Four-Color Sound: A Peircean Semiotics of Comic Book Onomatopoeia

Abstract

Onomatopoeia are the representation or imitation in language of sounds from the natural world. They occur in the phonic modality of speech, the written modality, and a third modality combining word and image. The latter is a common device in the sequential art of comic strips and comic books, and is particular to the American tradition of comics. Onomatopoeia diversify the experience of sequential art and have unique signifying properties. Though there have been significant attempts to provide a structural analysis of the comics medium, these have often ignored onomatopoeia’s uses in the comics medium. This study utilizes the concept of an American Visual Language (Cohn, 2013) within a Peircean framework to offer theories of the individual (onomatopeme) and structural uses of word/image onomatopoeic expressions in mainstream American comic books.

Interpretation of Social Interactions: Functional Imaging of Cognitive-Semiotic Categories During Naturalistic Viewing

“…Peirce aimed at a general semiotic theory that accounts for all kinds of sign processes in all kinds of modalities, including those occurring in nature and scientific inquiry; hence, his model of sign processes goes beyond communication per se ( Jensen, 1995 ; Nöth, 2001 ). The UCs have inspired theoretical models developed to characterize and interpret manual gestures (e.g., McNeill, 1992 , 2005 ; Fricke, 2007 ; Mittelberg, 2008 , 2013 , 2018 ; Mittelberg and Waugh, 2014 ), onomatopoeia in language ( Jakobson, 1966 ; Guynes, 2013 ), and images ( Sonesson, 2005 ; Jappy, 2011 ), and further, describe narrative comprehension in both spoken and written stories ( Lee, 2012 ), film sequences ( Deleuze, 1986 , 1989 ; Sykes, 2009 ) and comics ( Magnussen, 2000 ; Cohn, 2007 ; see also Bateman et al, 2017 on multimodality). Qualitative analyses utilized aspects of Peirce’s UCs for the investigation of mental imagery, human gestures, language evolution, and developmental aspects of communication and culture (for a review, see Zlatev, 2012 ).…”

A Picture is Worth More Words Over Time: Multimodality and Narrative Structure Across Eight Decades of American Superhero Comics

“…Corpus analyses have become a growing tool to investigate aspects of visual narratives like the framing of panel content (Cohn et al 2012b;Neff 1977;Cohn 2011), visual morphology (Cohn and Ehly 2016;Forceville 2011;Forceville et al 2010;Abbott and Forceville 2011), and page layout (Pederson and Cohn 2016). However, studies of multimodality related to comics have mostly looked at onomatopoeia (Pratha et al 2016;Forceville et al 2010;Guynes 2014) and conceptual metaphors (Forceville 2016;Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009). Here, we used corpus analysis to explore complex multimodal interactions and their changes over time in one of the longest contiguous traditions of comics in the world: American superhero comics from the 1940s to the 2010s (Duncan and Smith 2009).…”

Analysis Onomatopoeia in Selected Poems by Lee Emmett

“…Although there are have differences in the data but the most dominant of both this research are the same, it is secondary onomatopoeia. Based on the explanation above, It caused different object of the research that makes the result of data is different and then the types of the onomatopoeia that have been found in the same because in onomatopoeia commonly used in poetry and comic, because delusion and event described in linguistic and then onomatopoeia is part linguistic (Guynes, 2014).…”