Janina Wildfeuer, Ielka van der Sluis, Gisela Redeker & Nina van der Velden (2022) No laughing matter!? Analyzing the Page Layout of Instruction Comics, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2022.2053559
ABSTRACT:
The study reported in this paper analyzes the specific genre of ‘instruction comics’ with regard to typical patterns of comic book pages. As a sequential-pictorial genre with a narrative as well as instructive character, ‘instruction comics’ have recently and increasingly been used in education as a novel way to communicate, for instance, health-related information. The corpus for this study includes 37 single-page first-aid comics that all show how to help a person who is choking, i.e. how to perform what is generally known as the Heimlich manoeuvre. To understand how this procedure is presented visually and how this presentation is similar to the layout of typical pages of comic books and graphic novels, the corpus is annotated with a multi-level annotation scheme that has been developed to annotate and analyse the page layout of visual narratives. The annotation scheme includes formal descriptions to synergistically analyse the complexity and variety of various comic genres, with specifications for typical comic page grids and the use of framing, inset panels, or captions. The paper presents and critically discusses the results of the corpus annotation with regard to the specific multimodal design choices in the corpus of choking comics.