While the most obvious difference in reading comics from more traditional forms of text is the negotiation between drawings and texts, one thing that any reader will have experienced feeling is a certain sense of uncertainty at times as to where they should look next. With some major exceptions such as visual poetry—
defined by Bohn (2001, p. 15) “. . . as poetry that is meant to be seen,” and which places words within in the page in a way which prioritizes visual effect—it is the rare literary work that does not continue on in the accepted movement of text for whatever language it might be. A work of English will take for granted that the next word will come to the right or below the last; although there may be a double-carriage return between them, the next paragraph will come below the first—and if not, then surely on the page to the right. Sometimes these rules may be complicated, such as in Japanese, which is identical in order to English for horizontal text, and left-to-right, top-to-bottom for horizontal text; yet as soon as this is determined, the text will remain consistent, at least for that section. While there are on occasion times in when one sees volumes which mix vertical and horizontal text in Japanese, the same basic principle stands: The vertical texts are compiled together on one end of the book, opening from the left, and the horizontal texts together on the other end, opening from the right. When one reaches the middle, the book may be turned over and started again from the other side. There is no experience of moving around throughout the page: It is a linear experience, where one moves throughout the text following a set course that is determined almost immediately with the appearance of the first word on the paper. Comics, however, break this golden rule, as text is embedded into the drawings themselves, partitioned into blocks of text that are interspersed through the pages and frames.
While comics still follow some basic principles of reading in terms of how to move through pages and frames in a mannered order—this order being paramount above all else, at least according to Scott McCloud,
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who put the sequentiality of images as the definition of comics (1994)—text within a given frame does not necessarily follow that path; it rather requires readers to make judgments about orders based upon what they determine to be a viable narrative. An example might be found in Figure 19, from Tomoko Ninomiya’s Nodame Cantabile. Here, the main female character, Nodame, and a secondary character, Masumi, have been competing to get the main male character, Chiaki, to go on a date with them on Christmas. Both characters are very upset at having not been able to get Chiaki to go out with them; given what Groensteen (2007) and others have written about the shapes of speech balloons, we can assume that this is being expressed not only by their having their heads in their arms, but by the use of jagged-edged speech balloons. A disadvantage of jagged-edged speech balloons, however, is that they generally do not feature tails to demonstrate who is speaking. As a result of this, there is some ambiguity in terms of assigning the bubbles to speakers. Assuming that the speech bubbles are assignable to the speakers to whom they are closest, the right most two would go to Nodame and the left most two to Masumi, and the content of the speech bubbles themselves seem to correspond with this interpretation, as does the use of language within the two frames, with the one on the top right calling Chiaki sempai (senior/upperclassman; see glossary) as Nodame generally does, and the top left using the strongly feminine sentence-final particles no-yo that Masumi generally does (gendered speech and character development will be brought up again in Chapter 4). However, what remains questionable is the order in which these should be read.
Clearly, the content of the two lower bubbles must be read after the corresponding upper bubbles, as they are post-position, inverted subordinate clauses. That is to say, they are dependent sentences which normally would appear in the beginning of the sentence, but were tagged on afterwards, a common phenomenon in Japanese (Eguchi, 2000). Here, the use of no-ni (even though) in Nodame’s second sentence clearly tags its relationship to the sentence above it. Masumi’s second sentence also ends in no-ni, and parallels Nodame’s structurally. Yet we might ask the question whether it should be Masumi-Masumi, or should it be Nodame-Masumi-Nodame-Masumi. Both seem viable options, especially given the structural parallels in the language. It would even not be impossible to think that theses were not post-position subordinate sentences at all, if one accepted reading from the bottom up.
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Under some circumstances, readers may also find themselves moving back into a previous frame to access the linguistic text necessary to string together the story. In an example of the universality of such issues for all comics, one may look at Figure 20 from Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s 2004 adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (Auster, Karasik, & Mazzucchelli, 2004). Looking at the overall page, we see that it has been broken into two panels with six frames in total, three on top, two in the middle, and one on the bottom. However, the bottom frame is peculiar in that it is shaped like a pyramid, with its top breaking up the two frames in the middle panel. Visually, too, the top part seems to almost form a third frame, with the background design gradated so that it only starts to blend in graphically with the lower part of the frame as it approaches the bottom part of the middle panel. Thus, when reading the text in what would seem the most natural order, we find ourselves inclined to read the text featured in the top part of the bottom most frame between the two panels in the middle in a natural left-to-right, top-to-bottom order: “. . . Quinn himself was & the dummy . . .” / “. . . and work was &
the voice that & gave purpose to & the enterprise.” / “Little by little, work & had become a presence in Quinn’s life . . .” In this sense, the bottom frame becomes a part of the middle panel; in a linear sense, it should thus be
‘spent’, inaccessible now to readers. Yet the most natural reading, both in terms of content and in the continuity created by the ellipsis “. . .” is to link it here with the bottom-rightmost “. . . his comrade & in solitude.”
Figure 19: Example of speech bubbles where it is difficult to determine the speaker and natural order in Nodame Cantabile (2:47)
Nodame: Doushite & senpai ha kyuu ni & taido wo hirugaeshita & n deshoukaa Why did Chiaki suddenly change his attitude?
Masumi: Doushsite & watashi ga & taijou saserareru & no yo---!!
Why am I forced out?
Nodame: Yakusoku shita & no ni!
Even though (he) promised!
Masumi: Ai wo hyougen & shita dake I was just expressing my love!
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In both the cases of Figure 19 and Figure 20, readers, motivated and searching for narrative, are forced to make judgments. While research has shown that manga reading skills are developed, meaning that they are acquired over time with manga reading experience, the results being more consistent interpretations of reading orders for panels and other aspects (Nakazawa, 2005), readers will nevertheless find themselves moving between them in a way that is not possible in linear texts. Whatever readers feel makes the most sense as a narrative, there are many cases where they will not be able to achieve a viable interpretation without moving back and forth between the frames. Research on the experience of reading manga has shown that rereading is a crucial part of the process, and it may come either immediately, before one moves through to the next page, or after one goes through the chapter or book to completion (Ingulsrud & Allen, 2009). These kinds of examples clearly speak of the importance of that process: Initial readings may not lead to appropriate interpretations, thus literally demanding readers go over the passages again. Yet as with the example above from Nodame Cantabile with the use of jagged-edged speech bubbles, text in manga, incorporated into the drawings as it is, often borrows graphic elements in order to add in extra information that can help with these processes. The role of visual representations
Figure 20: Example of speech bubbles allowing for movement in City of Glass (8)
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of text has in fact been a popular theme in research on language in manga, with a large body of research particularly focused on the graphic nature of onomatopoeia. Fuse (2004) writes on the difference between handwritten and typed text in manga, associating handwritten text with what I call Onomatopoeia and type with what I call Lines. Arguing that there is something inherently different between handwritten and typed text, he claims that handwritten text is in a closer relationship with drawings than type, giving it a visual quality not found in its printed versions. Handwritten onomatopoeia are thus more graphically-oriented, with a large part of their meaning not deriving not from their linguistic structure, but rather from how they are physically written, allowing him to argue that onomatopoeia can be “read” even from just how they are written visually.
Interestingly, similar arguments have been proposed by others for works translated from Japanese, and Rommens (2000) writes that “. . . it has to be noted that non-translated Japanese onomatopoeia are very visual, next to being additive, which further testifies to the visual integration of the verbal.”
It could be argued, however, that the intersection of linguistic and visual language is most obviously and importantly realized not within individual types of text such as Lines or Onomatopoeia, but in how linguistic information can be categorized into those different types themselves (Lines, Narration, etc.) by their visual presentation (i.e., whether or not they are in speech bubbles or written on the background, etc.). It is first and foremost through the use of such visual structures that we as readers are able to distinguish between text types, which are clearly an important part of reading manga. In the pen-tracing experiment described earlier, while readers seemed to search for text, they also seemed to differentiate what types of text they looked for. In particular, readers seemed to search for lines, but ignored other text types, with some readers even actively commenting that they skipped them (Allen & Ingulsrud, 2007, p. 8). Given that the major way for telling whether or not a given piece of text which one has not read counts as Lines or Narration is their visual presentation, these results suggest that readers use visual structural clues to determine what parts they will (and will not) read.
In some ways, this visual distinction of textual categories could also be said to be the foremost difference between text in manga and text in linear literatures. While certain structural tools may help identify the roles of different text in novels—such as the use of quotation marks (“,”) for lines and italicized text for Thoughts—a great deal of the text may only be distinguished by the linguistic structures of the text, not by their graphic presentation. Onomatopoeia, for example, certainly do occur in novels in non-sentence form as they do in comics.
A good example might be Kyuusaku Yumeno’s Dogura Magura (Dogra Magra) (2011), which began with
“………… ブ ウ ウ ―――――― ン ン ン ―――――― ン ン ン ン ………”
(…………buuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnnnnn………). However, a reader could only tell that they were looking at onomatopoeia by actually reading the text, and not by a greater set of rules applicable to all novels for how to present onomatopoeia. Even if you understood that it was likely onomatopoeia because of the use of symbols
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and katakana, there are no obvious clues telling you that this first line would just be free-standing onomatopoeia, until you finish the line and realize that it contains no verbs.
Similarities, of course, can be found within certain genre of literature; the stylized distinction between text types may be comparable in part to a script or a play in the sense that certain rules have been adopted in order to distinguish between what is meant to be spoken—and by whom—and what are just notes. Speakers’
lines are identified by the inclusion of a name at the beginning of an utterance, separated from the body of the text by tabs or colons; set notes or information about how a certain line is to be performed are usually either in different font, font size, or style such as italics, and naturally lack an identifying speaker. Yet even in plays, the visual categorization of text serves a fundamentally different purpose from what it does in comics: Ultimately, plays are meant to be read aloud, taken up and interpreted by the spoken voice, and proper formatting allows the clarity necessary to do so; in manga, however, the visual presentation of text is another tool of narrative. Sam Smiley (2005), writing on the art of playwriting, states that “(s)tating a play in a professionally typed format is an essential aspect of the playwright’s craft (295),” and offers four “vital functions” of the playwriting format:
the psychological effect of format on writers (in the sense of accomplishment); giving the play a professional appearance (thus helping its marketability); providing a way of estimating a script’s performance length (in that pages following the format can be accurately estimated to take up a certain amount of stage time to speak); and readability (to add clarity to reading) (295-296). While the first two are largely surface-level and thus secondary, the third may seem comparable; after all, both Takeuchi (2005) and Yamaguchi (2005) have argued that certain aspects of language create a sense of time. Yet in manga, this is largely a tool used to the advantage of narrative, less concerned with actual minutes and seconds than with a sensation of time and rhythm in the reader, whereas Smiley’s time is more of a practical matter of real-time concerns for scheduling and acting. And while the visual presentation of text certainly affects readability, in manga, as some of the previous examples demonstrate, it can also complicate readability, making text in fact less clear for narrative purposes. Needless to say, the structure of the text in plays still follows a clearly linear order, forcing an order into the flow of reading to follow the relevant rules of the language.
As a result of this non-linear, visually-distinguished use of language in manga, there exists—in exaggeration, perhaps, but not to a strong degree—a cacophony of sounds and voices in any given panel, with tension existing between interflowing narratives, Lines, Onomatopoeia and other forms of auditory data. Manga have not surprisingly been compared to cinema, particularly in their use of frames (Rommens, 2000), but one might say that they are also similar in regard to this point: Movies, too, offer a multiplicity of sounds, quite literally, with background music, outside noises, narration and dialog sounding off at once, each having their own role in the narrative, each playing their own part. While other written literatures may certainly achieve a
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sensation of sound and multiplicity of voices, few offer it on the same, non-linear, simultaneous way that manga and comics do, making this an essential part of the manga reading experience.
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