![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Page layouts are a salient feature of comics, which have only recently begun to be studied using empirical methods. This preliminary study uses corpus analysis to investigate the properties of page layouts in comics from Europe (Sweden, France), Asia (Japan, Hong Kong), and America (Mainstream, Indy genres). Pages from Asian books used more vertical segments and bleeding panels, while European and American Indy pages used more horizontal staggering. Pages from American mainstream comics used widescreen panels spanning a whole row, and more variable distances between panels (separation, overlap). These results suggest that pages from different types of comics have different systematic characteristics, which can be studied by empirical methods.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Neil Cohn
Neil Cohn is known internationally for his research on the overlap in cognition between sequential images and language. His books, The Visual Language of Comics (2013) and The Visual Narrative Reader (2016), establish a foundation for the scientific study of comics’ structure. He received his PhD in cognitive psychology at Tufts University and is currently an assistant professor at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. His work can be found online at www.visuallanguagelab.com.
Jessika Axnér
Jessika Axnér, Michaela Diercks, Rebbecah Yeh, and Kaitlin Pederson are graduates of the University of California at San Diego in the linguistics and cognitive science programs.