In their combination of visual and linguistic resources, comic books are perfectly suited, as objects of study, for the relatively novel inter-discipline of multimodal stylistics. Many graphic novels, in particular, have reached such a level of stylistic sophistication that it is only through a multimodal analysis of their techniques that their authors’ aims can be fully appreciated. The author of this article looks at the various techniques through which thought is bodied forth in Chris Ware’s experimental “comic box”, Building Stories (2012). Far from merely importing into comic art the techniques normally employed in non-graphic fiction, Ware combines drawings and the written word in ever-creative ways, often privileging the visual over the linguistic medium. A character’s thought, or feeling, can be presented by means of a thought bubble – but also, in a much more immediate manner, by the arrangement of images in the panel or on the page. At the end of the article, a taxonomy of multimodal techniques for thought presentation is briefly sketched.

Multimodal Thought Presentation in Chris Ware's Building Stories

MORINI, MASSIMILIANO
2015

Abstract

In their combination of visual and linguistic resources, comic books are perfectly suited, as objects of study, for the relatively novel inter-discipline of multimodal stylistics. Many graphic novels, in particular, have reached such a level of stylistic sophistication that it is only through a multimodal analysis of their techniques that their authors’ aims can be fully appreciated. The author of this article looks at the various techniques through which thought is bodied forth in Chris Ware’s experimental “comic box”, Building Stories (2012). Far from merely importing into comic art the techniques normally employed in non-graphic fiction, Ware combines drawings and the written word in ever-creative ways, often privileging the visual over the linguistic medium. A character’s thought, or feeling, can be presented by means of a thought bubble – but also, in a much more immediate manner, by the arrangement of images in the panel or on the page. At the end of the article, a taxonomy of multimodal techniques for thought presentation is briefly sketched.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11576/2631515
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