Multimodal Cohesion in Panel Graphs

A Pragmaticist Approach to the Gap Between Comics Grammar and Aesthetics

Abstract

The essay presents a Peircean or pragmaticist approach to the contradiction between two kinds of theories about comics interpretation: One set which assumes the existence of a fundamentally lingual grammar in accordance with concepts of ‘visual languages’, and another set which insists on a free artistic interpretation as the force grounding interrelations between comics panels in sequence and sense-making in comics. The approach presented supports both positions and attempts to reconcile them by explaining in which two different senses comics do and do not have grammar. It examines the perceived gap between the grammar and the aesthetics of comics in a quotidian example taken from the pages of Amazing Spider-Man. While admitting a possible hermeneutic corridor between regular and singular, ‘heautonomous’ interpretations in the terminology of Romantic aesthetics, this position then historicizessuch accounts and looks for alternative treatments of the same cognitive processes. By moving from a grammatical through a hermeneutical to a pragmaticist semiotic account of the resolution of ambiguities and irritations in interpreting a short panel sequence, the argument pivots on the Peircean continua of continued semiosis, of the interplay of prescision and abstraction, and of the gradual differences between simple and creative abduction, to outline three distinct conclusions for a multimodal model of cohesion in panel sequences that straddles the seeming divide between grammar and aesthetics: First, that such a hermeneutic corridor can be elaborated as a specific kind of r e v i s i o n a l  a t t i t u d e towards panel interpretation in sequence; second, that this allows the delegation of assumptions about conscious or reflective reading in favor of a comprehensive technical account of continuous interpretation; and third, that the historic contexts of previous interpretations have reasons to c o n f l a t e  d i s t i n c t i o n s between pictorial grammar and aesthetics with distinctions between conscious and automatic reading as well as between script and pictures, but that such conflations may no longer have to hold today.