The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to Literature) by Jan Baetens & Hugo Frey

Author:Jan Baetens & Hugo Frey [Baetens, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

Grammatextuality (the graphic equivalent of Roman Jakobson’s better-known “literariness” or “poetic function”) is commonly associated with the typographic plays or excesses of some literary genres, but its role in the graphic novel is no less crucial. The form of the lettering, the configuration of the words in the speech balloons and the insertions of these balloons in the panels, the presence of letters and other written symbols within the fictional world, the presence of the typical onomatopoeias (“wham,” “whoosh,” “whap”), the visual dialogue between words and images on the page – all these elements underscore the importance of the visual form of the words in the graphic novel. A brief consideration of the translation of graphic novels makes this palpable: besides “proper” translation issues, translators have to take into account the space of the panel and the structure of the page; letterers cannot harmlessly change the writing style of the original version, for example.

An interesting example is Eddie Campbell and Daren White The Playwright, which proposes in almost each of its pages delicate variations on a basic model (the book has an oblong format featuring one tier per page, normally of three panels accompanied by an ironical narrator’s text presented in handwritten captions generally placed on top of each panel), whose apparent simplicity is falsely reassuring (Illustration 6.e). Although the style of the book remains overall more or less the same, both in the images as in the texts, the slight changes in graphiation from one panel to another smartly reinforce the already-mentioned unstable relationships between words and images: one time words and image coincide, another time they don’t, and at the end the suspicious reader may think they never really do while at the same time they also perfectly stick together.

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