the characters, which may be explained by the nature of interjections. Further on the concentration of interjections in speech balloons is recorded and it is revealed that interjections occupy 1/5 of the entire communicative space of each of the analyzed comics. Actualizing the emotional component of comics, interjections are involved in creating the maximum similarity between the formation of a speech act in a speech balloon and in live speech. Graphic tools and illustrations allow the reader to determine the intensity of the emotion transmitted by this or that interjection, and the nature of its expression. According to the results of the study, the author is found that comics, revealing the unity of narration and visual action, serve as a valid platform for actualization of the potential of interjections, which are an integral element of this type of a multimodal text.

CNN-based segmentation of speech balloons and narrative text boxes from comic book page images

Most of the recent research works on comic document images have focused on the reading and distribution of comics digitally due to the evolution of technologies. In this work, the extraction of narrative text boxes and speech balloons, which contain the conversations among comic characters along with their feelings, is presented. Due to the huge variety of drawing styles, the shape of these speech balloons is complex, and extraction is difficult. We present a shape-aware dual-stream convolutional neural network for the segmentation of narrative text boxes and speech balloons of various shapes. In our dual-stream architecture, an added shape module processes edge information of the speech balloons and narrative texts with the main module. Later, the concatenation of these two modules produces more accurate segmentation of speech balloons and narrative text boxes. The proposed method achieves significant performance improvements in terms of both region accuracy (mIOU) and boundary accuracy (F-measure and Hausdorff distance) compared to other state-of-the-art methods on various publicly available comic datasets (namely eBDtheque, DCM and Manga 109 dataset subset) in different languages. In addition, we have developed a new dataset (BCBId) for comics in Bangla, the eighth most spoken language in the world, and propose a method for the development of ground-truth images in a semiautomatic way.