The Interplay of Words and Images in Expressing Multimodal Metaphors in Comics

This paper aims at providing a provisional classification of different types of multimodal metaphors belonging to the verbo-pictorial variety found in comics, based on the relation between written and visual language, as two modes of human communication commonly combined in everyday life. Starting from the theoretical background on multimodal metaphors and comics studies, and using a corpus comprising comics and graphic novels published by both mainstream and independent American houses, the authors propose the following three types of relations which occur in multimodal metaphors in this medium: (1) image-dominant metaphors, (2) text-dominant metaphors, and (3) complementary metaphors.