The Language of Comics: Word and Image

In our culture, which depends increasingly on images of instruction and recreation, it is important to ask hwo words and images make imeaning when they are combined. Comics, one of the most widely read media oif the twentitth century, serves as an ideal for focusing on an investigation on the word-and-image question.

This collection of essays attempts to give an answer. The first six see words and images as separate art forms that play with or against each other. David Kunzle finds that words restrict the meaning of the art of Adolphe Willette and Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen in Le Chat Noir David A. Berona, examining wordless novels, argues that the ability to read pictures depends on the ability to read words. Todd Taylor draws on classical rhetoric to demonstrate that images in The Road Runner are more persuasive that words.

N. C. Christopher Couch–writing on The Yellow Kid–and Robert C. Harvey–discussing early New Yorker cartoons–are both interest