Speech Balloons Research Articles

The Veil in Western Eyes and the Politics of (Mis)Representation in Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner: A Graphic Novel

This study attempts to explore the (mis)representation of the Afghan women by western feminists with a special reference to Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner: A Graphic Novel. This study entails the use of the concepts of postcolonial feminism as theorized by Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, Leila Ahmed and Lila Abu-Lughod as well as postcolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall. Moreover, Edward Said’s concept of ‘Orientalism’ will be used to unravel how the portrayal of Muslim women in the graphic novel resulted in the ‘Othering’ of third world women, creating a third world difference. As per the alliances of graphic fiction with postmodern critical approaches and different academic disciplines, the study will also explain the significance of all medium specific features of the graphic narrative like page layout, panel design, speech balloons, narratorial captions, and sound effects. The functions of filmic techniques used in graphic narrative like camera angle shots and the mise en scene will be thoroughly examined as well in order to support the main argument of the study – mainly criticizing the negative stereotyping of Muslim women in the selected text.

COMICS AS A TRANSMEDIAL PHENOMENON: FROM A PRINTED TO A DIGITAL MEDIUM

Comics have recently attracted the increased attention of theorists as a very dynamic and fast-growing genre. A characteristic feature of contemporary comics is their transmediality, i.e., exceeding the boundaries of the printed page and transforming to digital narratives. Transition to a digital medium gives a number of advantages, including the possibility of using different display modes, deeper immersion in the fictional world, greater degree of interactivity. This paper examines comics, which are adaptations of the classic fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, identifies intertextual references and modifications of the comics versions. Intertextual references can be traced at the level of comics titles, names of the characters and their characteristics, semi-quotes, which paraphrase the original texts, besides, comics have a different temporal and spatial setting, they extend the scope of the storyworld. Particular attention has been paid to the page layout, such comics-specific features as panels, frames, speech balloons, speed lines, emanata, and onomatopoeic words. Print and digital comics are analysed using narratological and multimodal approaches. The analysis includes such narratological issues as narratorial and nonnarratorial strategies of representation, the temporal and spatial structure of a narrative, internal and external focalisation, as well as focalisation-marking devices (the eyeline match, the over-the-shoulder shot, the high-angle shot). A comic is a multimodal narrative, combining several modes, mainly visual and verbal. The aural mode is represented in comics by linguistic and visual signs, e.g., jagged borders of a speech balloon or the size and boldness of letters. Special attention has been given to the interaction between visual and verbal modes, in particular to the text-image relations. Our analysis has identified such types of the text-image relations as specification, exemplification, and enhancement. Comics have recently attracted the increased attention of theorists as a very dynamic and fast-growing genre. A characteristic feature of contemporary comics is their transmediality, i.e. exceeding the boundaries of the printed page and transforming to digital narratives. Transition to a digital medium gives a number of advantages, including the possibility of using different display modes, deeper immersion in the fictional world, greater degree of interactivity. This paper examines comics, which are adaptations of the classic fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, identifies intertextual references and modifications of the comics versions. Intertextual references can be traced at the level of comics titles, names of the characters and their characteristics, semi-quotes, which paraphrase the original texts, besides, comics have a different temporal and spatial setting, they extend the scope of the storyworld. Particular attention has been paid to the page layout, such comics-specific features as panels, frames, speech balloons, speed lines, emanata, and onomatopoeic words. Print and digital comics are analysed using narratological and multimodal approaches. The analysis includes such narratological issues as narratorial and nonnarratorial strategies of representation, the temporal and spatial structure of a narrative, internal and external focalisation, as well as focalisation-marking devices (the eyeline match, the over-the-shoulder shot, the high-angle shot). A comic is a multimodal narrative, combining several modes, mainly visual and verbal. The aural mode is represented in comics by linguistic and visual signs, e.g., jagged borders of a speech balloon or the size and boldness of letters. Special attention has been given to the interaction between visual and verbal modes, in particular to the text-image relations. Our analysis has identified such types of the text-image relations as specification, exemplification, and enhancement.

Improving student’s complex problem solving through LAPS-Talk-Ball learning integrated with interactive games

One of the competencies needed currently is non-routine competency in solving a complex problem. Students with complex problem solving will be able to identify the complex problem, understand to review related information, and create solutions for the problems. However, the improvement of complex problem-solving abilities lacks attention. This phenomenon occurs when students are given problem-solving, students have not been able to understand the problem, plan solutions, and provide solutions to problems. To overcome these problems, the LAPS-Talk-Ball learning model integrated with interactive games that guide the students in solving problems was implemented by using interactive games and speech balloons to stimulate each student to express their ideas. This research is quantitative experimental research to determine the success of the LAPS-Talk-Ball learning model integrated with android-based interactive games in training complex problem-solving students using saturated sampling and non-equivalent control group research designs. From the results of gain test results high improvement category, which means that the LAPS-Talk-Ball learning model integrated with android-based interactive games can train the complex problem-solving abilities of students.

The narrative functions of sound-symbolic words in comics and graphic novels

ABSTRACT A story in a comic book employs different visual elements such as images, text, speech balloons, caption boxes, symbols, and sound effects. These elements work in harmony to convey the narrative to the reader. The Sound-Symbolic Words (SSWs), popularly studied as onomatopoeias, represent various sounds to enhance the visual narrative. This paper presents an analysis of examples from popular comics and graphic novels to provide an understanding of SSWs beyond their usage for conveying sound. It investigates the contribution of SSWs to carry forward the narrative, thus bringing SSWs to the forefront at par with image and text. This study attempts to redefine the role of SSWs and their significance in visual narratives. Various narrative functions of SSWs are identified and named as temporal-marker, spatial-marker, action-marker, emotion-marker, and identity-marker. The analysis helps to draw inferences about represented sound and its importance in printed comics. The study opens up possibilities for comic book artists to deliberate on the idea of SSWs as a narrative element and to implement them creatively to produce better visual narratives.

A learning approach with incomplete pixel-level labels for deep neural networks

Learning with incomplete labels in Neural Networks has been actively investigated these last years. Among different kinds of incomplete labels, we investigate incomplete pixel-level labels which are tackled in many concrete problems. One of the challenges for incomplete pixel-level labels is the missing information at local-level. Most of the current researches with incomplete labels in Neural Network focus on the incompleteness of global labels, only a few works focus on the incompleteness of local labels. To deal with the local incompleteness, we propose a learning approach which uses two dynamic weighted maps in parallel: one for object pixels and another one for background pixels. The two maps are integrated into the loss function of the target Neural Networks, to optimize the model by the present labels and to minimize the damage of the missing labels. We validate our approach on the speech balloon extraction problem in comic book images. Our approach uses the output of a balloon extraction algorithm as incomplete labels. The results are comparable with the state of the art supervised approach with manual labels. The results are very promising because our method does not require any manual labels. In addition, we apply our method to the medical image segmentation task to confirm the generalization of our approach.

“It’s Showtime, Synergy!”: Musical Sequences in Jem and the Holograms

This article discusses how the musical sequences (including concerts, rehearsals, and music videos) in Jem and the Holograms (Thompson and Campbell, 2015) depart from the conventions of the rest of the comic. Artist Sophie Campbell uses paneling techniques including bleeds and aspect-to-aspect closure to give these sequences a disorienting quality of occurring out of the regular time scheme of the comic. She presents the music as a physical element in the scenes: her song clouds float in the foreground of the image, similar to speech balloons but belonging to the realm of art instead of text. These song clouds help guide the reader through the scenes, by both separating the images into their constituent parts, and guiding the reader as to the order those parts should be read in.

Extraction of Semantic Content and Styles in Comic Books

Digitisation of comic books would play a crucial role in identifying new areas in which digital comics can be used. Currently, existing systems in this domain lack the capacity to achieve complete digitisation. Digitisation requires a thorough analysis of the semantic content within comic books. This can be further sub-categorised as detection and identification of comic book characters, extraction and analysis of panels as well as texts, derivation of associations between characters and speech balloons, and analysis of different styles of reading. This paper provides an overview of using several object-detection models to detect semantic content in comics. This analysis showed that, under the constraint of limited computational capacity, YOLOv3 was the best-suited model out of the models evaluated. A study of text extraction and recognition using Optical Character Recognition, a method for determining associable speech balloons, as well as a distance-based approach for associations between characters and speech balloons are also presented here. This association method provides an increased accuracy compared to the Euclidean distance-based approach. Finally, a study on comic style is provided along with a learning model with an accuracy of 0.89 to analyse the reading order of comics.

Connecting Current Literature, Cartoons, and Creativity: Incorporating Student-Created Cartoons in a Biochemistry Course to Enhance Learning

Pharmacy students in a biochemistry course enhance their learning by creating cartoons on pharmaceutical topics. For each of six course assignments, students are given and reflect on a current, advanced review article. The assignment has three parts: (i) Students write a one-sentence synopsis of the article; (ii) students create a cartoon that includes speech balloons; and (iii) students ask a “How?” or “Why?” question about the topic. Students gain understanding of subject matter directly related to their major and approach the literature with creative engagement and a novel perspective.

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...

Material Conditions and Semiotic Affordances: Natsume Fusanosuke's <em>Many Fascinations with the Lines of Manga</em>

Material Conditions and Semiotic AffordancesNatsume Fusanosuke’s Many Fascinations with the Lines of Manga Lukas R. A. Wilde (bio) Comics and manga, in all their generic and cultural variations, are typically considered multimodal forms of expressions. Although many wordless variants exist, they typically combine written and pictorial modes of expression to represent worlds, as well as characters and sequences of events located within these worlds. The specificity and distinctiveness of pictoriality, however—of “being an image”—remains extremely hard to define. Since pictoriality is often treated as a material given, at core “untranslatable” in other semiotic modes such as the written language, it should come as no surprise that many picture theories dissociate themselves from semiotics as clearly as possible. James Elkins’s highly insightful study On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (1998), for instance, is opened up by the following words: This book might well have been titled The Antisemiotic, since much of what I have to say here runs against the tendency to interpret pictures as systems of signs, or—in the looser but more prevalent formula—as examples of visual language.1 In striking contrast, it has been argued within Japanese manga discourse—by practitioners as well as by theorists, maybe most prominently by Ôtsuka Eiji—that the pictures of manga should not be considered pictures at all but rather a form of “hieroglyphics” or a “semiotic code.”2 Since around the mid-1990s, a strand of theory became visible that is now called manga hyôgenron. It is usually translated as “theories of manga expression,” understood in a rather narrow sense as “stylistics” or “aesthetics” of manga. Nearly at the same time when Scott McCloud published Understanding Comics (1993), in which he separated any “contents” of comics from their “form,” Natsume Fusanosuke and Takekuma Kentarô expressed a similar interest with Manga no yomikata (How to read manga, 1995).3 Here, they developed fundamental theories, taxonomies, [End Page 62] and typologies of basic manga elements such as speed and impact lines, pictograms (kei’yu), sound words, speech balloons, background patterns, and so on. Within this line of discourse, highly sophisticated semiotic theories have since been developed that focus on formal functions, internal structures, and the meaning of discrete elements within the medium. On the first glance, our everyday understanding of comics as, say, “sequential images,” should apply to Natsume’s conception of manga as well: At least the contemporary manga (including the one-panel-manga) is composed in the format of frames [koma] with contents of pictures [e]. To Japanese people today, manga is a particular form of expression [hyôgen] based mostly on pictures included in consecutive frames. If one of both elements disappears, no manga emerges.4 Why, then, is Natsume insisting that we should not mistake the “manga expressions” (manga hyôgen) for anything but “an accumulation of conventions”?5 Why, for that matter, does his collaborator Takekuma Kentarô state that “any manga-frame does not merely contain ‘pictures and letters,’ but actually various structures of accumulated, heterogeneous signs [kigô].”6 Many manga theorists, in fact, build their conceptions not at all on the idea of a verbal/visual-divide but rather on an emphasis on “line-pictures” (senga) with clear “outline borders” and “demarcations” (rinkaku, sakaime, or kyôkaisen):7 “The line is the most important element for the emergence of pictures.”8 What, then, are the very material conditions at the core of the Japanese media mix, and in what way can they be addressed as semiotic “affordances” that might cross a threshold toward pictoriality?9 I argue that Natsume’s “emergence” of pictoriality in manga constitutes in fact not one but two threshold conditions and that these must be addressed independently from each other, one way or the other; at least, if we are to make sense of the author’s manyfold “fascinations” or “attractions” (miryoku) that “capitalize on the ambiguity of the line.”10 And, if Natsume is right, the same “primordial attraction of the line” that we can observe with respect to certain visual puns must also be taken into account in most (if not all) works of the medium.11 Natsume’s overall fascination rests...

The Word for Friend; by Aidan Cassie

Reviewed by: The Word for Friend; by Aidan Cassie Deborah Stevenson, Editor Cassie, Aidan The Word for Friend; written and illus. by Aidan Cassie. Farrar, 2020 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780374310462 $18.99 Reviewed from galleys R 4-6 yrs When Kemala the pangolin moves to a new home, she’s excited about all the new things she encounters and all the new friends she’s sure she’ll meet at school. She’s [End Page 424] thrown, though, to find out that she doesn’t understand the language her new classmates and teacher speak, leaving usually voluble little Kemala shy and silent. Fortunately, a kind anteater reaches out and Kemala begins to make a friend via a shared artistic pursuit as the two make puppets together and use them to tell stories. The impact of the sudden change for Kemala, accustomed to chattering on nonstop, is respectfully portrayed; the book uses Esperanto for the new country’s language, putting audiences in the same position as Kemala in being an outsider but also allowing listeners, especially those with some background in Romance languages, to puzzle out the speech balloon dialogue. Cleanly composed line and watercolor illustrations make the most of the appealing animal cast, and little Kemala, with her tendency to roll into a ball under stress, is an amusing but sympathetic child proxy. Libraries where Williams’ My Name Is Sangoel (BCCB 10/09) sees good use will welcome this new take on the experience of being a cultural transplant. Closing pages include information about Esperanto as well as a glossary, and some details about pangolins. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Relocating the Text: Mosaik and the Invention of a German East German Comics Tradition

At the height of the international anti‐comics debates of the mid‐1950s, East Germany began publishing the popular comic book Mosaik. Scholars argue that, despite its opposition to comics as a quintessentially American form, the state tolerated Mosaik to counter popular comics from the west and promote a socialist German identity in its readers. This article uses the example of the changes made to Mosaik's speech balloon text in 1962 to show further how the comic's creators intentionally invented an East German tradition and tapped into a national reading community in opposition to the international comics of the Federal Republic by locating the comic in the East German socio‐historical, political, and literary present. By creating a new Mosaik with its text below images, its creators were placing the work within an imagined cultural history stemming directly from the German Bildgeschichtentradition of the nineteenth century.

말칸(말풍선)의 소리 이미지에 대한 연구 : 발화되지 않는 말칸

만화에서 말칸의 발견은 획기적인 순간이 아닐 수 없다. 말칸은 만화에서 소리의 표현에 대한 갈증을 해소해주었고 동시에 만화표현의 생동감과 현실성까지 추구해갈 수 있도록 했다. 말칸으로 인해 인간의 다양한 목소리가 직접적으로 전달될 수 있었고 마음속의 이야기나 머릿속의 생각까지도 구현해낼 수 있게 되었다. 그 과정에서 말칸은 다양한 형태로 나타나고 보다 더 예술적 표현을 찾는 노력을 아끼지 않는다.BR 본 연구의 목적은 말칸의 소리 여부에 따른 이미지를 살펴보고자 하는 것이다. 말칸의 형태나 기능상의 분류는 말칸의 소리에 대한 부분을 재고해보게 한다. 대화의 경우 말을 주고받는 과정이 외형상으로도 분명하게 확인되지만, 실제로 발화되지 않는 소리의 경우는 겉으로 확인될 수 없는 것이다. 그렇기 때문에 이 부분은 만화의 이해에 있어 커다란 영향을 미칠 수 있다. 사람의 감정이나 속마음 혹은 머릿속에서 무의식중에 진행되고 있는 생각들은 밖으로 드러나지 않는 부분이다. 실제로 이러한 것들은 말로 실현되지 않을 수도 있다. 그런데 만화에서는 다양한 방법으로 일종의 내면을 말칸에 담아내고자 한다. 말칸의 형태나 기능은 재구성될 수 있다. 소리가 없는 말칸은 작품속에서 다양한 의미를 부여한다. 생각의 흐름을 표현하기도 하고 독백이나 방백처럼 독자에게만 밝히는 비밀처럼 여겨지기도 한다. 말칸은 그와 같은 다양한 의미의 구현을 다양한 형태로 나타낸다. 테두리나 꼬리의 부재가 발견되고 칸의 여백을 활용하기도 한다. 이것은 말칸을 통해 만화의 서사적 층위를 확장시키기도 한다.BR 말칸은 소리의 표현이다. 그럼에도 불구하고 만화는 현실에서 소리로 나타나지 않는 부분까지도 말칸을 통해서 형상화해낸다. 발화되지 않은 말칸이 만화의 세계를 유연하게 만들고 있는 것이라 할 수 있다. 본 연구를 통해서는 말칸의 다양한 이미지와 변형이 확인되며, 특히 발화되지 않은 말칸, ‘독백말칸’의 형태적 · 의미적 특성이 재정립된다. 독백말칸으로 나타나는 심리나 생각등 의식에 대한 다양한 이미지의 구분은 향후 과제가 될 수 있을 것이다.

Being explicit about the implicit: inference generating techniques in visual narrative

abstractInference has long been acknowledged as a key aspect of comprehending narratives of all kinds, be they verbal discourse or visual narratives like comics and films. While both theoretical and empirical evidence points towards such inference generation in sequential images, most of these approaches remain at a fairly broad level. Few approaches have detailed the specific cues and constructions used to signal such inferences in the first place. This paper thereby outlines several specific entrenched constructions that motivate a reader to generate inference. These techniques include connections motivated by the morphology of visual affixes like speech balloons and thought bubbles, the omission of certain narrative categories, and the substitution of narrative categories for certain classes of panels. These mechanisms all invoke specific combinatorial structures (morphology, narrative) that mismatch with the elicited semantics, and can be generalized by a set of shared descriptive features. By detailing specific constructions, this paper aims to push the study of inference in visual narratives to be explicit about when and why meaning is ‘filled in’ by a reader, while drawing connections to inference generation in other modalities.

This Is MY Fort! by Drew Daywalt, and: What Is Inside THIS Box? by Olivier Tallec

Reviewed by: This Is MY Fort! by Drew Daywalt, and: What Is Inside THIS Box? by Olivier Tallec Deborah Stevenson Daywalt, Drew This Is MY Fort!; illus. by Olivier Tallec. Orchard/Scholastic, 2019 [56p] (Monkey & Cake) Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-338-14390-4 $9.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-338-14391-1 $5.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 1-2 What Is Inside THIS Box?; illus. by Olivier Tallec. Orchard/Scholastic, 2019 [56p] (Monkey & Cake) Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-338-14386-7 $9.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-338-14387-4 $5.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 1-2 This new beginning reader series from Drew Daywalt (author of The Day the Crayons Quit, BCCB 11/13) features friends Monkey (a chipper red-capped simian) and Cake (a cherry-topped slice of sheet cake miraculously endowed with a face and limbs). In This Is MY Fort, Cake makes a fort with a blanket, pole, and armchair and then declares it a Cake-only zone ("No Monkeys are allowed in my fort"); clever Monkey then declares everything outside of Cake's fort to be Monkey territory ("Your fort is a cage. You are in a cage, Cake! A CAKE CAGE!"), leading to Cake's repentance and shared forts. In What Is Inside THIS Box, Monkey carries a big cardboard box that contains a "magic cat" ("Because the cat disappears when I open the box"). A flummoxed Cake tries to negotiate this notion, then decides there's actually a magic dinosaur in the box, whereupon the two friends agree to disagree. The odd friends, simple text in contrastingly colored speech balloons, and snappy use of controlled vocabulary are familiar from Willems' Elephant and Piggie, but no less enjoyable for that. Daywalt takes those components in an interestingly conceptual dimension in both titles, though, slyly tickling not only kids' funny bones but also their STEM bones (Schrödinger's cat is even explicitly captioned on the endpaper of Box, and the endpaper slogan for the series is "Read. Laugh. Think"). Illustrations are acrylic paint and pencil vignettes, featuring the highly kinetic figures of our protagonists balanced against generous white space and crisp, geometric speech balloons. These will be perfect for novice readers who enjoy a bit of brain-teasing as well as a comedy buddy act. DS Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Concept Animation - a potential instructional scaffolding

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Concept animation - the graphical array of pictures accompanied by text as speech balloons, can help to improve learner's comprehension from basic to advanced levels concepts. When the process of concept comprehension is not facilitated, the learner may come in a transitional state of misperception and understanding, that can restrain their learning to a surface approach. The basic science concepts learned at the inception of a Health Sciences program play a vital role towards the development of higher-order thinking and problem-solving aptitude in the subsequent years. Hence, it is important to facilitate meaningful learning of core concepts and principles in difficult basic science disciplines, like Pharmacology. This work reports our experiences of employing concept animations as a 'visual aid' instructional strategy to simplify pharmacology concepts to undergraduate Optometry students. The fundamental ideas of drug pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and side effects were transformed into concept animations. The effects of these concept animations are explained by using Vygotsky's 'zone of proximal development, Mayer's cognitive theory of multimedia learning and cognitive load theory.

The Nested Spaces of Graphic Narrative

The topology of graphic narrative has commonly been conceived of as ‘sequential’ (see Eisner 2008; McCloud 1993) – that is to say, a paratactic arrangement of bordered images to be read in a linear sequence, even when the gridded layout of these images is taken into consideration (as in Groensteen 2009). This sequential organization of space, baked into the epithet ‘sequential art’, is in danger of becoming an orthodoxy.This article considers the ways in which nested spaces – images inside images and worlds within worlds – are essential to graphic narrative, and will argue for a consideration of comics’ hypotactic structure, the layered embedding of the spaces they construct. Comics from the start represent a space within a space: within the ‘discourse space’ of the world in which creators communicate with readers, the flat plane of the page represents a ‘phatic space’ of contact on which the text-worlds of the creator are inscribed. Within that space appear yet further spaces, inscribed in speech balloons, thought balloons, and other abstract enclosures. The article uses Paul Werth’s Text World Theory (expanded and made available after Werth’s death in Gavins 2007) within a framework derived from the functional linguistics of Michael Halliday (previously adapted to multimodal media texts and art by theorists such as Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; O’Toole 2010) to account for the ways in which comics, like language, recursively construct and project spaces in which their narrative takes place. The artice characterises the nature of world-building in graphic narrative, and how the ways in which stories are narrated in this form oblige the creator to build and rebuild the worlds of the story (despite the options available to evade this commitment). The article presents ideas emerging from the development of a functional framework for describing graphic narrative which systematically adapts Halliday’s social semiotics (see Halliday 1978; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) to account for comics, fumetti and bande dessinee.

العلاقة التکاملیة بین بنیة العمل القصصى وبنیة الشکل الفنى لأثراءالأخراج القصص المصور(comics) The integral relation between the story structure and the artistic form structure in designing comics

العلاقة التکاملیة بین بنیة العمل القصصى وبنیة الشکل الفنى لأثراءالأخراج القصص المصور(comics) The integral relation between the story structure and the artistic form structure in designing comics

Under the Bed Fred by L. Bailey

Bailey, Linda. Under the Bed Fred. Tundra Books, 2017.In this offering of the “monsters are not scary” genre, award winning author Linda Bailey has written a chapter book for newly independent readers. There are five chapters telling the story of Leo, who is afraid of the monster, Fred, who lives under his bed. Eventually Leo befriends Fred and discovers he is not scary. He takes Fred to school, where Fred defends him against the class bully, who is portrayed as a red-headed child with a green shirt. Most readers will relate to dealing with a bully at school.The book is well paced for a new reader’s daily reading time. The text is simple and nearly every page has an illustration. One can imagine a child in Grade 2 or 3 being able to read a chapter each day and feel success at having completed a 63 page book by the end of a week.The illustrations are comic style. The monster looks a lot like a brown bear. There are lots of action images, extreme expressions, and speech balloons. The text appears as a very large typeface to emphasize something scary or loud. Sometimes the text is printed at an angle and sometimes words like “KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!”, “GRRRRRROWWLL!” and “CRASH! OOF! POP!” are printed over images for effect.Overall, this is a good book and it is therefore recommended for public and school libraries. Recommendation: 3 stars out of 4Reviewer: Sean C. BorleSean Borle is a University of Alberta undergraduate student who is an advocate for child health and safety.

Diagnósticos, de Diego Agrimbau e Lucas Varela: A Estética dos Quadrinhos como Forma de Representação de Distúrbios Mentais

Este texto se debruça sobre a obra Diagnósticos (2016), dos argentinos Diego Agrimbau e Lucas Varela. A obra reúne um conjunto de seis contos independentes sobre variados distúrbios psicológicos, tais como a claustrofobia ou a sinestesia. No decorrer do artigo, busca-se analisar como os elementos fundamentais na composição dos quadrinhos são utilizados intencionalmente para simular os efeitos de cada uma das enfermidades que protagonizam os contos. Aspectos como a composição do quadro, as relações entre a palavra e a imagem, o uso dos balões ou a noção de movimento são analisados de maneira que se compreendem não apenas os elementos constituintes das narrativas gráficas, mas também os recursos utilizados para potencializar cada trama e reforçar a representação dos distúrbios psicológicos que nelas figuram. Para isso, as análises dialogam com olhares de outros estudiosos dos quadrinhos e da relação texto-imagem, tais como Will Eisner (1999; 2008), precursor dos estudos sobre as narrativas gráficas, Laura Vazquez (2012), Jacques Rancière (2012) e Sophie Van der Linden (2011).