How will we manage the alt text?

My interest in comics from an academic standpoint is how language codes function. Mostly I examine how dialogue is structured and how characters build their relationships and identities through their talk. This approach blends tenets of conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. (For an example of this kind of research, see my article on The Rawhide Kid in the journal ImageTexT.)

One methodological concern for analysts who do similar work is this: how is the language in the comic best prepared for analysis? To analyze dialogue, we can create a transcript to account for typical features of conversation. For grammatical analysis, we can track the relative distribution of features–for example, comparing simple past tense verbs with past perfect verbs (‘walked’ vs ‘had walked’). In most cases, linguists need to examine 100% of the language in the comic to make sure that whatever analysis they’re doing is complete. In some cases, only a sample of the language is needed, but that requires asking the right research question and setting parameters effectively.

Web comics present an interesting challenge. Some web comics, like Penny Arcade, are structured in a familiar three-panel or four-panel strip.  All the language is present: it is visible, it is easily accessed. However, many web comics feature alt text, language that pops up when the reader mouses over the image.

Scenes from a Multiverse is one such comic that uses alt text (a.k.a., easter egg). Without the alt text, the comic itself is ostensibly complete. However, the alt text adds a dimension to the comic. It might extend the humor, it might extend the narrative action, it might twist the perspective, and it might provide editorial commentary by the author.

Hidden Comic from Amazing Super Powers

Similar to the notion of alt text is the hidden comic. A hidden comic is one that appears either when the reader mouses over it or, in the case of Amazing Super Powers, appears when the reader clicks on an icon. As a typical comic strip, ASP usually comprises three panels, but just to the right of the comic strip, there is a large question mark icon, visible only when a mouse/cursor hovers over it. Clicking on the question mark opens a new web page, giving the reader an ‘extra’ panel, extending the strip in often surprising and humorous ways.

Comics scholars who are working in web comics have to manage the alt text and, in some cases, the hidden comic. We need to account for the ‘extra’ comic material in our analyses. I’m not sure yet how to do this. In extracting dialogue from a web comic for analysis, I feel comfortable creating a transcription in the style of conversation analysis. How should I include the alt text? Should it be offset from the ‘main’ comic, using spacing and indention to demarcate it entirely? Should it be formatted as if it were part of the ‘main’ comic and noted as alt text only if necessary?

I think these questions are in some ways related to Roy Cook’s earlier series, “When are two comics the same comic?” If one reader sees only the ‘main’ web comic but another reader sees both the ‘main’ comic and the alt text and the hidden comic, are they reading the same comic?

Does the shelf on which a comic appears affect how we read it?

Yang's American Born Chinese

In college I worked at Waldenbooks around the time when the company began shelving African American literature in its own section. This was in the early 1990s, shortly after Terry McMillan’s novel, Waiting to Exhale, and Invisible Life by E. Lynn Harris, were topping bestseller lists.  All kinds of readers flocked to the bookstore looking for black popular fiction then, and every once in a while, after browsing the section, they would leave the store with a new and unexpected mystery, science fiction, or literary title by a black author. We sold a LOT more books by Walter Mosley, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison during those early years.

A similar pattern has occurred with comics in bookstores and libraries. The surge in trade paperback comics, graphic novels, and the popularity of manga titles, have led stores to clear new spaces and endcaps. Online bookstores don’t have shelves of course, but they do engage in classification systems that are intended to guide and market to readers’ interests. Browsing the graphic novel section one afternoon was how I discovered one of my favorite comics, a short stocky book that didn’t quite sit right on the shelf.

After I had been working at Waldenbooks (and later, at Borders) for a few years, I noticed that attitudes toward the African American literature section had shifted. Readers of all races began making troubling assumptions about the content of the books despite the range of genres that were shelved there. Customers who were unaware that a particular author was African American searched aisles of “general fiction” shelves confused. Occasionally I noticed that my co-workers would incorrectly stock a book in the section if it had a black person on the cover. No wonder more and more bookstores are moving away from this practice.

But what about comics? In my local public library, the majority of the comics and graphic novels are housed in “juvenile fiction” sections. This is where I find titles like Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, Jeremy Love’s Bayou, and James Sturm and Rich Tommaso’s Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow. I’ve learned over the years that, no matter what a publisher may suggest, deciding where a book is shelved is based largely on the discretion of the venue in which it is sold or exchanged. But do these choices also shape our reading experience as well?

I have encountered readers who are reluctant to pick up American Born Chinese once they realize that they have to walk through the Judy Blume books to pick it up. Friends ask me if it is okay to give Bayou to their elementary school-age kids since the main character is a little girl. But I’m less interested here in issues of age-appropriate content, than in the choices we make when selecting new material to read. In a medium that has a long history of being associated with children’s entertainment, but also remains steeped in post-code creative frontiers in which explicit language and images are the norm, the expectations that move us to pick up a comic are constantly being challenged.

What kind of comic book reader would you be if Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet series from Scholastic were shelved alongside Bill Willingham’s Fables series from Vertigo? Or what if John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew were simply housed among other detective fiction titles? How does the shelf on which a comic appears affect how we read it?

When Are Two Comics The Same Comic? (Part III)

(See Part I and Part II here and here).

In the previous two posts in this three-part series, I examined how we determined whether two instances of comics art were, or were not, instances of the same comic type. In Part I, I examined panel layout (with the help of Calvin and Hobbes) and in Part II, I examined coloring (with the help of the 1988 and 2008 editions of The Killing Joke).

Here I look at a case I take to be particularly difficult (and one that also illustrates the tragedy that can result from haphazard archiving of comic art). The second volume of Fantagraphics’ amazing series of Peanuts reprint volumes (edited and designed by Canadian comic artist Seth) contains a short note at the end regarding the status of the May 3, 1953 Sunday strip. After bemoaning the sorry state of newspaper comic strip preservation, the note notes that:

“… one strip has proven at least partly ‘lost’”.

This is the aforementioned May 3, 1953 strip. The strip actually included in the volume is described thusly:

“The version reproduced in this volume is a composite of a trimmed but relatively clean copy from the Chicago Tribune extensively retouched and re-inked to incorporate material visible in a very blurry but more complete microfilm copy; the top tier has been created from scratch by the book’s designer, Seth”

The Seth-Schulz collaboration that resulted is reproduced above. The question, of course, is whether or not this is an instance of the same comic that Schulz originally produced.

At first glance, it might seem easy to answer this question. After all, the top tier is a complete (albeit ‘authorized’) fabrication, since no record of the original top tier exists. But this answer might be too quick. After all, the top tier of a Sunday comic was often not printed (as a space-saving device), and comic artists (including Schulz) designed their strips with this in mind.

In my previous posts on identity conditions for comics, I suggested that whether or not two instances were tokens of the same comic likely depended (at least in part) on whether or not the comics in question shared those features that are relevant to our appreciation of them as comics. So one aspect of the question is this: Is it possible for Seth to recreate (or completely invent) aspects of the comic while it nevertheless remains an instance of Schulz’s original work?

In thinking about this question, it is worth keeping the following facts in mind:

(1) The main content of the comic strip (i.e. the ‘gag’) is retained (in tiers 2 and 3) even though Seth retouched and re-inked this work.

(2) The new strip is authorized by both Fantagraphics and the Schulz estate (at least in the sense of it being ‘legitimate enough’ to be included in the collection).

(3) At present, this strip provides the only access we have to the original strip (regardless of whether that ‘access’ is merely partial).

So is this strip a genuine instance of the strip Schulz drew in 1953?

Does Mooch the Cat speak French?

In the 1990s, I lived in Athens, Georgia, where I was a doctoral student in linguistics. I read the newspaper almost every day, and I started reading a comic strip called Mutts, by Patrick McDonnell. I loved the strip — the sweetness and good intentions of the dog, Earl, was paired with the slightly self-centered cat, Mooch, who also happened to be not quite as smart as Earl in many ways. These two characters are neighbors who live in an urban area that is best characterized as a city in the northeastern United States.

In the series that this strip comes from, Earl is on a leash waiting to be taken for a walk, but his human, Ozzie, gets distracted for a moment. In walks Mooch, who decides to pick up the leash and take Earl for his walk. Not knowing exactly where to go, Mooch decides to see Paris, and of course Earl tags along. After walking for an unspecified period of time, which Earl calls FOR-EVER, the pair decide to stop and ask whether they’ve made it to Paris.

In his best “French,” Mooch makes the first conversational move. Getting an answer from Fifi, the French poodle, satisfies Mooch, of course, who celebrates their arrival in “Paris.”

In these three panels, McDonnell employs both French and English to convey the story, but he also uses other linguistic tools at his disposal. In panel 2, Mooch uses what linguists might call “Mock French,” a pretend French accent, in his attempt to speak with the local citizenry. The attempts at French include a simulated “bon jour” as well as French-accented English: “dees” for “this” and “iz” for “is.” In panel 2, then, the point is that Mooch is relying on language ideologies based in Anglophone culture, having to do both with French as a linguistic system and with speaking French to native French speakers. Of course, Mooch is using English, not French, which means he’s producing “English” as it would be produced (in a very stereotypical fashion) by a French speaker communicating in English.

As an aside, the food pun on “bon jour” is a hallmark of McDonnell’s humor, which folds the pets’ mindsets and attitudes into the strip whenever possible.

Panel 3 bears witness to Mooch’s full-tilt code switch into French. It’s as if Mooch exclaims Eureka!, planting his linguistic flag in “Paris,” which he and Earl have managed to walk to. Of course, the accent mark (accent aigu) over the “a” of “Voilá!” is not the correct one. The “correct” spelling of this word would use the accent grave instead: “Voilà!” So even though the lexical item is indeed French, it is marked ever so subtly as produced by a nonnative speaker of French.

While this may not have been McDonnell’s intention, Mooch’s use of Mock French (Faux French?) demonstrates a stereotypical American attitude toward foreign languages: using a funny accent is a legitimate (or at least sufficient) mode of communication. Nevermind, of course, that Fifi, the French poodle, is speaking an “unaccented” English! Mooch proceeds as if he has successfully led Earl all the way to Paris. In later strips, Earl isn’t convinced they’ve made it to Paris, which turns out to be the case. They make it back home eventually, and when Mooch expresses some concern about their outing, Earl assures him that they’ll always have Paris.

Could Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” be made into a comic?

Earlier this week, in a review of African American Classics, the latest volume from the Graphic Classics series, I made this claim about comics adaptations of African American literature:

These “graphic” adaptations elevate the visual field of representation in ways that should remind us that literary expressions of African American experience have always been deeply entrenched in the realm of social perception, spectacle, and visibility. The works were originally written to counter claims that the entire character of a people could be arbitrarily determined by what is seen, from skin color to physiognomy to a so-called drop of Negro-stained blood. African American Classics, then, returns the counter-argument of its featured stories to their visual origins and exposes the absurdity of race prejudice in a way that only a comic can.

When Are Two Comics the Same Comic? (Part II)

Part II (of three): Coloring

(See Part I here)

A month ago I raised the question of when two distinct comic tokens (e.g. two distinct issues) are or are not instances of the same comic type. One natural way to approach this question is to ask whether or not the comic tokens in question are identical (or, at least, relevantly similar) with respect to those properties that are relevant to our experience of the comic as a comic.

How do the absurd and the realistic blend in comic strips?

One of my favorite webcomics is Wondermark, by David Malki !. What fascinates me about the strip is how mundane, ordinary elements get combined with unexpected elements to create a strong sense of the absurd, the fantastic(al), and the unreal. Generally, the physical setting of the strip is Dickensian, often involving not much more than two or three characters in a library, parlor, or dining room. Occasionally, the characters will interact in a scientific laboratory or public place, like on a street corner. Often it’s the language of the strip that creates the absurd. The characters broach topics that make little sense or, more accurately, stretch the very fabric of logic and sense to highly skewed proportions.

In strip #682, “Monkey Box and its ilk,” two characters are involved in what seems to be an ordinary conversation.

In panel 1, the man is seated and reading a newspaper article about a murder, the woman standing nearby. The man makes a comment about the story, but he doesn’t focus on the murder itself. Instead, he remarks in an understated disbelief that the name of the town is Monkey Box. The woman responds, seeming to explain away his concern by contextualizing the process of naturalization: the residents of Monkey Box may not even pay attention to the name of the town — it’s such a constant part of their world that it has become natural (naturalized) to them. As far as ordinary conversations go, so far so good.

*

How Do Comics Represent the South?

From Jeremy Love's Bayou

Three years ago at the bi-annual conference for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, Brannon Costello and I began considering the possibilities of the question: how do comics represent the South? To what extent do comics creators wrestle with what Scott Romine calls the “qualitative geography” of the region, that elusive sense of place and specter of history that shadows nearly every author, poet, or artist whose creative aspirations wander below the Mason-Dixon line?

Fifth Thursday: Could Jimmy Olsen be Superman?

[Guest post by Stephen Nelson]

Imagine the following scenario: Superman learns about a planet on the other side of the galaxy that may be inhabited by some long lost Kryptonian relatives. He decides to leave Earth in search of them. He has always taken seriously his commitment to protecting the people of Earth, though, so he convinces his old pal Jimmy Olsen to take his place as Superman. What would it take for this scheme to be successful? That is, could Jimmy Olson ever truly be Superman?

New Feature: Fifth Thursday Guest Contibutor!

Tomorrow we will begin our first special feature here at PencilPanelPage: Fifth Thursday Guest Contributors.

In any month that has five Thursdays, the fifth Thursday’s post will be written by a guest. We are planning on using these posts to provide exciting young comics scholars with a venue to try out some of their ideas. So don’t look for these posts to feature big established comics scholars whose name and work you know (although sometimes, of course, the name and the work will be well-known). Instead, this feature will be promoting names and work that you probably don’t know yet, but should look out for in the future.

This week’s post is by Stephen Nelson. Steve, who sometimes claims to be related to Thor, is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. Although his research centers on metaphysics, logic, and related issues such as personal identity, he also has a longstanding love of comics and a real interest in applying philosophical analysis to questions about the metaphysics of the fictional worlds within which Superman and Spiderman live.

Tomorrow’s post is no exception. Based in part on a paper that is forthcoming in the Avengers and Philosophy: Earth’s Mightiest Thinkers volume (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), Steve addresses a thought-provoking question regarding personal identity and superhero identity. In short: How can it be the case that at one point in time, Batman is (that is, is identical to) Bruce Wayne, yet at another time Batman is not Bruce Wayne (since someone else is Batman). Taken at face value, these claims seem to imply that Bruce Wayne is not identical to Bruce Wayne!

We’re excited about this new feature. Hopefully it will be the first of many.