Abstract
Comics, comic books, and graphic novels are increasingly the target of seriously
scholarly attention in the humanities. Moreover, comic books are exceptionally
complex documents, with intricate relationships between pictorial and textual
elements and a wide variety of content types within a single comic book publication.
The complexity of these documents, their combination of textual and pictorial
elements, and the collaborative nature of their production shares much in common with
other complex documents studied by humanists — illuminated manuscripts, artists’
books, illustrated poems like those of William Blake, letterpress productions like
those of the Kelmscott Press, illustrated children’s books, and even Web pages and
other born-digital media. Comic Book Markup Language, or CBML, is a TEI-based XML
vocabulary for encoding and analyzing comic books, comics, graphic novels, and
related documents. This article discusses the goals and motivations for developing
CBML, reviews the various content types found in comic book publications, provides an
overview and examples of the key features of the CBML XML vocabulary, explores some
of the problems and challenges in the encoding and digital representation of comic
books, and outlines plans for future work. The structural, textual, visual, and
bibliographic complexity of comic books make them an excellent subject for the
general study of complex documents, especially documents combining pictorial and
textual elements.
Introduction
This study provides an introduction and rationale for the development of Comic Book
Markup Language, or CBML, an XML
[1] vocabulary for encoding
multiform documents that are variously called comics, comic books, and
“graphic novels”
[2] as well as other documents that integrate comics content
[3] or that share formal features with comics content. A markup
language is a set of machine-readable textual codes, or “tags,”
that are used to identify structure, semantics, and other features of documents and
data.
[4] The application of these codes to a document is typically a
necessary stage, often the most crucial and informative stage, of editing, analyzing,
indexing publishing, visualizing, and otherwise studying or manipulating texts in
digital environments. The act of encoding a document is a form of discovery, or
prospecting, in which the encoder maps a document's structure, identifies semantic
elements of interest, and documents relationships internal and external to the
document. Scholarly encoding is a form of both reading and writing. The reading,
shaped by the constraints of a markup language, is inscribed upon and embedded within
the digital text. As literary scholar and digital humanist Jerome McGann has noted, “When you mark up a text you are ipso
facto reading and interpreting it. A … text marked up in TEI [a scholarly
encoding language] has been subjected to a certain kind of
interpretation”
[
McGann 2001, 143]. Sperberg-McQueen, Huitfeldt, and Renear assert that markup is constitutive of
meaning, markup is interpretive, markup is performative, markup acknowledges or
licenses inferences about the text:
Markup is inserted into textual material not at random, but to convey some
meaning.
An author may supply markup as part of the act of composing a text; in this
case the markup expresses the author’s intentions, e.g. as to the structure
or appearance of the text. The author creates a section heading, for
example, by creating an appropriate element in the document; the content of
that element is a section heading because the author says so, and the markup
is simply the method by which the author says so. The markup, that is, has
performative significance.
In other cases, markup is supplied as part of the transcription in
electronic form of pre-existing material. In such cases, markup reflects the
understanding of the text held by the transcriber; we say that the markup
expresses a claim about the text. The transcriber
identifies a section heading in the pre-existing text by transcribing it and
tagging it as a section heading; the content of that element is a section
heading if the transcriber’s interpretation is correct, but other
interpreters might disagree; it is plausible to imagine discussions over
whether a given way of marking up a text is correct or incorrect.[5]
In the one case, markup is constitutive of the meaning; in the other, it is
interpretive. In each case, the reader may legitimately use the markup to
make inferences about the structure and properties of the text. For this
reason, we say that markup licenses certain
inferences about the text. [Sperberg-McQueen, Huitfeldt, and Renear 2000, 11]
Julia Flanders' discussion of scholarly text encoding privileges the role of the
researcher/encoder and likens the encoded text to the scholarly article:
Perhaps we need to look to the pleasure of mutability. To recuperate XML,
politically and aesthetically, we should be looking not to the paradigms of
XML usage that arise from librarianship and from industry-level ideas of the
separability of form and content, but rather to paradigms of performance of
a different kind. By shifting our view we can understand XML as a way of
expressing perspectival understandings of the text: not as a way of
capturing what is timeless and essential, but as a way of inscribing our own
changeable will on the text — in other words, as a form of reading. Seen
this way, XML's presentational flexibility derives not from a separation of
presentation and content, but rather from the shifting vantage points from
which the text appears to us, the shifting relationships that constrain our
understanding of it, the adaptability and strategic positioning of our own
readerly motivations.
Ironically, this is a view which emerges most clearly at the margins of
current digital text practice. It is not visible in the large digital
library projects, whose workflow has come to resemble an industrial
operation complete with offshore outsourcing, detailed division of labor,
reliance on automation and robotics, and an emphasis, in the output, on
uniformity and quantity (thankfully planned obsolescence has not yet become
part of the strategy). But we can find it in the small projects designed by
individual faculty, typically in conjunction with their teaching, to create
digital versions of individual texts which serve as readings: often
idiosyncratic, unscalable, representing private insight. They function more
like an article than an archive, as a local, contingent expression of
insight. [Flanders 2005, 60–61]
The development of a markup language that can support such scholarly reading and
interpretation necessitates a careful study and analysis of the content, structure,
and semantics of the class or classes of documents for which the language is designed
— in this case, the comic book.
CBML is based on the
Text Encoding
Initiative P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange
. The
TEI Guidelines are a mature conceptual model for digital
representation of multitudinous and disparate document types: inscriptions and
papyri; illuminated manuscripts; authorial holograph manuscripts; correspondence;
printed books of prose, verse, and drama; critical and scholarly editions;
born-digital documents; and more. The
TEI Guidelines
make recommendations about suitable ways of
representing those features of textual resources which need to be identified
explicitly in order to facilitate processing by computer programs. In
particular, they specify a set of markers (or tags) which may be inserted in
the electronic representation of the text, in order to mark the text structure
and other features of interest.
[TEI 2010c]
The
TEI Guidelines are widely used in the digital humanities
and academic library communities and are maintained by the
TEI Consortium, an international body
modules, including modules for general categories of documents, such as prose, drama,
verse, and dictionaries.
[6] The
Guidelines also provide additional modules that address more
specific textual features and metadata requirements, such as names and dates,
manuscript description, linking, textual criticism, and so on. And in their most
recent incarnation, the
Guidelines provide elements and attributes for
linking transcriptions to facsimile page images. This latter feature is especially
useful for encoding comics and other graphics-intensive works. From these many
available modules, one selects a subset that meets the needs of a particular
document, project, collection, or analytical approach. The
TEI
Guidelines are extremely flexible, providing a vocabulary and mechanisms
for encoding and describing a rich diversity document types. However, recognizing
that not every document type and representational requirement may be anticipated, the
Guidelines provide a well-documented system for customizing and
extending the provided tag set with new and modified elements and
attributes.
[7] TEI, as delivered by the TEI Consortium, is remarkably well-suited to
encoding many aspects of comic books; nevertheless, conceptual clarity and practical
benefits may be gained from some modest modifications and additions to the stock
TEI Guidelines. Hence CBML, a TEI customization with elements and
attributes for encoding many of the structures and features found in comic book
documents.
The Book of Comic Book Markup Language
The language under discussion here is called Comic Book Markup
Language in part to highlight the book-ness and bookishness of these documents, their
material properties and bibliographic characteristics. Graphic narratives typically
manifest as “books,” stapled or otherwise bound leaves, perhaps
thirty-six pages, with an interesting and complex structure, incorporating the
graphic narrative — the sequential art and text or “comics”
content — alongside a rich assortment of paratexts: advertisements, fan mail, and so
on. The emphasis on both “comics” and “books”
in the title of the language signals an awareness of the full range of content in the
material artifact and the integration of comics content with related paratextual
content. The material properties of the book — the codex form, the leaves and pages,
the physical properties of the paper — are inseparable from the structure, pacing,
and design of the narrative. Certainly less page-bound organizational and
compositional frameworks are possible, such as the newspaper strips with long-running
narrative arcs, in which the daily “strip” of three or four panels
is the basic structural unit.
The traditional grouping of panels into deliberately composed groups (often
corresponding to the physical page or the “strip” of a newspaper
daily) is being challenged by changing publishing and reading technologies. iPhones
and other smartphones have become popular devices for reading newly published comics
as well as “reprints” of older comics. However, a full-page grid
of panels is not easily readable on the smaller screen of the typical smartphone, so
the software interfaces on such devices focus on a single panel at a time. The
deliberate juxtaposition of graphic and textual elements in the original composition
is shattered by the interface requirements and limitations of the reading device. As
new comics work is increasingly targeted at such digital platforms, the traditional
grouping of panels into compositional units resembling pages may be abandoned for new
compositional strategies. Larger format devices like the iPad and other tablets are
better able to represent full-page compositions of panels while also allowing zooming
in to focus on individual panels. The isolation of a panel from its surrounding
context is not easily achieved in print media. While the reader's eyes and attention
may focus on a single panel at a time, other panels on the page remain in the
reader's field of vision. The migration of comics content to digital reading devices,
and the structural and aesthetic implications of that migration, call attention to
the impact of the material characteristics of the comic book document.
Comic books are often very formally self-conscious documents and express a
fascination with their own bibliographic identities — creators (comic book writers
and artists) become characters in the narrative, editorial notes refer to episodes
from prior issues, comic books and paratextual elements, such as advertisements, are
parodied within the comic book narrative, publication milestones (such as the first,
fiftieth, or one hundredth issue are highlighted and celebrated. These literary,
rhetorical, and commercial moves point to a self-awareness of the comic book as
document and bibliographic object.
CBML is intended primarily for representing, modeling, and analyzing twentieth- and
twenty-first-century comic books, daily comic strips, longer narratives or
“graphic novels,” and Web comics and other comics content
published on digital platforms, such as smartphones and tablets. CBML may also serve
as a possible solution for encoding certain documents we might not normally
characterize as comics or comic books, but which share many formal characteristics
with comics. In his influential
Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud's
definition of comics encompasses Hogarth's
narrative picture series, the
Bayeux Tapestry, and
pre-Columbian picture writing as found in the
Codex Zouche-Nuttall
[
McCloud 1993, 10–17].
Goals and Motivations
Comic books and graphic novels have been the subject of serious critical attention
for some time, and increasingly so with the emergence of scholarly disciplines such
as popular cultural studies and new areas of interest in traditional scholarly fields
such as English and American literature. In 1992, Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer
Prize for his
Maus, a comic book narrative of holocaust
survival. In 2001, Michael Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel
The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which relates the experience of
two Jewish cousins working in the nascent comic book industry at the beginning of
WWII. Comic books and the mythologies they have spawned continue to be a vital part
of our popular culture and national consciousness. Witness the surprising and almost
unprecedented popularity of the recent spate of superhero feature films based on the
characters of Marvel and DC, the two largest publishers of comic books. In the 70s,
80s, and 90s, the Superman and Batman film franchises produced regular blockbusters.
Since the more recent financial and critical success of Marvel’s X-Men and Spider-Man
film franchises, the film industry has been flooded with films based on comic books,
many based on mainstream super hero comics, others adapted from realistic, personal,
and autobiographical graphic narratives, often published by smaller publishers. In
2012, Marvel’s
The Avengers film from Walt Disney Studios broke all
previous box office records with over $200 million in ticket sales for the biggest
opening weekend of all time [
Barnes 2012].
[8] These few examples, which are frequently discussed in scholarly
articles, monographs, and in school and university classrooms, demonstrate the
continuing and perhaps increasing importance of comic books as an art form and
cultural touchstone.
Like the study of other popular art forms — film, television, jazz, rock — comics
scholarship is a thriving field of academic research. Scholarly books about comics
are being published by university presses
[9] and articles about comics appear frequently in
peer-reviewed journals such as
The Journal of Popular
Culture. In 2008,
English Language Notes, published an
issue devoted to “Graphia: The Graphic Novel and Literary Criticism”
[
Kuskin 2008].
ImageTexT
is a peer-reviewed online journal devoted to the study of comics. In 2007
ImageTexT published a special issue on “William Blake and Visual Culture,” recognizing the connection
between modern comics and earlier art forms that integrate text and image [
Whitson 2007].
In light of the ongoing cultural and scholarly relevance of comics, one goal of CBML
is to support the study and analysis of comic books in the way that digital
collections of, for instance, English poetry or American fiction support the study
and analysis of more traditional literary forms. A large corpus of digitized comic
books, along with encoded transcriptions and descriptive metadata, would allow
scholars to search the text of comic books, search for keywords related to topics of
interest, search for the appearance of particular characters, or search for works by
particular writers and artists. Additionally, when exploited to its full potential, a
large CBML collection would allow searching — and other forms of computer processing
and computational analysis — based on structural, aesthetic, and informational and
documentary features peculiar to the genre of comic books.
Large digital collections of comic books would support the types of searching that is
now taken for granted in large digital collections of literary and other texts. This
sort of functionality has proven incredibly useful and has transformed the ways in
which scholars and students conduct research and “read.” This now
commonplace functionality though can be particularly significant for the study of
comics, given the complexity of the fictional universes that have developed in the
works of many comics publishers. For instance, major characters like Superman,
Batman, Spider-Man and Wolverine appear regularly in multiple titles. DC Comics'
Batman is the featured character in Batman, Detective
Comics, and other titles; he is a prominent member of the Justice League
superhero teams featured in a number of different titles; and he shares adventures
with other heroes in titles such as The Brave and the Bold and
World’s Finest. Since Batman shares the same fictional universe
with most of DC’s other characters, he will make frequent “guest
appearances” across their entire line of publications. One will even
find publishers occasionally cooperating to merge their fictional universes and
publish works that feature, for instance, Superman from DC and Spider-Man from
Marvel. Therefore, a scholar researching the development and representation of a
particular character cannot confine herself to a small number of publications, but
must consider almost the full output of a publisher or even multiple publishers.
We've been looking thus far at some of the more practical goals for CBML, providing a
digital format to support digital research collections that in turn support different
types of searching and digitally-enabled analysis. Another motivation behind the
development of CBML is the desire to explore more generally the modeling and
representation of the broader class of documents that tightly integrate pictorial
images and text. Comic books are just one such type of complex graphic document;
other examples include illuminated manuscripts; seventeenth-century alchemical
manuscripts, with hand-drawn figures and graphic symbols; artists’ books; artists’
sketchbooks; illustrated poems like those of William Blake; letterpress productions
like those of the Kelmscott Press; illustrated children’s books; newspaper and
magazine advertisements; and even Web pages and other born-digital media. Comic books
provide some of the more obvious examples of this integration and co-dependence of
image and text, but lessons learned in the modeling of comic books may be applied to
other forms.
Martha Rust, in her essay “
‘It's a Magical World’: The Page in Comics and Medieval Manuscripts,”
writes:
Both medieval book artists and contemporary
cartoonists make use of the page as a device for giving their readers access to
a domain of representation that is beyond the regimes of either pictures or
words — yet somehow in the shadow of both.
[Rust 2008, 25]
The page is indeed one of the primary structural and compositional units of
comics. In TEI the page is viewed as a “milestone,” an empty
marker within the flow of the text. In comics books (and similar documents), the page
is not an arbitrary milestone, but a compositional feature — a composed container for
“panels” and text.
The miniatures pictured in
Figure 2 and
Figure 3, tightly integrate text and image. Moreover, we
find discreet, bordered, sequential images, similar to comic book panels, and text
representing speech, like comic book word balloons, originating from the figures’
mouths. In
Figure 3, below the
“panels” we find explanatory text, similar to the narrative
captions found in comic books. Such examples illustrate formal and structural
features of comics shared by many other document types. The analytical and
descriptive strategies of TEI and CBML may prove useful in studying not just modern
comics but an even more historically and culturally diverse assortment of document
types.
Perhaps the most significant motivation behind the development of CBML is the wish to
support for comic books and related documents the interpretive strategies and
inscriptions of readings — discussed in the introduction above — that occur when a
text is encoded. Unlike the traditional academic essay, in which a reading or
analysis is sprinkled with relevant quotations from primary source materials, an
encoded text may combine a digital representation of a full source text inscribed, in
the form of markup, by a reading and performance of the text. Like the image and text
of a comic book, the source text and the scholar's reading and analysis are
inextricably intermingled in the encoded document. Encoded documents are
metadocuments “which describe and enhance information
but also serve as performative instruments.… As texts that describe a language,
naming and articulating its structures, forms, and functions they
[metalanguages and metatexts] seem to trump languages that are used merely for
composition or expression”
[
Drucker 2009, 11]. CBML facilitates more transformative reading strategies that have developed
in response to the increasing numbers of high-quality digital and digitized
documents. Literary scholar Franco Moretti has popularized the term “distant
reading” to describe strategies for analyzing massive numbers of
literary and historical documents:
[I]f you want to look beyond the canon
… close reading will not do it. It’s not designed to do it, it’s designed to do
the opposite. At bottom, it’s a theological exercise — very solemn treatment of
very few texts taken very seriously — whereas what we really need is a little
pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read
them. Distant reading: where distance … is a condition of
knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or
much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes — or genres and systems. And
if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears,
well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If
we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing
something.
[Moretti 2000, 57]
Digital technologies facilitate both close and distant reading strategies.
Individual comic books and graphic narratives may be better understood through
strategies of close reading, with careful attention paid to minute details of
linguistic and visual language and document features, but comic books as a system and
extended comic book narratives — which often unfold over decades in thousands or tens
of thousands of individual documents by hundreds of creators (writers and artists) —
benefit also from the distant reading (of text, image, and metadata) from comic book
documents.
CBML aims to support such digitally-enabled and embedded performances and readings
in comic books and across a range of graphics-intensive documents. This motivation is
not unique to the study of comics or the development of CBML, but comic books and
related documents do have particular, if not unique, features that must be supported
in markup languages if we are to realize this goal.
Encoding the Comic Book
The following sections examine features and content of comic book documents and
propose encoding strategies for representing, documenting, and analyzing those
features and content types. These encoding strategies incorporate both new elements
introduced in the CBML customization and existing TEI elements.
The comic book is a particularly complex class of document. A typical comic book,
from the early twentieth century to the present, contains diverse content types.
Alongside and intermingled with comics content, we may find prose fiction,
advertisements, editorial and promotional content, fan mail, and bibliographic
metadata about creators and publication details.
“Comics” Content: Sequential Art & Text
By “comics” content, I refer to the sequential art — usually
combined with text — of the comics narrative. Comics content is typically divided
into panels (usually with clearly delineated borders) that include images,
narrative captions, word balloons, and sound effects (POW! SMASH! FOOM!).
A great deal of comics scholarship examines these individual elements in the
context of the aesthetics, architectonics, and grammar of comics — how comics
work, the systems and semantics, the structural components, the mutual
dependencies of text and image, and how these textual and graphic components
function together to convey information, narrative, plot, character,
etc.
[10] Perhaps the most well-known and
influential such study is Scott McCloud’s
Understanding Comics, a
meta-comic about the art and form of comics, that includes this frequently-cited
definition of comics:
A possible objection to McCloud's definition is its subordination of text to
image. In fact, McCloud's definition makes no mention of text. Certainly one can
find examples of comics without any words, but, as McCloud acknowledges, the vast
majority of comics do in fact contain a great deal of text of different types. The
intricate and complex interplay between text and image is one of the defining
features of most comic books. While we typically say that we
watch,
view, or
see a film, we more often say that we
read a comic. Lawrence L. Abbott, Henry John Pratt and others have
emphasized the characterization of comics as a “read” medium
[
Abbott 1986]
[
Pratt 2009]. Abbott stresses this characterization in part to
bolster his argument for the preeminence of text over image in comics: “The perceiver is, after all, termed a
‘reader’ — and the subordination of the pictorial to
the literary in comic art is one of the subtlest realities of the
medium”
[
Abbott 1986, 156]. David Carrier places a similar emphasis, not just on text, but on the
distinctive text — the speech balloon — of comics: “The speech balloon is a defining
element of the comic because it establishes a word/image unity that
distinguishes comics from pictures illustrating a text”
[
Carrier 2000, 4]. The ability to identify and characterize textual components of comics art
and to describe and analyze the interplay between text and image is one of the
chief aims of CBML. TEI provides a host of options to support extensive analysis,
textual criticism, and annotation. CBML suggests applications of existing TEI
markup for encoding many of the distinctive features of comics and also provides a
handful of additional elements for distinctive features that are not adequately
handled by existing TEI markup.
In the discussion that follows, I shall use the terms “comics”
to refer to sequential art (and text) and “comic book” to refer
to a document that contain comics content and, optionally, other content
types.
<cbml:panel>
The panel — encapsulating the constituent parts of image, text, and sound
effects — is the primary building block of meaning in a comics text:
The panel is the fundamental unit
of comic art…. The panel is the smallest unit in which the complex
interaction of text and picture operates, and one notices quickly that
the “text” in comic art takes form according to an
elaborate series of conventions.
[Abbott 1986, 156]
CBML provides the
<cbml:panel>
[11] element to represent this basic
structural unit of comics.
<cbml:panel> is a modification of TEI’s
<div> element, which represents a generic subdivision of the text in
the TEI model.
<cbml:panel ana="#action-to-action" characters="#cap #anon_man" n="5"
xml:id="eg_000"> <cbml:caption> Cap acts quickly to tranquilize the
gun-happy pedestrian... </cbml:caption> <cbml:balloon type="speech"
who="#cap" xml:id="eg_007"> A little <emph
rendition="#b">sleep</emph> will do wonders for you!
</cbml:balloon> <sound> SPLAT! </sound> <cbml:balloon
type="speech" who="#anon_man"> Ugh! </cbml:balloon>
</cbml:panel>
Example 1.
CBML fragment illustrating an encoded panel from
Captain
America #193. See
Figure 6
above.
A few details of the above CBML fragment are worth noting, particularly the way
in which both standard TEI elements and attributes are used alongside custom
CBML attributes to describe the structure and semantics of the panel.
The
<cbml:caption> and
<cbml:balloon> elements, described in more
detail below, are used to encode these common components of comics panels. A
TEI element
<sound> is used to encode another common panel element, the
graphical/textual representation of a sound in the narrative. One might imagine
this element to be as peculiar to comics as the narrative caption or balloon,
yet TEI provides the
<sound> element, which seems to suffice. The
TEI Guidelines explain that
<sound> is intended to
“describes a sound effect or musical
sequence specified within a screen play or radio script”
[
TEI 2010a]. Of course a comic book is not a screen play or radio
script, but comics and film share many similarities, and the scholarship on
comics often notes these similarities.
[12] That the TEI element
<sound>,
designed to describe a phenomenon found in film, works so well, without any
particularly wrenching semantic deformation, in the context of comic books is
further evidence of the similarities shared by these two forms.
The
@n attribute on
<cbml:panel> is a TEI
“global” attribute, meaning it is available on all TEI
elements. The
@n attribute may be used to provide a number or other
label to the element. Depending on the needs of one’s content or analysis, one
could use
@n to provide a descriptive label or sequential number to a
panel. In the example above,
n="5" indicates that this panel is
sequentially the fifth panel among a larger group of panels, such as those
appearing on a single page.
[13]
More interesting perhaps is the @characters attribute, a custom CBML
attribute used to identify the characters appearing in any given panel. The
@character attribute contains, in TEI lingo, one or more data.pointer values. In the example above
#cap and #anon_man point to elements, with unique
identifiers of cap and anon_man, in the
<teiHeader>. These elements in the <teiHeader> provide more
detailed information about the characters Captain America and
“anonymous man.” The <teiHeader> is a mandatory
and potentially very large TEI element that prefaces the encoded transcription
of the document. The <teiHeader> provides a great deal of detailed
descriptive information and other metadata about both the digital file and the
source document. And it may, for instance, provide detailed information about
all the characters appearing within a given document. With a large collection
of comic books encoded using these mechanisms from CBML and TEI, a search
interface could provide users the ability to retrieve instantly, from thousands
or tens of thousands of comics, all the panels containing a character of
interest, regardless of whether or not the character's name appears in the
original panel.
In
Example 1 above the TEI
@ana attribute
is used to describe the transition from the previous panel to the current
panel. The attribute
@ana, short for
analysis,
is another global TEI attribute (activated by inclusion of the optional TEI
analysis module) that points to one or more elements containing interpretations
of the element on which the
@ana attribute appears. Typically
@ana points to one or more
<interp>, short for
interpretation, elements. The document from which the
above fragment is taken also contains this code:
<interpGrp resp="#jawalsh" type="panelTransition"> <desc>The
<gi>interp</gi> elements below include vocabulary that may be
used to characterize the transition from the previous panel
<emph>to</emph> the current panel. The transition types
listed below are defined by Scott McCloud in his
<bibl><title>Understanding Comics</title> <biblScope
type="pp">(70-72)</biblScope></bibl>.</desc>
<interp xml:id="moment-to-moment"/> <interp
xml:id="action-to-action"/> <interp
xml:id="subject-to-subject"/> <interp xml:id="scene-to-scene"/>
<interp xml:id="aspect-to-aspect"/> <interp
xml:id="non-sequitur"/> </interpGrp>
Example 2.
CBML fragment listing a vocabulary that may be used to characterize
transitions from one panel to the next. The above example uses McCloud’s
transition types defined in his
Understanding Comics
[
McCloud 1993, 70–72]. Of course, the encoder/editor
may choose to augment or replace McCloud’s vocabulary with any suitable
typology.
The above code provides an “interpretation
group” (
<interpGrp>) of type “panelTransition.” The
@resp attribute points to a unique identifier of the agent
responsible for the interpretations, for instance, the editor or author of the
encoded document. A description (
<desc>) inside
<interpGrp>,
explains the purpose and rationale for the interpretation group. Finally, a
sequence of
<interp> elements lists six possible panel-to-panel
transitions, using a vocabulary borrowed from Scott McCloud, as explained in
the description for the interpretation group. The
@ana/
<interp> mechanism is an extremely flexible one
provided by TEI to encode multiple avenues of interpretations and analysis. One
could, for instance, use this mechanism to record typologies related to visual
motifs, actions and gestures, or gender representations and roles.
<div type="panelGrp">
Most theories of comics distinguish between a single-panel
“cartoon” — such as Bill Kean's
The Family
Circus, Tom Wilson's
Ziggy, or Gary Larson's
The Far Side — and multi-panel comics, in which the sequence
and juxtaposition of multiple panels plays a fundamental role in the production
of meaning in the document. McCloud explains:
Panels, especially in print comic books, are not presented as a continuous,
unbroken stream of narrative units, nor are they randomly laid out in sequence
across a series of pages. The total collection of panels that make up a comics
narrative are subdivided into panel groups. The sequence of panels that a
reader has in her field of vision is typically an intentionally composed
composite component of the larger work. For instance, a panel depicting a
moment of high suspense might occur as the last panel of a recto page, forcing
a lingering suspenseful pause while the reader turns the page to reveal the
resolution of the suspense in the first panel of the verso page. These
carefully composed panel groups often correspond to a physical page, but a
panel group may share a physical page with advertisements or other content or
may correspond to two physical pages of a two-page spread, in which panels are
read from left to right, top to bottom across two opposing verso and recto
pages. To capture this level of composition, CBML adopts the TEI <div>
element, which is meant to encode a subdivision of the text. The
@type attribute on <div> is used to indicate the type of
textual subdivision, e.g., chapter, act, scene, canto, etc. In this case we use
the string “panelGrp” to indicate the division is a grouping of panels.
Another attribute, @subtype, is also available to distinguish further
between different types of panel groups. Of course, the generic <div>
element may also be used in CBML to encode other subdivisions, such as chapters
or “parts,” which are commonly found in comics.
<div type="panelGrp" xml:id="eg_002"> <cbml:panel
characters="#david #samson"> <cbml:balloon type="speech"
who="#david"> What a funny looking truck outside here… Never saw one like
it before! </cbml:balloon> <cbml:balloon type="speech"
who="#samson"> That’s strange! What’s it look like? </cbml:balloon>
</cbml:panel> <cbml:panel characters="#samson #david">
<cbml:balloon type="speech" who="#samson"> You’re right--I never saw
one like this before! </cbml:balloon> <cbml:balloon type="speech"
who="#david"> Wonder what it’s doing here? </cbml:balloon>
</cbml:panel> <cbml:panel characters="#samson #david">
<cbml:balloon type="speech" who="#samson"> What the--!
</cbml:balloon> <cbml:balloon type="speech" who="#david">
Gas---Help! </cbml:balloon> </cbml:panel> <cbml:panel
characters="#samson #david"> <cbml:balloon type="speech"
who="#samson"> No time to look for doors now! </cbml:balloon>
<sound>Crash!</sound> <fw place="lower-left"
type="pageNum">1</fw> </cbml:panel> </div>
Example 3.
CBML fragment illustrating the use of
<div
type="panelGrp">. Panels are intentionally grouped and composed
in larger compositional units, often corresponding to a physical page
surface.
<cbml:caption> and <cbml:balloon>
A number of textual and graphic elements make up the content of individual
panels. Textual content is found primarily in narrative captions and word
balloons. Abbott provides a brief description of these elements:
Narration is placed in squared-off
areas [narrative captions], usually colored yellow in comic books.
Dialogue is located in white “balloons” that include little pointed
projections indicating the speaker. Unspoken thoughts follow a similar
pattern except that the balloons are billowy, and a string of small white
circles leads to the thinker. Both narration and dialogue are recognized
as extra-visual phenomena that may share space in the panel plane with
the drawing but are not part of the scene. The visual assumption is that
narration and dialogue lie on the plane of the opening through which one
views the scene, augmenting the pictorial element but not part of
it.
[Abbott 1986, 156]
Abbott’s description is accurate but incomplete. In addition to speech
and thought balloons, one may find other types of balloons in comic book
content. For instance, since so many genres of comics concern supernatural,
speculative, fantastic, and science fiction narratives,
“telepathic” balloons are not uncommon and are visually
distinct from standard speech or thought balloons.
In many comics narratives, distinctly styled
“audio” balloons may be found emanating from radios,
televisions, telephones, walkie-talkies, hi-fi speakers, and other devices.
These “audio” balloons are usually represented by jagged
pointy borders, perhaps suggestive of the electricity that powers the audio
source.
<cbml:panel characters="#spidey #jjj" n="3" xml:id="eg_ae1">
<cbml:balloon rendition="#uc" type="audio" subtype="telecast"
who="#jjj" xml:id="eg_006"> My name is J. Jonah Jameson, publisher of
<title rendition="#b">Now</title> magazine and the <title
rendition="#b">Daily Bugle</title><emph
rendition="#b">!</emph> I am sponsoring this program in the
public interest, to expose <emph
rendition="#b">Spider-Man</emph> to the pubic as the menace he
is! </cbml:balloon> </cbml:panel>
Example 4.
CBML code to represent the panel depicted in
Figure 9.
One also finds a great deal of graphic stylistic variation among speech
balloons. For instance, a character like the Vision, from Marvel Comics’
The Avengers superhero team, is usually depicted with
stylized speech balloons that highlight his android origins. Interestingly,
when the Vision made his first appearance in
The Avengers #57 in
October 1968, his speech balloons were not styled differently from other
characters. Later, the text inside the Vision’s speech balloons would be styled
in a hand-written italics. The rectangular balloons with rounded corners were
introduced in issue #91 in 1971. A yellowish tint was added to the balloons two
months later in issue #93 and this convention has now persisted for over
thirty-five years. This evolution of the graphic representation of the Vision's
speech might be tied to an analysis of other aspects of the character's
development.
The Vision's speech balloon is, however, still a speech balloon, but
it is styled differently than other conventional speech balloons. TEI is
equipped with a suite of elements and attributes (
<rendition>,
@rendition, and
@rend) to describe the styling, or
“rendition” of various elements in source documents. In
primarily textual documents, the
<rendition> element and related
attributes might be used to describe details such as font family, font size,
justification, and son on. The rendition features of TEI may be used in CBML
contexts to describe graphical features, for instance to provide a detailed
description of the distinctive styling of the android's speech balloon.
Another convention for presenting characters’ speech and thoughts in comics
eliminates balloons entirely and instead uses captions that incorporate both
narrative text and the dialogue/monologue text usually found in balloons. At
the other extreme are comics that contain balloons but lack narrative captions.
The presence or absence of captions and balloons are particularly interesting
examples of meaningful structural variation found in comics. The basic
structures of the graphic panels and pictorial elements may be similar, but the
structures of the textual elements are completely different. For McCloud, who
privileges the pictorial, the different textual structures may be of interest
but do not affect the content’s status as comics. For other scholars who
privilege the textual over the pictorial — Carrier, for instance — the lack of
text balloons may mean that such documents are simply illustrated stories and
not comics at all [
Carrier 2000, 4, 27–45]. Certainly, these
structures have important generic implications. The use of separate narrative
captions and balloons results in structures that closely resembles the textual
structures found in drama and film, while the absence of balloons results in
structures that more closely resemble prose fiction. A complete absence of
narrative captions is a likely indicator of the absence of a narrator in the
text, while comics with a high number of narrative captions might indicate a
very strong narrative presence. An examination of the absence, presence, and
frequency of narrative captions and balloons could be a useful strategy for
analyzing the role of narration and the narrator in comics generally or in a
particular title or author.
In CBML, narrative captions are encoded using the
<cbml:caption>
element. TEI provides its own
<caption> element, described in the
Guidelines as “the text of a caption or other text
displayed as part of a film script or screenplay.” The examples provided
in the
Guidelines clearly indicate that TEI’s
<caption>
element is intended for relatively brief and sparse captions, and the content
model for the TEI
<caption> element will not accommodate the complexity
of many comics captions, which may consist of multiple paragraphs and dialogue.
In response to the constraints of the stock TEI
<caption> element, CBML
provides its own
<cbml:caption> element, with a richer content model, in
the CBML namespace. For captions like those in
Figure
11, with embedded dialogue, one would use the TEI
<said>
element to demarcate the speech or thoughts inside
<cbml:caption>.
Diegetic text and <floatingText type="diegetic">
Diegetic documents are another important textual and graphic feature of comics
narratives. Diegetic documents appear in the comics art as part of the
narrative’s fictional universe. Such documents can be seen and
“read” by the narrative's characters. We find diegetic
documents or text appearing as street signs, store front signage, billboards,
newspaper headlines, or even full newspaper articles. Pratt discusses clearly
diegetic text and the degrees to which other text (balloons, captions, sound
effects) may also be diegetic:
The words within comics have an
interesting relationship to the diegesis, the story world that is
“real” to and hence can be experienced by the
characters who populate it. When a street number or a postcard is
depicted in a comic, it is diegetic. Not only the reader, but also the
characters can see it. However, only the reader can see the other types
of words that occur in comics. The characters cannot see word balloons,
sound effects, or narration (leaving aside cases where, for example,
comics artists playfully have their characters interact with word
balloons: breaking them, using them to float, and so on). But these
features are not exactly non-diegetic. Though characters cannot see
speech balloons, they can hear the words in them, and presumably each
character is aware of the contents of his or her own thought balloons.
When there are sound effects, characters can hear them, though the sounds
heard within the diegesis may not be exactly the same as the sounds
depicted in words. “Kablammo!” may be onomatopoetic,
but it cannot capture the exact sound of an explosion. And characters may
even be aware of narration, as is the case where one of the characters is
also the narrator, or in the unusual situation where a character reacts
directly to an impersonal narrator.
[Pratt 2009, 108]
The term
diegetic is frequently used in film
studies to distinguish between the film score music that plays in the
background but cannot be heard by the characters and the diegetic music that is
part of the film's narrative sphere, for instance, when a character in the film
plays the guitar or when music plays in a bar where characters meet. Famous
examples from film include many of the scenes set in Rich Blaine's Café
Américain in
Casablanca and the music played by the
“Cantina Band” in the Mos Eisley Cantina scene in the
original 1977
Star Wars film. Below are examples of diegetic
text in comics.
<cbml:panel characters="#pparker" n="1"> <cbml:balloon
rendition="#uc" type="speech"> Some day I'll show them!
<sound>sob</sound> Some day they'll be sorry! --Sorry that they
laughed at me! </cbml:balloon> <floatingText subtype="poster"
type="diegetic"> <body> <head rendition="#uc #large">
Science<lb/> Exhibit </head> <p rendition="#uc">
Experiments<lb/> in<lb/> Radio-Activity </p> <p
rendition="#uc"> Open<lb/> to the<lb/> Public </p>
<ab rendition="#right-arrow #red"> Room 30 </ab> </body>
</floatingText> </cbml:panel>
Example 5.
TEI's
<floatingText> element is used to encode diegetic text from
the panel in
Figure 12.
<div type="panelGrp" xml:base="eg/cbml_eg.xml"> <cbml:panel
n="1"> <cbml:balloon rendition="#uc" type="speech" who="#jjj">
Well, let's just see with the <emph rendition="#b">distinguished
competition</emph> has for their headline this morning…
</cbml:balloon> <floatingText subtype="newspaper"
type="diegetic"> <body> <ab type="masthead"> <title
rendition="#uc #large #center"> New York Globe </title> <lb/>
<hi rendition="#small #center #uc"> New York's Oldest Daily Newspaper
</hi> </ab> <div type="news_story"> <head
rendition="#x-large #uc #b" type="headline"> Webbed Wonder<lb/>
Wows City! </head> </div> </body> </floatingText>
</cbml:panel> <cbml:panel n="2"> <cbml:balloon
rendition="#uc" type="speech" who="#jjj"> <p>Huh.</p>
<p>And let's see, what did the <title
rendition="#b">Journal</title> run this morning?</p>
</cbml:balloon> <floatingText subtype="newspaper"
type="diegetic"> <body> <ab rendition="#center #large #uc"
type="masthead"> The New York Journal </ab> <div
type="news_story"> <head rendition="#x-large #uc #b #center"
type="headline"> A Spider-Man<lb/> Among Us </head>
</div> </body> </floatingText> </cbml:panel>
<cbml:panel n="3"> <cbml:balloon rendition="#uc" type="speech"
who="#jjj"> <p>And…<emph rendition="#b">what,</emph>
pray tell, did the <title rendition="#b">Daily Bugle</title>
decide to run this morning?</p> <p>Some fat cat's <emph
rendition="#b">house</emph> catches on fire.</p>
</cbml:balloon> <floatingText subtype="newspaper"
type="diegetic"> <body> <ab rendition="#center #large #uc"
type="masthead"> Daily Bugle </ab> <div type="news_story">
<head rendition="#x-large #uc #b #center" type="headline">
Osborne<lb/> Burning</head> </div> </body>
</floatingText> </cbml:panel> <!-- … --> </div>
Example 6.
TEI's
<floatingText> element is used to encode diegetic text from
the series of panels in
Figure 13.
Prose Content: Fiction, Editorial, Promotional Material, Company and Industry
News, Fan Mail
In addition to the comics content, a comic book will often contain more
traditional prose of various sorts, including prose supplements to the comics
narrative; short stories, sometimes accompanied by illustrations;
[14] editorial and promotional content from publishers,
editors, writers and artists; news items from the publisher; and fan mail, often
accompanied by replies from the comic book creators.
Comic book fan mail has great potential value to scholars studying comics. Fan
mail highlights the social aspect of comic book creation and readership; the role
of the reader in the creation, expansion, and elucidation of the larger,
collective fictional universes of comics narratives; the often intense and
intimate interaction between creator and audience; and frequent authorial or
editorial commentary. Further, fan mail is often a source for important details
such as the explicit identification of otherwise uncredited creators, including
writers, artists, inkers, colorists, and letterers. There are many instances, as
in
Figure 16 below, in which individuals who would
go on to become prominent figures in the comic book industry first appeared in
comics as the authors of fan mail.
Advertisements
Print advertisements, particularly many of the types frequently found in comics,
are themselves extremely complex documents. One cannot study the history of
television in the twentieth century without careful attention to television
advertising. Similarly, one cannot study the comic book without close
consideration of the advertisements in document. In comic books from major
publishers such as Marvel and DC, advertisements are, in terms of quantity, the
dominant content type apart from the comics content.
[15] Of particular interest
are the many advertisements that adopt conventions from comics. The intermingling
of comics-based narrative with commercial advertisement becomes a key element in
the production of meaning in the text. In addition to advertisements for
third-party products, comics are rife with advertisements and other promotional
materials for the comic books and other products of the publisher. These
promotional materials contribute to the transformation of the publisher from
commercial entity to a club or cult
[16] and to the process by which a reader becomes a “fan.”
Unfortunately, this important content is usually omitted from both print and
digital “reprints” from the comic book publishers.
Advertisements are interesting on many levels. For instance, a scholar examining
gender roles in comics may be interested to know that certain advertisements are
addressed directly to boys (“Look, Fellows!”) and that participation in
certain activities promoted by the ads, such as selling Grit
newspaper in one’s neighborhood, required one to answer in the affirmative the
question, “Are you a boy?” Later versions of the same ad would replace
“Look, Fellows!” with “Look, Friends!” and “Are You a Boy?” with
“Male or Female?”
Other advertisements found in comics are of interest because of the ways in which
they appropriate the characteristics of comics content, the dominant content type
of the “host” document. One finds such appropriations
increasingly in video and film as elaborate advertisements adopt the conventions
of, for instance, music videos or short films. The televised broadcast of the
National Football League’s annual Super Bowl championship has become a showcase
for such advertisements. Further intermingling of commerce and
“art” is found in the relatively recent trend of
advertisements in the movie theater and product placement within television and
film. Comics anticipate such trends, on a mass scale, decades before they became
commonplace in other media. Comic book documents encoded with CBML would allow one
easily to identify, retrieve, and analyze advertisements that contain comic book
elements such as panels and balloons.
The following examples illustrate some of the variety found in comic book
advertisements and the extent to which the advertisements adopt the formal
conventions of comics, from advertisements that include elements like word
balloons to advertisements that contain miniature multi-panel comics
narratives.
<div type="advert">
The advertisements typically found in comic books may be adequately described
using existing TEI elements, along with custom CBML elements for those
advertisements that incorporate comics features such as panels and word
balloons. The generic TEI <div> with its @type and
@subtype attributes may be used as the container element for
advertisements.
<div type="advert" xml:id="eg_003"> <head
rend="background-color:black; color:white;" rendition="#x-large #center
#uc"> Poems Wanted </head> <ab rendition="#center #uc"
type="floatingHead"> To Be Set to Music </ab> <p> Send one or
more of your best poems today for <emph rendition="#uc">free
examination</emph>. Any subject. Immediate Consideration. </p>
<ab rendition="#center #uc" type="floatingHead"> Phonograph Records
Made </ab> <ab> <address> <addrLine rendition="#uc
#large #center"> <orgName>Crown Music Co</orgName>
</addrLine> <addrLine> 49 W. 32 St., Studio 11, New York 1
</addrLine> </address> </ab> </div>
Example 7.
TEI/CBML code for the small advertisement featured in
Figure 22.
Related Documents
Many other publications and content types that would not typically be classified
as comic books incorporate the formal elements of comics. For instances, there are
a number of publications that combine news, interviews, reviews, and other
journalistic features about comics and the comic book industry. These publications
include fanzines, such as
Alter Ego; official fan club
publications, such as Marvel’s
FOOM Magazine;
magazines such as
Wizard or
The Jack Kirby
Collector; and Web sites, such as
Comic Book Resources
.
The existence and relevance of these many comics-related publications is an
important reason behind the decision to base CBML on TEI. Comic book content does
not exist in isolation from other document types but is often integrated into
essays, news articles, reviews, scholarly criticism, and so on. TEI provides
robust mechanisms for encoding these more familiar document types, while CBML
supplements TEI with features necessary for encoding the integrated comic book
content.
One of the most noteworthy aspects of TEI is its many elements, attributes, and
other structures for describing components of scholarly textual editions,
including textual variants among multiple printings and editions, authorial
manuscripts and typescripts, notes, annotations, and marginalia. Like many other
modern documents, comic books can have complicated publication and production
histories, with multiple editions and reprintings. Likewise, published comic books
have their origins in authorial manuscripts and typescripts and original art with
marginalia and notes of various types. See
Figure 24
and
Figure 25. The combination of CBML elements and
existing TEI elements for describing manuscripts, typescripts, and textual
variants provides a suitable suite of descriptors for encoding such documents.
Linking Transcription and Image
The examples above illustrate how CBML can capture a transcription of the text found
in a comic book. Other important features are also captured, such as the structure of
the comic book; the sequence of pages and panels; the grouping of panels into
compositional units that may or may not correspond to a physical page; classification
of panel transition types and analysis of individual transitions from panel to panel.
However, the examples above do not attempt to describe the
pictures one
finds in the comic book, nor should they. Comic books are a visual, graphic art form
combining text and image. CBML/TEI/XML is a text format. While one could certainly
use CBML to describe details about any or all of the pictures in a comic book
publication, such an effort would undermine the hybrid form of the comic book. The
visual, pictorial, and graphic design elements of the comic book simply cannot be
fully or adequately described or translated as text. While many design features
common to textual documents, such as text size and font characteristics, may be
reasonably and usefully described using common TEI techniques, it would be futile and
impractical to attempt to describe every detail of every picture in a comic book
document. The encoded document, with markup containing and describing metadata,
structure, transcription, and analysis, should co-exist with and be linked to digital
facsimile page images of the comic book. Thankfully, in current digital environments
and on the Web, such linking and display of text and image is relatively simple, if
time-consuming, to accomplish. Section
11.1
Digital Facsimiles in the
TEI Guidelines describes existing
TEI elements and attributes for linking digital transcriptions to digital facsimile
images [
TEI 2010c].
On the other hand, depending on the goals of any particular project employing CBML,
some scholars will wish to add to the encoded text some description and analysis of
the pictorial aspect of the comic book. If one has such needs, CBML and TEI provide
suitable mechanisms. Typed TEI <note> elements may be used to provide detailed
descriptions of the pictorial dimensions of the document. For example, one might use
<note type="panelGrpDesc"> for a “panel group
description” or <note type="panelDesc"> for a
“panel description.”
<div type="panelGrp"> <!-- Preceding panels omitted to conserve space.
--> <cbml:panel characters="#hulk" n="7"> <note resp="#jawalsh"
type="panelDesc"> The hulk kneels in the grass, surrounded by trees. He leans
back with hands on his head, lamenting his transformation back into Banner.
</note> <cbml:balloon rendition="#jaggies" type="speech">
No!<lb/> <emph>No!</emph> </cbml:balloon> <cbml:balloon
type="speech"> It feels like-- <lb/> my
<emph>blood</emph>--<lb/> is on <emph>fire!</emph>
</cbml:balloon> <cbml:balloon type="speech"> <p> My
<emph>skins--<lb/> shrinking--<lb/> shrinking--!!</emph>
</p> <p> Can't--<lb/> <emph>fight</emph> it--
anymore--! </p> </cbml:balloon> </cbml:panel> <cbml:panel
characters="#hulk #banner" n="8"> <note resp="#jawalsh" type="panelDesc">
Set against an abstract background, a sequence of four views of the Hulk's and
Banner's head depicts the Hulk's transition back to Bruce Banner. </note>
<cbml:caption> Thus, there and then--<lb/>
suddenly--uncontrollably--<lb/> the awesome
<emph>transformation</emph><lb/> starts--until--
</cbml:caption> </cbml:panel> <!-- <cbml:balloon -->
<cbml:panel> <cbml:balloon type="speech" who="#cap" xml:id="eg_008"> A
little <emph rendition="#b">sleep</emph> will do wonders for you!
</cbml:balloon> </cbml:panel> <!-- captions -->
<cbml:panel> <cbml:caption rendition="#uc" xml:id="eg_009"> Thus,
there and then--<lb/> suddenly--uncontrollably--<lb/> the awesome
<emph>transformation</emph><lb/> starts--until--
</cbml:caption> </cbml:panel> </div>
Example 8.
<note type="panelDesc"> is used in this code example to
describe the pictorial content of individual panels. Similarly
<note
type="panelGrpDesc"> could be used to provide a description of the
layout or other visual details of group of panels.
Another option is to use the
@ana attribute, illustrated
above, to apply analytical or interpretive schemes to the
pictorial, graphic, and visual dimensions of the text.
Even when focusing solely on the text of comics, the transformation from handwritten
or printed text to unformatted digital transcription may lose important
information-bearing graphic and design features. For instance, in the examples in
Figure 27 below, distinct fonts and balloons are
used for particular characters in an attempt to represent graphically the tone,
timbre, or other qualities of speech, resulting in a sort of visual or synaesthetic
onomatopoeia. In such cases, TEI's
<rendition> element and
@rendition and
@rend attributes may be used to describe such
design features.
Challenges: Visual Complexity
The basic structures of CBML were based on representative samples of common and
relatively simple structures and panel layouts. For instance, panels normally are
arranged in fairly regular grid patterns. 2 x 3 panel grids (three rows of two
rectangular, nearly square panels) are very common; 2 x 2 and 3 x 3 layouts are also
prevalent.
But variation from strict and regular grid layouts is ubiquitous. Panels of
every size and shape — circles, triangles, irregular polygons, and fluid organic
shapes — are also common, as are borderless panels with ambiguous boundaries.
Simplistic approaches to encoding the spatial and sequential relationships among
such panels are foiled by frequent variations and complexities in panel size, shape,
and arrangement and particularly by ambiguous sequential positioning of panels. As
determination of meaning in a textual document is dependent on a particular, usually
obvious, sequence of words, so is determination of meaning in a comic book dependent
on a particular sequence of images and panels. While a meaningful panel sequence in
comics is usually apparent, the conventions of graphic expression in comics are not
as fixed, well established, or as well known by general readers as the conventions
for textual expression and narrative. And just as writers and poets break rules and
conventions, so do comics writers and artists play with the rules and conventions of
comics narrative. In
Figure 30 below, a single obvious
sequence of panels is not at all clear — multiple valid sequential readings are
possible. Also note the playful use of diegetic text, with bibliographic information
about the creators and title of the story embedded in the pictures. Near the upper
left of the page is a blue-tinted panel with the names of the creators of the story:
“LEE STERANKO SINNOT ROSEN in Another Epic!” The title of the story, “Tomorrow You Live Tonight I Die!,” appears on a calling card
in the panel at the lower right-hand corner of the page.
A
<note> and omission of sequential numbering on the
<cbml:panel> elements could be used in the encoding to address such
sequential ambiguity.
Irregular and unusual panel arrangement, composition, and presentation may pose
challenges for “reading” of the visual and textual language of
comic books, just as difficult syntax, unfamiliar vocabulary, neologisms, or
unconventional typography and punctuation may present challenges for reading
primarily textual content. Most comics have panels with clear borders and generous
gutters between borders. The borders and gutters between panels correspond to the
punctuation and spacing used to enhance clarity and readability in written and
printed texts. Panels without clear borders and gutters introduce another type of
visual ambiguity in comics.
Figure 31 illustrates a
panel group with discreet pictorial moments that correspond to panels, but these
“panels” lack conventional borders and gutters.
At least six such pictorial moments or “panels” may be
identified in Eisner's page from
Figure 31. The top of
the image depicts a man and woman running through Charles de Gaulle Airport; the next
element shows, from a distance, the couple as they ride up an escalator. The lines of
the escalator tube, extending more or less horizontally across the entire page, cause
this image to serve simultaneously as a discreet pictorial moment
and as
a border or gutter separating the “panels” above and below the
escalator scene. Two more “panels” are found directly below the
escalator. On the left, the couple rush through the crowded airport; on the right,
they arrive at their seats on the plane they have been rushing to catch. A very
subtle “panel” emerges quietly below these two panels as the
aircraft, seen from a distance, takes off through the clouds. Like the distant view
of the escalators, this image does double duty as “panel” and as
border/gutter. In the final “panel” of the page, the man and
woman, reclined in their seats, relax and resume their conversation. In those images
(the escalator and the ascending aeroplane) that function as both panel and
border/gutter, we might say, borrowing terminology from textual criticism, that the
substantive content has merged with the accidentals of the document. By encoding
these graphic and textual moments within
<cbml:panel> elements, the scholar
encoder has imposed an interpretation and asserted various claims about the document.
Additional
@ana attributes might be used to indicate those
“panels” that function as both panel and border/gutter.
<note> elements might also be used to discuss other issues related to the
general graphic ambiguity of the page.
In
Figure 26 above, we saw an example of a speech
balloon crossing the gutter from one panel into another. Another type of visual
ambiguity is introduced when pictorial elements cross panel boundaries and co-exist
is more than one panel. Since different panels often depict different physical spaces
and different moments in time, the presence of a pictorial element in more than one
panel can be particularly jarring and can be used to establish complex spatial and
temporal relationships.
Figure 32 below shows an
example of this type of visual ambiguity in an early WWII-era comic book:
The panels above are not uniform in shape or size. Pictorial elements, such
as the gun in the fifth panel and the purple-suited figure and motion lines in the
bottom two panels, cross the gutter separating the panels and co-exist in multiple
panels. These graphic moves suggest interesting spatial and temporal juxtapositions
and facilite visual transitions from panel to panel, breaking down the clear
separation of narrative moments and instigating a flow approaching (though still very
far removed from) the rapid frame-to-frame transitions found in film.
Figure 33 below, from Morrison and Jone's
Marvel
Boy
[
Morrison 2000], shows a more recent example of a page with both
ambiguous panel boundaries and overlapping panels. The central action — of the
blue-cloaked golden figure lifting Marvel Boy into the air — is witness to its own
genesis, visually encroaching on the panel depicting some moments prior in time. As
Marvel Boy is lifted up into the underlying panel he becomes a spectator — with the
reader — of himself within the previous moment. Likewise the blue-cloaked figure
plants a golden boot upon a future moment that proceeds from the central action. An
encoded CBML document might identify and analyze such transitions. One could develop
a taxonomy to classify the sorts of overlap phenomena found in
Figure 32 and
Figure 33 and
use the TEI
<interGrp> and
<interp> elements and the
@ana
attribute, discussed above, to describe and interpret the graphic features and the
resulting spatial and temporal relationships.
Serialization and Bibliographic Complexity
As is the case in many other art forms (fiction, television, film), serial
publication of an ongoing narrative introduces a great deal of bibliographic and
metadata complexity. While these issues are not unique to comics, I would argue that
the degree of complexity is distinct in comics. Comic books typically contain
serialized narratives. Often one finds “stand-alone” issues, which
contain a complete story, and often stories extend over many issues, or even many
issues of two or more serial titles.
[17] In the case of
mainstream super hero comics, regardless of whether any particular story is more or
less self-contained within a single issue or extends over many issues, these
narratives exist in the context of larger narratives developed over many decades by
dozens or hundreds of individual writers and artists. Rather uniquely, characters
like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, and the Hulk exist in ongoing,
decades-long, cross-generational narratives created by collaborative teams of
writers, artists, and editors. Although we find similar issues of long-running
narratives with changing collaborative teams in film and television, none approaches
the longevity and frequency of production found in the comic book
narratives.
[18] Most long-running comic book
features, from Fawcett's original Captain Marvel to Spider-Man to Archie, have
complex bibliographic histories involving networks of changing titles, creators, even
publishers. These complex bibliographic histories, with multiple creators, are
relevant to textual theories about the nature of authorship and the social and
corporate nature of document production. In comic books we have examples of
collaboratively-produced narratives coupled with collaboratively-produced visual art.
The many metadata structures available in TEI lend themselves to description of these
complex bibliographic histories and relationships.
The evolution of characters over many decades in serialized tales poses documentary
complications that may be addressed through encoding strategies. For instance, one
may be interested in the DC super hero known as the Flash. The general concept of a
super hero named the Flash, with the power of super speed, published by the comic
book publisher DC, is some sort (or some sorts) of bibliographic entity — a
character, a subject, a title. But there is not one Flash character (or title) in the
DC imaginative universe. The first Flash, with the secret identity of Jay Garrick,
was created by Gardner Fox and artist Harry Lampert in Flash Comics #1
(January 1940). This character was revived in the 1950s, with a new costume, new
origin story, and new secret identity — police scientist Barry Allen. Allen
“died” in the 1985 series Crisis on Infinite
Earths and remained “dead” for over twenty (real — not
fictional) years . During Allen's absence, his similarly super-powered sidekick Wally
West took on the persona of the Flash, as did Bart Allen, Barry Allen's grandson.
Many other characters have undergone similar evolutions and transformations.
TEI is well-equipped to capture these complex details of character and identity. The
prosopographical features of TEI provide a framework for modeling relations
among both real people (e.g., comics writers, artists, and other creators) and
fictional characters.
Conclusions and Future Work
Like most digital humanities projects and markup language development, CBML is an
ongoing effort. Although many diverse examples have been shown here, the extent of
textual and graphic variation found in the world of comics is astounding. Examples
here have focused on superhero comics, the most enduringly popular genre in the
history of the art form. However, many other important genres exist — romance, war,
horror, science fiction, and fantasy comics — each with their own traditions and
conventions. Increasingly, more realistic narratives, autobiographical works, and
non-fiction works are presented as comics. Japanese manga and manga-influenced comics
are very popular and possess a style and conventions distinct from western comics.
Certainly many more difficult and challenging comic book documents will be found to
test the general applicability of CBML and suggest additions and modifications to the
markup language.
An important issue, not yet addressed in this discussion, is the issue of copyright.
Modern comic books, which developed in the 1930s and since, are largely still under
copyright protection. The most popular of these, those featuring the famous super
heroes, are owned by massive media conglomerates. DC Comics (publishers of titles
featuring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, etc.) is owned by Time Warner.
Marvel Comics (publishers of titles featuring Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Iron
Man, the Hulk, etc.) was recently acquired by the Walt Disney Company. These media
companies have reputations for jealously and fiercely protecting their copyrights.
Copyright is doubtless a challenge for scholars studying comic books, just as
copyright is a challenge for scholars studying film and many other twentieth- and
twenty-first century works. But barring further restrictive copyright legislation,
many of the older comic book publications will be entering the public domain in
coming decades. Under current U.S. Copyright Law,
Action Comics #1
(June 30, 1938), featuring the first appearance of Superman, would enter the public
domain in 2033, 95 years after publication. And many comic books from the same period
are already in the public domain because the copyright was not renewed, when such
renewal was still necessary for an extension of copyright protection. In 2008,
publisher Image Comics began their Next Issue Project, a series of new comics based
on the narratives and characters from comic books published in the 1930s and 40s that
had fallen into the public domain. The first Next Issue Project comic book was
Fantastic Comics #24 [
Fantastic Comics 2009]. It draws
on stories and characters from Fox Feature Syndicate's
Fantastic
Comics, the final issue of which was #23, published in November 1941. The
Next Issue Project has identified a number of other public domain titles, including
Lev Gleason Publications'
Silver Streak Comics (twenty-three issues),
Quality Comics'
Crack Comics (sixty-two issues), and Harvey Comics'
Speed Comics (forty-four issues). These four titles alone provide
over 150 comic books that could be used for further collaborative development of CBML
and published on the Web and in other media. Certainly there is a great deal more
comics content in the public domain or for which permissions may be secured, and
nothing prevents a scholar from applying CBML markup to any text as part of a
strategy for reading, interpretation, and analysis. The end goal of markup is not and
should not always be publication of a digital surrogate. The encoding of a text may
be a rigorous intellectual activity that has great value as process, not just as
product.
CBML, as described here, focuses primarily on overall structure of the document,
textual content, and metadata. Significant work remains to be done giving similar
attention to the pictorial dimensions of the comic book. I have argued above that
CBML should not attempt to go too far in description of individual images and
pictorial details, relying instead on the presence of facsimile page images.
Nonetheless, in order to analyze the visual grammar and conventions of comics,
additional visual and pictorial features will need to be “identified explicitly in order to facilitate processing by
computer programs”
[
TEI 2010c]. Future work on CBML will include modeling frameworks for
analysis of pictorial and graphic features and developing taxonomies for identifying
such features, beyond the basic structural components of panels, balloons, captions,
and sound effects.
Comic books are an endlessly fascinating medium and one from which the digital
humanities can learn a great deal. The structural complexities of the content rivals
or surpasses the complexity of content famously treated by digital humanities
scholarship: fragmentary classical texts; medieval manuscripts; Blake's illuminated
work; and Rossetti's double works. The combination of text and pictures and the role
of visual communication in comics prefigures the multimedia and new media of digital
environments and the prominence of pictures, graphics, and icons found on the Web and
other modern digital interfaces. The corporate and collective authorship of many
long-running comic book narratives and the interactive relationship between creators
and readers/viewers/consumers of created content provide models of authorship and
readership that are relevant to the collaboratively created digital content that we
make and study in the digital humanities.
Ongoing development of CBML is documented at
http://www.cbml.org/. One may download the most recent schemas and TEI ODD
files (which define and document the CBML customizations of TEI) and example CBML
instance documents.
CBML-L, an email list for discussion of CBML, is available at
https://iulist.indiana.edu/sympa/info/cbml-l. In addition to ongoing
development and refinement of the CBML markup scheme, future research will involve
the creation of a large corpus of pubic domain comics encoded in CBML and the
development of interfaces for representing, exploring, and manipulating CBML
documents and associated facsimile page images.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank DHQ Editor Julia Flanders and the
reviewers for their very valuable feedback on this article. I would also like to
thank my colleagues Paul Aarstad and Michelle Dalmau for their careful reading and
insightful comments.
Notes
[1] XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, is a
widely-adopted metalanguage that specifies a set of rules for encoding documents
and data and for creating application- and domain-specific markup languages for
encoding documents and data. XML is a recommendation of the World Wide Web
Consortium. See [Bray 2008]. [2] I share with many comics creators and scholars a dissatisfaction with the term
graphic novel, finding it unnecessary, misleading and
perpetuating of a false distinction. Wikipedia's article on Graphic novel includes a useful summary of many of the criticisms of the
term. [3] An
example is Peter David's Mascot to the Rescue!
[David 2008], a superhero-themed children’s novel that integrates
comics content with more traditional narrative prose. Brian Selznick’s The
Invention of Hugo Cabret
[Selznick 2007] is an illustrated novel, with many of the
illustrations subdivided into juxtaposed images reminiscent of comics
panels. [4] Readers from the scholarly markup and digital humanities communities
will be familiar with many of the general issues about text encoding discussed
here. I am also hopeful that this essay will attract readers from the comics
scholarship community who may not be as familiar with text encoding, and so I go
into more detail about general issues of text encoding than I might
otherwise.
[5] The
reader wishing to test whether or not it is indeed “plausible to
imagine discussions over whether a given way of marking up a text is
correct or incorrect” is invited to browse the TEI
Mailing List (TEI-L) Archive, where she will find many lively
and energetic debates on markup practices. [7] See chapter 23 “Using the TEI” of the
TEI Guidelines
[TEI 2010b] and Roma, an online tool for “generating validators for the TEI.”
[8] Additional examples of
recent comic book film adaptations include From Hell (2001),
Ghost World (2001), Road to Perdition (2002),
American Splendor (2003), Daredevil (2003),
Hulk (2003), The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen (2003), Catwoman (2004),
Hellboy (2004), The Punisher (2004),
Batman Begins (2005), Fantastic Four (2005),
A History of Violence (2005), Sin City (2005),
V for Vendetta (2005), 300 (2006),
Superman Returns (2006), 4: Rise of the Silver
Surfer (2007), 30 Days of Night (2007), Ghost
Rider (2007), The Dark Knight (2008), Hellboy II:
The Golden Army (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2008),
Iron Man (2008), Punisher: War Zone (2008),
The Spirit (2008), Watchmen (2009),
Whiteout (2009), Iron Man 2 (2010),
Kick-Ass (2010), Captain America: The First
Avenger (2011), Green Lantern (2011), X-Men:
First Class, Thor (2011), The Dark Knight
Rises (2012), and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012). Many
more film adaptations of comics are planned or in development. Extensive lists of
films based on comics may be found on Wikipedia’s “
List
of Films Based on Comics
”. [9] The University Press of Mississippi
publishes dozens of comics related titles. See, for instance, [Di Liddo 2009], [Gordon, Jancovich, and McAllister 2007], [Hatfield 2005], [Jeet 2008], [Kunzle 2007], and [Lee and McLaughlin 2007]. Other scholarly presses are also publishing
monographs on comics studies. See [Aldama 2009], [Carlin, Karasik, and Walker 2005], [Carrier 2000], and [McLain 2009]. [10] Comics scholarship also includes historical studies, studies of
individual writers and artists, and investigations of traditional literary
issues of theme, plot, narrative and character; as well as representations of
politics, class, race, and gender [Capitanio 2010]
[Huebner 2009]
[Wanzo 2009]
[Coogan 2006]
[Emad 2006]
[Wright 2001]. Other fields, such as education and rhetoric,
study the use of comics in the classroom to teach reading and writing [Jacobs 2007]
[Ranker 2007]
[Norton 2003]. Within the field of library science one finds
research on the history of comics within libraries and on the development of
comics and graphic novel collections [Matz 2004]
[Highsmith 1993]
[Hoffmann 1988]. [11] In this essay, XML elements are enclosed in angle brackets (<>) and
displayed in a monospaced font. XML attributes, by common convention, are
prefixed with the “at” symbol (@) and are also displayed
in a monospaced font. The prefix cbml: identifies
CBML elements added to TEI using TEI customization mechanisms, e.g.,
<cbml:panel> or <cbml:balloon>. Elements without the cbml: prefix are stock TEI elements, e.g.,
<div> or <epigraph>.
[12] See for instance Johanna Drucker’s
“What is Graphic about Graphic Novels?"”
[Drucker 2008]. [13] Additional global attributes include
<xml:id>, for providing an element with a unique identifier;
@rend and @rendition, two related attributes used to
describe how the element is rendered or styled in the source document; and
@xml:lang, for indicating the language of the text in the
element. More global attributes, such as those used for linking and analysis
are added by including optional TEI modules in one's schema.
[14] Golden Age
comics often included such prose narratives. In fact, the first published
comics work of Stan Lee, the famous co-creator of such characters as
Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and Iron Man, was a prose story in
Captain America Comics #3 [Lee 1941]. More recently, Alan Moore frequently includes prose
material that supplements the comics-based narrative. Examples may be found in
Moore’s Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen. [15] As a random example,
Fantastic Four #61 (April, 1967) contains thirty-six pages,
including front and back covers, recto and verso. Of these thirty-six pages,
twenty-one are devoted to comics content, twelve to advertisements, two to fan
mail, and one page to other editorial content.
[16] Stan Lee, who was both a major creative
force at Marvel Comics as well as its most effective and visible promoter,
frequently addresses Marvel readers/fans as “True Believers.”
[17] For example, the Marvel Comics
“Avengers Defenders War” storyline from 1973-74 takes place
in two serial publications, The Avengers (issues #115 to #118) and
The Defenders (issues #8 to #11).
[18] The closest analog might be daytime soap operas, many of which
have been in production for decades and are produced more frequently (with daily
episodes Monday through Friday) than typical comic book issues are published. But
the longest-running soap opera, Guiding Light, which started on
radio in 1937, ceased production in 2009. The Superman and Batman narratives,
which started in 1938 and 1939, respectively, continue to be told in multiple
serial publications and of course in film and other media. Another analog might be
the repeated refashioning of mythological, biblical, and Arthurian narratives
throughout literary history, but such recasting of shared imaginative universes
are more decentralized and lack the corporate control and continuity found in the
ongoing comic book narratives or soap operas.
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