Conceptual Art or Readable Contract: The Use of Comics in Technical Communication

ABSTRACT

Comics provide a promising platform for technical communication, but there are limits to their affordances. This article demonstrates some of the limits using Robert Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions, a graphic adaptation of Apple’s iTunes Terms and Conditions. Using discourse analysis, it argues that Sikoryak’s adaptation, while an impressive piece of art, is not an example of accessible user agreement as media reports claim. The article concludes with practical implications on producing comics-style technical communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Comics
• design of communication
• visual rhetoric/visualization techniques

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The history of “manga,” which literally means whimsical drawings, goes back many centuries to works such as the Animal Scrolls (12th century, credited to Toba Sōjō) and Hokusai’s Manga (19th century, by Hokusai).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Han Yu

Han Yu is Professor of Technical and Scientific Communication at Kansas State University. Han’s research focuses on popular science communication, visual rhetoric, and intercultural technical communication. She is the author of Mind Thief: The Story of Alzheimer’s, The Other Kind of Funnies: Comics in Technical Communication, as well as Communicating Genetics: Visualizations and Representations. She is the co-editor of Negotiating Cultural Encounters: Narrating Intercultural Engineering and Technical Communication (with Gerald Savage) and Scientific Communication: Practices, Theories, and Pedagogies (with Kathryn Northcut).