Comics as a sign system Cover Image

Komiks ako znakový systém
Comics as a sign system

Selected compositional aspects of semiotics of comics

Author(s): Peter Karpinský
Subject(s): Literary Texts, Semiotics / Semiology
Published by: Lingvokulturologické a prekladateľsko-tlmočnícke centrum excelentnosti pri Filozofickej fakulte Prešovskej university v Prešove (LPTCE)
Keywords: semiotics;comics

Summary/Abstract: This paper challenges the prevailing approach to semiotics of comics that only deals with visual representation. Instead, it suggests that comics, as a picto-verbal art form, presents a far more complicated and complex problem from the point of view of semiotics. In the analysis of K. Saudek’s Tieň na hranici času (Shadow on the Border of Time), the paper focuses mainly on one aspect of the language of comics – on its compositional component, which, from the point of view of its semioticity (that is its substitutive function), is understood as a certain type of index and symbol, drawing on logical, temporal or cause-and-effect relations affecting the ordering of picture panels, but also on the convention of reading linear texts from left to right. In the static, two-dimensional picto-verbal art form, this compositional component is claimed to stand for time and movement in space, but also for the three-dimensional space itself.

  • Issue Year: 11/2020
  • Issue No: 41-42
  • Page Range: 43-54
  • Page Count: 9
  • Language: Slovak