Tag Archives: Frank Bramlett

Editorial Cartoons: Is Michael Sam gay? or is he black?

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A lot of media attention has been paid lately to the case of American football generally and the National Football League in particular. Recently, the NFL drafted its first openly gay man into its ranks, causing a great deal of celebration in some quarters and a high degree of consternation in others. As a fan of (American) football, I am interested in this story because of what it says about the social implications for individual players, team camaraderie, and the fans, too. I am thinking about this because I try to be mindful about and supportive of efforts to eliminate discrimination and promote equality regarding race and ethnicity; regarding sexual orientation; regarding gender; and regarding socioeconomic class.

Since I currently live in Sweden, I don’t see all the news (infotainment) about current events in the U.S., so what I have seen of the Michael Sam story I have found through websites that I visit on occasion. I saw stories on my BBC phone app; on Queerty.com and Advocate.com; and on other random links I saw on Facebook. What I did not see, though, in any instance, was editorial cartoons about this event, so I went hunting for them. Using a Google search, I found a few cartoons, some of which focused on Michael Sam’s race and others on his sexual orientation.

I include below some randomly chosen cartoons depicting some facet of the Michael Sam case. Does the cartoonist in each instance focus more on representations of race, more on representations of sexual orientation, or some combination of both?

Bok (bokbluster.com/creators.com)

bokbluster.com

The first cartoon borrows President Obama’s earlier discourse regarding the NFL and the incidence of concussions and traumatic brain injury. Bok makes a connection between working class men, beer drinkers, and anti-gay prejudice. (Because of the perspective, we don’t see the butt crack, but we know it’s there and it is revealed.) The image on the television screen is of two men kissing. What is not clear is how the characters in the panel would react to the fact that it is apparently two men of different racial identities kissing. Since it is set in a ‘sports bar’ (pictures of hockey and baseball on the wall), readers might assume that it is a bold statement this man makes about not having a son play in the NFL.
 
Drew Litton (http://www.drewlitton.com/)

drewlitton.com

 
This cartoon draws on the historical significance of racial integration in baseball (an interesting sports cross-over). Litton uses visual cues to communicate Michael Sam’s race, but he uses linguistic cues to communicate Sam’s sexual orientation (the newspaper in his hand). Robinson is pictured wearing his Dodgers uniform (the team he joined) but Sam is wearing his Missouri uniform (not yet having been drafted by the St. Louis Rams).
 
Keith Knight (www.cagle.com)

http://www.cagle.com/2014/02/michael-sam/

 
Knight’s technique relies much more on linguistic cues to communicate his thoughts about Michael Sam. It may be that Knight uses Sam’s stats rhetorically to establish the rationale for the caption, which shows the linguistic struggle over how to name the importance of this event. Knight decides that it is neither Black History nor Gay History but History.

In her 2009 article published in Visual Communication, Elisabeth El Refaie writes about visual literacies and the processes that readers use to understand political cartoons. Her essay is a pilot study exploring how readers make sense out of the visual and verbal elements in a panel. In her analysis, El Refaie explores five questions regarding the ‘multiliteracies’ required to understanding these cartoons: “How do readers: (a) establish the real-world referents of a cartoon; (b) impose a narrative on the cartoon image; (c) interpret the facial expressions of the depicted participants; (d) understanding text-image relations; and (e) establish metaphorical connections between the fictional scene of the cartoon and a political argument?” (p. 190).

What interests me about the range of cartoons shown above is how few of them rely on metaphorical representations to communicate their messages. Most of them are relatively literal scenes: representations of people having conversations about Michael Sam, or Michael Sam himself having a conversation about his future. Research on editorial and political cartoons discusses the tendency for artists to make their commentary using metaphor: combining two very different domains for the reader to interpret. (For more on cognitive metaphor in cartoons, see Bounegru & Forceville 2011; El Refaie 2003; among  others.)

In my very limited search for cartoons about Michael Sam, I found just a very small number that relied on metaphor to communicate the meaning. Here is an example:
 
John Darkow (columbiatribune.com)

http://www.columbiatribune.com/opinion/darkow_cartoons/

 
Readers familiar with the story will know that Michael Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams. This cartoon by Darkow communicates a similar message to the cartoon by Keith Knight (above), that race and sexual orientation should somehow be subsumed in the general meaning of the cartoon and that the ‘simple’ fact of the draft should be highlighted. One major difference is that the Darkow comic relies on metaphor and the Knight comic is a more literal representation. In fact, ‘Barrier Breaker’ is drawn in such a way that it erases all mention of sexual orientation and it erases all mention of race. The metaphor of a ram breaking through a wall is clear to the reader only if the reader already knows the discourses that play a role in the Michael Sam case. (Under other circumstances we would need to consider underlying or implicit prejudicial messages: the jokes that could be told about a gay man joining a team called the Rams; the jokes that could be made about a black man being represented by a ram.)

It is no surprise, of course, that cartoonists would choose to highlight certain aspects over others. The intersections of race and of sexual orientation in this particular situation—professional sports in the U.S.—are a virtual minefield. Is it safer for cartoonists to create a more literal representation than it is to create a metaphorical representation? Is it simply too difficult to navigate the issues metaphorically? Understanding political cartoons is a complex act of reading that draws on multiple types of literacies and relies on a vast array of knowledge and cultural discourses. Likewise, creating cartoons demands that artists focus on some aspects of an issue or story and leave out other aspects.

I ask readers of Pencil Panel Page and Hooded Utilitarian to provide their own examples of cartoons regarding Michael Sam or regarding similar situations. How do race and sexual orientation function in the commentary of political cartoons?

How do questions get answered in comics?

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Years ago, when I was learning about cross-cultural communication and the teaching of English, a teacher of mine said that Americans are often considered very friendly by people from other countries. Sometimes, we’re considered overly friendly, overly intimate, especially when we meet someone new.  Her example was something like this:

  • A: How are you?
  • B: Fine thanks, how are you?
  • A: Pretty good. I’m actually on my way to a meeting.
  • B: Oh, okay. Maybe we can have coffee later.

People who are new to English have to learn that when Americans ask ‘How are you?’ we don’t really necessarily mean it. Maybe we mean it a little bit, but not enough to hang around for an extended answer. Sometimes we are really interested in finding out, but more often than not it’s a perfunctory question and it serves as a routinized greeting rather than an earnest or sincere inquiry. (There is an enormous amount of research in discourse studies and conversation analysis about questions and answers.)

Likewise, when we answer with ‘Fine thanks,’ it’s not because everything is necessarily fine, but because it’s ordinarily expected of us. In fact, if we offer more information than that, it could be seen as inappropriate. Under some, rather restricted circumstances, if someone asks ‘How are you?’ we can answer the question honestly:

  • I’ve got a stomach ache.
  • My car broke down and I need a thousand dollars.
  • Stan just gave his resignation to Melinda.

Usually, though, we reserve honest answers for close friends, spouses, and family members. Most often, though, the question ‘How are you?’ elicits a quick, conventional, standardized answer.

Not all question/answer adjacency pairs are routine, though. In web comics, especially those that are meant to be funny, the question/answer adjacency pair is used to further the humor of the strip. On a first date between a dragon and a transporter malfunction victim in Scenes from a Multiverse, a comic I wrote about before, questions can help uncover and solve problems or at least defuse tension:

 

2011-05-11-Blind-Date

 

There is a degree of similarity between Dragon’s question ‘Is everything okay?’ and ‘How are you?’ Both of them are queries about the state of the interlocutor: feelings, health, overall situation. But these two forms function very differently. In this comic, Dragon is genuinely concerned about how his interlocutor is feeling. We know this in part because of the follow-up, ‘You seem a bit flustered.’

The questions in panel 2 aren’t routine, either, especially since the two characters are out on a first date and attitudes toward dragons seem particularly germane given the situation. But in panel 4, there is another question: ‘Can you believe it?’ I don’t think this question is a routine question like ‘How are you?’ (Some people may call it a rhetorical question, popularly defined as a question that doesn’t need an answer.) This is a kind of question that is a frozen form, a formulaic utterance meant to anticipate/address an interlocutor’s question or comment about a topic or situation.

I’d like to consider question and answer adjacency pairs in two additional comics. One is from the absurdist web comic Wondermark and the other is from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

 

20130827 bat signal phone text email

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, 27 August 2013

 

The question-and-answer exchange between Batman and Alfred is funny because it so clearly violates our expectations about how the Batsignal works as a call for help. Couple that with the disagreement about computer-mediated communication and Batman’s strong opinions about how it ought to be done, and no one is surprised by the last panel. Even Alfred’s question ‘Are you mad?’ is a query about Batman’s feelings (like ‘Is everything okay?’ in Scenes from a Multiverse, above).

My last example shows how questions and answers can go a long way toward preventing clear communication. (Alfred and Batman have clear communication in the above comic, even though it may be a little bit frustrating for both of them.) This strip comes from Wondermark, and I wrote about it in an earlier post.

 

2010-12-03-682places

Wondermark, 3 December 2010

 

The question-and-answer exchange in Wondermark takes the notion to an extreme degree. The conversation starts out reasonably well, but by panel three, the interaction has gone awry. It is easy to see that the forms (the form of the questions and the form of the answers) are perfectly fine. The ‘problem’ (humor?) arises with the content of the answers. The forward motion of the conversation was strong enough to keep the exchange rolling, even if the questioner and perhaps the answerer knew that the train was going off the rails.

The forms of questions and answers in comics of course reflect to a degree our ‘real-life’ experience with them. It is the function of these adjacency pairs that provides a great deal of room for discussion. The three comics I chose are designed to be funny, and the comics artists use adjacency pairs as a linguistic component to propel the humor.

What comics have you read that called your attention to the particular forms of questions and answers?

How do comics artists use speech balloons?

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This post is the first in a series on how comics artists represent talk in comics. I’ll be writing about speech balloons and how the discipline of conversation analysis (CA) helps us understand how creative these artists can be when they try to show the intricacies of everyday talk.

Consider the following two panels. These are from the webcomic Scenes from a Multiverse by Jon Rosenberg.  (Click on each of the titles to see the full comic.)

The Symbiote
(February 1, 2013)		 The Superbowl (sic)
(February 4, 2013)

 

 

2013-02-01-The-Symbiote c2013-02-04-The-Superbowl c

 

Both of these are the final panel in the comic. Specifically, each one is panel 5 of a 5 panel comic. Understanding the speech and the speech balloons in these two panels will depend on the sequencing of balloons in previous panels and, to some extent, the social context of the conversation.

In most kinds of comics, speech balloons show conversations in relatively uncontroversial ways. In smaller panels, there may be one, two, or three characters producing speech, while larger panels and full-page panels may contain a dozen or more characters talking at the same time. In conversation analysis (CA), the approach to studying talk is to keep track of the number of turns, how long the turns are, how many speakers there are, and how much silence there is, among others. This post is the first in a series about speech balloons and conversation sequence. In particular, I will focus on how comics artists draw two or more characters talking at the same time.

When two or more speakers produce speech at exactly the same time, then this is called simultaneous talk. (Sometimes it is called interruption, and sometimes it is overlap, but this depends on interpretation.) When listening to conversations, it is relatively easy to identify moments when participants are talking ‘on top of each other.’ And in transcribing the speech, there is a small set of typographical symbols that scholars typically use to do this. Consider the following excerpt, taken from an article by Emanuel Schegloff (2000) on simultaneous talk (p. 26). The two speakers, Anne and Dick, are an elderly couple who have been married for a long time. In this short excerpt, we see a good bit of simultaneous talk. Anne and Dick are having a conversation with their daughter, and it takes a funny turn in that Dick gives Anne a hard time about spending money on shoes and her claim about how many pairs of shoes she owned.

schegloff 2000 overlapping talk

SOURCE: Schegloff, E. (2000). Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language in Society, 29 (1): 1–63.

Lines 52 and 53 are clear examples. According to this transcription, at exactly the same time that Dick begins the word ‘six,’ Anne begins her utterance with ‘WHY’. The effect is that while Dick already has the conversational floor, Anne joins in, and the listeners have to keep track of what both of them are saying. At the end of Dick’s word ‘shoes’, he stops speaking but Anne continues her turn through line 54. The use of all capital letters indicates that Anne is using a LOUD volume.

It’s one thing to listen to speech and write it down in a transcription. But in comics, it seems to me that it’s a creative challenge to represent simultaneous speech using speech balloons. In other words, how does an artist use visual cues (putting one balloon on top of another) to signal a certain kind of verbal cue (two or more speakers talking at the same time)?

The question I have is whether the visual difference in the balloons has a material impact on the way readers ‘hear’ the speech. Does the doctor’s turn ‘sound the same’ as the dad’s turn? If there is a difference, is it a difference of kind or a difference of degree? To answer the questions, we should examine each of the comics in terms of conversation and speech balloons.

The Symbiote

2013-02-01-The-Symbiote a

The first two panels of ‘The Symbiote’ show very traditional strategies for representing turns and turn-taking. The doctor in panel 1 begins the sequence, with the patient taking the second turn, and the two trading off in panel 2 as well. Even though the tails cross in panel 1, I think readers would perceive these turns as more or less separate, perhaps with no simultaneous speech at all. In panel 2, the visual separation of the balloons is even clearer, indicating that the two speakers are being careful to take turns without ‘stepping on each other’s toes.’

The Superbowl (sic)

2013-02-04-The-Superbowl a

In panels 1 and 2 of ‘The Superbowl,’ the speech turns proceed much like those in ‘The Symbiote.’ I think the visual separation of speech turns here is crisp, with the tails of the balloons never crossing. The content of the balloons indicates that the daughter takes the first turn by asking a question and the dad takes the second turn by answering the question. This is true for both panels.

If we consider the sequence of panels 3-4-5 in both comics, we may be able to discern more readily whether the speech in the final panels are indeed different kinds of simultaneous speech.

The Symbiote
Panel 3 Panel 4 Panel 5

 

2013-02-01-The-Symbiote b

 

The Superbowl
Panel 3 Panel 4 Panel 5

 

2013-02-04-The-Superbowl b

In both comics, panel three is composed very similarly. The speech balloons of speakers 1 and 2 are touching, and in fact the balloon of speaker 2 is ever so slightly overlaid onto the balloon of speaker 1. Panel 4 in ‘The Symbiote’ has just one speaker, the doctor, but Panel 4 in ‘The Superbowl’ shows the two speakers producing some measure of simultaneous talk.

As we saw at the beginning of this post, panel 5 for both comics shows that one balloon is overlaid on top of the other. It is more than likely that readers are supposed to ‘hear’ simultaneous talk. In other words, the doctor talks at the same time as the patient, and the dad talks at the same time as the daughter.

What interests me about them is that in both panels, one speech balloon overlaps the other. There are some slight differences, however. In ‘The Symbiote,’ the doctor’s speech balloon overlaps the patient’s speech balloon, but all the words are visible. On the other hand, in ‘The Superbowl,’ the dad’s balloon overlaps the daughter’s but also partially obscures two words (on and grass). What is not clear is whether the balloon obscures additional words or other symbols in the balloon, symbols like ellipses (…).  But is the amount of simultaneous talk the same? If we hear the panels differently, what elements of each comic are we meant to consider when we decide how they sound?

When you read these two comics, how do you ‘hear’ the turns playing out? What might Rosenberg be trying to accomplish by drawing one speech balloon on top of another?  How much does the turn-taking sequence affect our perception of the balloons? And how much of an impact does the social context or the identity of the speakers have?

In part 2 of this series, I’ll talk about simultaneous discourse in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles.

What roles might linguistic arbitrariness play in Krazy Kat?

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Welcome to the third post in the Pencil Panel Page roundtable on George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. We are glad to have found a new home here at Hooded Utilitarian, and as Adrielle said in her inaugural post, you should dive into our archives here.

Since there has been some concern expressed on the Hooded Utilitarian site about the state of linguistic analysis, I wish to start my post on Krazy Kat with a note about the linguistic analysis of comics in general. As a linguist, I am most interested in the way that linguistic codes function in comics. I concentrate on the analysis of dialogue using methods borrowed from conversation analysis, primarily but not exclusively to highlight the interrelationship of language and identity. You might take a look at my essay on verbal camp in the Rawhide Kid as an example. But in addition to discourse analysis, and especially for my posts on Pencil Panel Page, I draw broadly on morphology, lexical semantics, dialect and register, as well as principles of bilingual code-switching, among others. Some commenters on Hooded Utilitarian have cited Hannah Miodrag’s book, Comics and Language (2013); Adrielle’s post two weeks ago mentions it. I would also like to note that I edited a collection of essays called Linguistics and the Study of Comics, published by Palgrave in 2012. You can read the table of contents and the introductory chapter here. My understanding is that Neil Cohn has a new book in the works, as well, about visual language. This is a very exciting time to be a linguist and to have interest in comics! And for those of you who are concerned about the dearth of linguistic analysis in comics, never fear! Much more is coming.

And now—on to language and sound in Krazy Kat. The point of Miodrag’s chapter on Herriman is ‘sidelining the visual (and thematic) content in favor of linguistic [in order] to illustrate how comics might truly be approached as literature, and to present a more convincing argument than has previously been achieved for their literary potential’ (p. 21). Some people will agree with Miodrag that comics are literature, and her goals are laudable. But for linguists, the point of a linguistic analysis of comics has very little to do with proving their literary worth. For me, a linguistic analysis demonstrates the nature of comics as comics and their relationship to linguistic systems. The aim is not to use linguistics to measure the nature of comics as literature or architecture or fine art or anything else.

But Miodrag does make some fine points in her discussion of arbitrary minimal units, which are essential in understanding linguistic systems. The arbitrariness of language can be discovered at the phonetic level: with just so many vowels available and a larger but nevertheless limited number of consonants, the tiny phonetic inventory of human speech sounds must necessarily be manipulated to produce vast numbers of unique combinations ranging across more than 6000 languages. (See Ethnologue for more about the world’s linguistic diversity). Depending on the dialect, English has roughly 12 to 14 vowels; other languages have more, others fewer. What this means is that phones cannot have frozen or static or essential functions: their functions are assigned by the speech communities that use them, and those functions always change.

Arbitrariness, of course, may also be illustrated at the morphological, syntactic, and lexical levels. Whether we call it chicken or poultry or fowl, we know that those words refer to a type of bird used around the world for food. Eventually, we’ll call that same bird something else, because languages change and the sign that we use to refer to that type of bird is arbitrary. We could even call it frindle if we wanted to.

Most linguists agree, though, that not every single unit in language is arbitrary. Sometimes, a syntactic form is only semiarbitrary. Consider these two sentences:

(a) We had pizza and beer after we finished our workout at the gym.

(b) After we finished our workout at the gym, we had pizza and beer.

The events here occur in the same order chronologically, but they are reversed syntactically. But in (b), the syntactic order of events mimics the chronological order of events. Workout at the gym comes first, pizza and beer comes next, so the order of (b) is not entirely arbitrary.

I think that the limits of arbitrariness play an important role in Krazy Kat. Like many comics creators, Herriman uses sound effects to provide an auditory element to the page. Many linguists consider human sounds meant to mimic sounds from the environment as semiarbitrary in nature. Even though a rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo in English, says quiquiriquí in Spanish, and says gokogoko in Cantonese—even though these are different phonetic representations—they are not completely arbitrary. They in some sense mimic the acoustic sounds outside the linguistic system.

Herriman’s use of sound effects is fascinating, and a quick survey of the Sunday comics (Fantagraphics, 1916­–1918) demonstrates his playfulness and creativity. I’d like to consider one particular sequence when Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse switch bodies. In the opening panel of the September 9th strip, we see a Krazy Kat throw a brick and hit an Ignatz Mouse with it:
 

Image

 
The sound effect of the brick sailing through the air is Zizz. (Zizz probably because bricks don’t go fap fap fap or sklircha sklircha when they nudge their way through air molecules.) When the brick strikes Ignatz, the sound is Blop!! Naturally, the other characters in the strip are mystified. They simply cannot believe that the mild-mannered, gentle, and kind Krazy has turned the tables on that spiteful bully Ignatz. The mystery is so deep that Herriman takes three Sunday comics to reveal the secret to readers.

In the second installment, on September 16th, the strip opens with a memory. It is an inset of the same event shown on September 9th, with a couple of different details:
 

Image

 
This time, when Krazy throws the brick, it says Jazzzz. And when Brick hits Ignatz, the sound is MBOB. There are a few other differences, too, like Krazy’s stance and the absence of speech on 16 September. (In both scenes, Krazy throws the brick from right to left: see Roy Cook’s earlier post about this.)

In the third installment, on Sunday 23 September, Herriman solves the mystery and puts Krazy and Ignatz back in their proper roles. In scene 12, we witness (the real) Ignatz throwing a rock at (the real) Krazy. The sound of the rock sailing through the air is Jazz, and the rock strikes Krazy with a Pap. The anomalous characters and actions have been resolved, and all is right with the world again.

Miodrag is right when she argues that Herriman pushes the boundaries of the standard English linguistic system by making full use of the arbitariness of minimal units. The same can be said for his sound effects. But not all of Herriman’s sound effects push the boundaries of the units. He often uses a standard(?) pow or bop or bam or zip, but his tool kit is wide-ranging. Herriman’s use of sound effects is highly creative. Just as he plays with arbitrary minimal units in creating the linguistic repertoire of characters, he also plays with the representation of nonlinguistic sound. Of course in Krazy Kat, bricks don’t always make sounds when they fly through the air or hit someone on the head. And at times, even on the same page, the sound effects for the same action are variable:
 

Image

 
Ignatz throws a brick (from right to left), and the sound effect is Zib. Later, on this very same page, the sound effect for a similar action is Bzip.

My main question on arbitrariness has to do with the sound jazz. Unlike bam or fwip, jazz is a word that has standing in other areas or domains of English. Its precise etymology is unclear, but early uses of the word associate it with such activities as baseball. (The American Dialect Society voted it the Word of the Century in 2000.) Nowadays, it is most often associated with an important musical genre. I believe Herriman uses jazz as the sound of an object whizzing through the air not because of its arbitrariness but because of its multiple meanings. Herriman plays with these multiple meanings—the arbitrary ones—that jazz contains and brings them to bear on the semiarbitrary representation of enivronmental sound in comics. Maybe the relationship between Krazy and Ignatz needs something more than a regular old sound effect, and Herriman uses jazz as a way to give their relationship a little something extra. Maybe the sound of the brick is more than physically acoustic: maybe it’s music to their ears.

Earlier comments on our Krazy Kat roundtable express the sense that Herriman’s comic is best read slowly, in small doses. A slow reading allows us to savor the visual and the verbal, but we also get to revel in the playful, almost-but-not-quite arbitrary representation of acoustics. As much arbitrariness as we sometimes see in the language and behaviors of Krazy Kat characters, as well as the background scenes, we know that Herriman doesn’t go too far afield lest he lose the reader in a fog of inscrutability. But Herriman does make his readers work for it, and as a result of this slow, sumptuous reading, we are very richly rewarded.