Comic Keywords
Idealism
" The terms 'idealism' and 'idealist' are by no means used only within philosophy; they are used in many everyday contexts as well. Optimists who believe that, in the long run, good will prevail are often called 'idealists'. This is not because such people are thought to be devoted to a philosophical doctrine but because of their outlook on life generally; indeed, they may even be pitied, or perhaps envied, for displaying a naïve worldview and not being philosophically critical at all. Even within philosophy, the terms 'idealism' and 'idealist' are used in different ways, which often makes their meaning dependent on the context.... It nevertheless seems safe to say that within modern philosophy there have been two fundamental conceptions of idealism: 1. something mental (the mind, spirit, reason, will) is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality, and 2. although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this mind-independent 'reality' is held to be so permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind (of some kind or other) that all claims to knowledge must be considered, in some sense, to be a form of self-knowledge. Idealism in sense (1) may be called 'metaphysical' or 'ontological idealism,' while idealism in sense (2) may be called 'formal' or 'epistemological idealism'" (Guyer, Paul and Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, "Idealism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/idealism/).
Auteur
"1. A film director whose personal influence and artistic control over his or her films are so great that he or she may be regarded as their author [i.e. as a kind of literary writer], and whose films may be regarded collectively as a body of work sharing common themes or techniques and expressing an individual style or vision. Recorded earliest in [the term] auteur theory.... 2. A musician or other artist who retains a high degree of independent artistic control over his or her work, from conception to production or performance. Also: a creative artist whose work is perceived to reflect a highly individual vision or innovative approach, or is (self-consciously) presented as such." ("auteur, n. and adj." OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/249941. Accessed 25 November 2019. Italics mine.) I invoked this term in discussing Chabon's depiction of Joe Kavalier's art comic The Golem. We could generally juxtapose the shop system and the notion of a house style (e.g. Superman is drawn the same way no matter who draws him for DC) to an auteur conception of comics creation. But we might make exceptions for, say, Eisner's The Spirit or Alan Moore's writing for DC (but not, maybe, for Dave Gibbon's drawing style which was pretty typical of 80s house style at DC and Marvel).
Starburst
"A (typically symmetrical) pattern of lines or rays radiating from a central object" ("starburst, n." OED Online , Oxford University Press, September 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/36003640. Accessed 5 September 2019.).
Panel
"A general indicator that time and space is being divided" on a comic book page; may or may not make use of a physical frame; gives the sense that image or set of images is distinct from another image or set of images on the same page. (Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art)
Splash Page
"A single-panel page [or half-page panel or third-of-a-page panel]. Often the title page (for which, indeed, the terms was originally reserved), in which case it may be used for the depiction of a crucial story moment out of narrative continuity, for a montage panel symbolic of the story's themes, etc." (Andrei Molotiu, "List of Terms for Comics Studies," https://comicsforum.org/2013/07/26/list-of-terms-for-comics-studies-by-andrei-molotiu/).Bleed Page: "'Bleed' is a commonly used printing term to define an image that is printed to the edge of the page (as in posters, for example). In comics, however, this term takes on a much wider relevance.... When the images fill an entire page to the edge, it is called a 'bleed'.... Scott McCloud writes of bleeds that 'time is no longer contained by the familiar lines of the closed panel, but instead hemorrhages and escapes into timeless space' (103). Bleeds are, by their nature, dramatic and often violent. The image's domination of the page is striking and demands the reader's complete attention. The removal of frames from the page edges removes any sense of constriction or confinement - the image has total control of the page. Furthermore, it removes the reader's ability to control the timescale of the narrative, which is usually regulated by the gutters and panel borders. If the bleed page follows a series of ordered panels, its presence breaks the flow of visual uniformity and shakes the reader's sense of security." (Harriet Earle, "Comics and Page Bleeds," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 5 (2013): n. pag. Web. 9 October 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.5.01.)
Allegory
"An allegory is a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by the author to make coherent sense on the "literal," or primary, level of signification, and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of signification. We can distinguish two main types: (1) Historical and political allegory, in which the characters and actions that are signified literally in their turn represent, or "allegorize," historical personages and events.... (2) The allegory of ideas, in which the literal characters represent concepts and the plot allegorizes an abstract doctrine or thesis.... In the second type, the sustained allegory of ideas, the central device is the personification of abstract entities such as virtues, vices, states of mind, modes of life, and types of character. In explicit allegories, such reference is specified by the names given to characters and places. Thus Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress allegorizes the Christian doctrine of salvation by telling how the character named Christian, warned by Evangelist, flees the City of Destruction and makes his way laboriously to the Celestial City; enroute he encounters characters with names like Faithful, Hopeful, and the Giant Despair, and passes through places like the Vanity Fair" (M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms/ Seventh Edition)
Pastiche
"Describes a work of art that imitates the style, gestures, or forms of an older work or antique model. As a formal descriptor of literary works, the word pastiche dates back centuries; as an evaluative term, its usage gradually acquired a hint of negative or dismissive connotation. The word implies a lack of originality or coherence, an imitative jumble. It was only in the latter half of the 20th c.—and most esp. in the context of theories of postmod. narrative—that pastiche acquired its current critical purchase.... Pastiche comes from pasticcio, the It. word for a hodge-podge of a pie containing both meat and pasta.... [The well-known literary critic Frederic] Jameson identifies pastiche as a "well-nigh universal" discursive practice of late capitalism. In this account, the ascendance of pastiche seems inevitable and is best understood through its new distinction from the term parody. All lang. having been flattened out into a kind of Orwellian media- speak, Jameson writes, "pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody." (BOWEN, C. "Pastiche." The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Green, et al., Princeton University Press, 4th edition, 2012. Credo Reference,
Bande Dessinée
"Drawn Strip"; term for comics in the Francophone world. Dominated by Belgian creators in the fifties and sixties who developed "the bright, clean, modern style known as l'Ecole de Bruxelles, later dubbed the ligne claire or "clear line" style. Graphically, the hallmarks of the ligne Claire are the use of an even unvarying line to define contours, flat color and avoidance of cross hatching or other graphic forms of shading. In storytelling as well as graphics, an inviting clarity and legibility were emphasized." Belgian creators also developed "The École de Charleroi, later referred to as the "Atom Style," was used in Spirou. It differed from the Bruxelles style of Tintin magazine in its more elastic, dynamic line quality and a greater use of comic exaggeration" (6 and 12). from Dan Mazur and Alexander Danner, Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present (2014)
On Photography
"However lightening-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic. There is a photograph by Kertesz (1921) which shows a blind gypsy violinist being led by a boy; now what I see, by means of this 'thinking eye' which makes me add something to the photograph, is the dirt road; its texture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself: is this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?), I recognize, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my long ago travels in Hungary and Rumania" (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980), 45).
Wish-fulfilment fantasy
"It may be said that those who are happy never fantasize—only the dissatisfied. Unsatisfied desires are the motive forces behind fantasies, every fantasy being a wish-fulfilment, correcting an unsatisfactory reality" (28). Freud goes on to say that in the case of popular writers, one "cannot help being struck, above all, by one special feature of their writings: they all have a hero who is the centre of interest, for whom the author seeks to win our sympathy...and whom he seems to place under the protection of a special providence.... It seems to me, however, that, because of this tell-tale trait of invulnerability, we have no difficulty in recognizing His Majesty the Ego [i.e. the reader's self], the hero of every daydream and every novel" (30). Note: Freud excludes more literary fiction, especially of the tragic form, from consideration, which quite obviously presents a problem for his argument. (Source: Sigmund Freud, "The Creative Writer and Daydreaming"). Superhero comics are often seen as the quintessential genre of wish-fulfilment fantasies.
Simonides of Cleos (as reported by Plutarch)
"Painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture"
Line of Beauty
"Pursuing is the business of our lives; and even abstracted from any other view, gives pleasure. ... The eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms, as we shall see hereafter, are composed principally of what, I call, the waving and serpentine lines" (William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty). "A serpentine line encapsulates the very essence of living processes caught in their capricious path. The principle property of his line is that of life itself, with its capacity for endless variation. In this, it is categorically opposed to the coercive geometry of institutionalized and disembodied systems that Hogarth represents in order to demystify them" (Thierry Smolderen, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay).
Metafiction
"Robert Scholes has popularized metafiction... as an overall term for the growing class of novels which depart from realism and foreground the role of the author and reader in inventing and receiving the fiction." (M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms)
Manga
"The term manga, in Japanese, has been used since the seventeenth century. Today it means comics, cartoons, and caricature of any kind or origin" (6). "[M]an, the first of the two characters that make up the word "manga," denotes (1) to proliferate or to cover a large surface; (2) long and continuing; (3) rambling, loose, idle, or lax; (4) wonderingly or unconsciously... The second character, ga, is a pictograph that depicts the borders of a rice field, signifying borders, divisions, to create a border, or to divide into smaller areas. From these definitions, the character ga subsequently came to denote picture, painting, drawing, and film, as well as the act of drawing and painting" (10). (Natsu Onoda Power, God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga)
Emanata
"Various graphic signs used in comics to convey information that goes beyond what could be perceived visually in the diegesis: e.g. sweat beads (for fear or anxiety), light bulb (for idea), etc. So named because they usually "emanate" from the head or body of a character. Emanata can suggest psychological or emotional states, sounds, smells, physical impact, etc. Emanata function primarily as symbolic signs added to the iconic signs that denote the visual diegesis. (Term first introduced, in a much more restricted sense, by cartoonist Mort Walker in his Lexicon of Comicana, 1980; the term has gained its wider meaning as it has been used in the comics industry and in academic comics studies.)" (Andrei Molotiu, "List of Terms for Comics Studies," https://comicsforum.org/2013/07/26/list-of-terms-for-comics-studies-by-andrei-molotiu/).
The Polygraphic
"[A] multilayered visual text saturated with allusions to conflicting systems of representation (ranging from the highly rhetorical language of history painting to the rebellious insolence of graffiti drawings)" (Thierry Smolderen, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay).
Lessing's Distinction: Painting (spatial) vs. Poetry (temporal)
"[I]f it is true that in its imitations painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colors in space rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive. Objects or parts of objects which exist in space are called bodies. Accordingly, bodies with their visible properties are the true subjects of painting. Objects or parts of objects which follow one another [i.e. have a progressive order] are called actions. Accordingly, actions are the true subjects of poetry. [P]ainting too can imitate actions, but only by suggestion through bodies. [What he elsewhere calls the "pregnant moment."] [P]oetry also depicts bodies, but only by suggestion through actions. (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoӧn: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766))
Satire
"[T]he literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire derides; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual (in "personal satire"), or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even (as in the Earl of Rochester's "A Satyr against Mankind," 1675, and much of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, 1726, especially Book IV) the entire human race" (M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms/ Seventh Edition). Literary satire was a major element in 18thcentury English literature such as Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, and John Gay (in fact, Hogarth painted a number of scenes from Gay's Beggar's Opera).
Schematized Illustration
"[T]he prephotographic tradition of illustration [used]... schematized illustration—the language of the diagram—that represents the ideal graphic compromise. It allows for quick sketching of an event, an object, a mechanism, a phenomenon, or even a concept, of which the illustrator manages to convey only the most significant aspects by eliminating any unnecessary details. The purpose of the diagram is not to transmit visual information (in the realistic, photographic sense of the term) so much as to stabilize visual signification (most often in relation to the accompanying text)" (Thierry Smolderen, The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay).
Gekiga
"[Yoshihiro] Tatsumi is famous as the artist who helped fashion a new style of manga known as "gekiga" (dramatic pictures), a term he coined in 1957. He played a major role in broadening the possibilities of the medium to accommodate mature-reader genres like mystery, action, and horror, oftentimes in 100-plus-page, single-story books that predate the advent of the "graphic novel" by many decades. Though there was hardly a genre Tatsumi didn't try his hand at, he is best known for the stories he created in the late '60s and early '70s about the bleak lives and perversions of aging white-collar and low-level blue-collar workers.... [B]y the mid '60s Tatsumi had completely lost control over the term "gekiga." The name was used to describe pretty much anything that was action-based for young men. [Tatsumi] found in mainstream "gekiga" a corruption of what he intended for that term. In 1967, he self-published Gekiga College (Gekiga daigaku) to set the record straight. Its texts and interviews presented a set of normative principles of what gekiga was intended to be: cinematic, for an older audience, realistic in terms of setting and character, no humor." (Ryan Holmberg, http://www.tcj.com/tatsumi-yoshihiro-1935-2015/)
Cartoon
(Traditionally hand-drawn) pictorial image involves "amplification through simplification" (Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art)
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Empiricism
A complicated term, but one of its meanings indicates "theories of knowledge as derived wholly from the senses—that is from experience" (Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society). In Ian Watt's influential study, Rise of the Novel, of 18thcentury English novels by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding among others, he "explicates empiricism's impact on novelistic character in the authorial use of contemporary names and in the practice of situating characters in recognizable streets, theaters, turnpikes, countryside, and ports. Interestingly, physical description does not figure as an empirical tactic" but we certainly are justified in seeing Hogarth as using physical depiction as such a tactic. (Roxann Wheeler, "Racial Legacies: The Speaking Countenance and the Character Sketch in the Novel," in A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture).
Autoclasm
An "autoclastic icon," Christopher Pizzino, author of Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, explains, "effects a kind of self-breaking, as if it is designed to work against itself.... as if self-destruction is its ultimate function as a signifier" (48). That is to say, autoclastic comics display a kind of performative contradiction wherein they challenge the idea, either thematically or by virtue of their complexity, that comics are an illegitimate medium while nevertheless intentionally and glaringly mobilizing the very aspects of comics (gratuitous violence, infantile humor, etc.) that the medium's detractors have long cited as evidence of its debased character. In this way, they frustrate the very distinction between bad, childish comics and good, grown up graphic novels that has sometimes been used to bestow cultural value on the medium. (BC)
Crisis in Meaning
Closely associated with the sense of a devalued present, the relationship between words and their meanings or between words and the things they named also was felt to be in crisis by many writers of this era. The platitudes of God and country were shaken by the horror of the Great War (i.e. World War I). And the explosion in advertising around the turn of the century meant that there was an entire industry committed to the abuse of language through misrepresentation and hyperbole. The question that presented itself to modernist writers was how to revivify language in order to overcome this crisis.
Loss of (Metaphysical) Value
During the modernist period, the question of what to value took on a new importance. Advances in science, especially the Darwinian theory of evolution, and the increasing secularization of everyday life, undercut traditional forms of religious authority. The destruction wrought by World War I made people question the stability of Western civilization and the authority of the past. Modernist writers either bemoaned this loss or used literature, in various ways, as a means for regaining or finding a new sense of value in the present.
Modernism
Five main components: "The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the present century, but especially after World War I (1914- 18).... Literary historians locate the beginning of the modernist revolt as far back as the 1890s, but most agree that what is called high modernism, marked by an unexampled range and rapidity of change, came after the first World War" (Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed., Thomson Learning, 1999, 167). We can distinguish at least two strains of literary modernism, one strain that further refined realist representational strategies but thematized the main concerns of modernist literature (e.g. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby or James Joyce's "The Dead") and another strain that developed new literary forms along with these modernist themes (e.g. James Joyce's Ulysses or T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land").
Comics
Formalist definition: "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic effect" (Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, 9). At least three types: comic strips, comic books (pamphlets), graphic novels (long-form comics)
German Expressionism
German Expressionism: "The Expressionists have generally been described as abandoning the naturalism of Impressionism in favour of a more raw focus on colour and movement.... [They] should also be seen as [in] a dialogue between the arts of France and Germany. Artists from both groups [Impressionists and Expressionists] were mesmerised by the dynamics of growing cities—Paris, London and Berlin—at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries... Both found new ways of looking; but whereas Impressionists tended to focus on the process of seeing itself, the Expressionists would also depict their own sentiments and emotions" ( Economist ). Expressionism also includes a (usually) critical relation to industrial conditions; keep in mind that these conditions nearly toppled the economic system in Western Europe. ( http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/05/impressionism-and-expressionism, accessed 2/26/2016)
Aureole
In modern English usage the word "aureole" means a head halo or nimbus as well as a body halo or glory, while the cognate forms aureole , aureola , and aureola are the principal words in the Romance languages for a head halo.... A standard work on English etymology, for example, notes that aureola is an adjectival form of aurum or gold used substantively to mean corona or crown and it gives as a thirteenth-century definition a "saint's crown of glory." If pressed to define this further, most readers would probably equate a "saint's crown of glory" with a halo.... To be a saint, by definition, means to enjoy eternal life in Heaven, and it is this state of beatitude shared by all saints that the halo symbolizes. The aureola , on the other hand, as the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary still understood in the nineteenth century, is the "celestial crown won by a martyr, virgin, or doctor, as victor over the world, the flesh, or the devil; the special degree of glory which distinguishes these." Hall, Edwin, and Horst Uhr. "Aureola Super Auream: Crowns and Related Symbols of Special Distinction for Saints in Late Gothic and Renaissance Iconography." The Art Bulletin , vol. 67, no. 4, 1985, pp. 567-603. JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/3050845.
Technical Experimentation
In response to these conditions, especially to the crisis in meaning, modernist writers, as Abrams points out above, created new literary forms, styles, and conventions (likewise modernist visual and musical artists, such as Picasso and Stravinsky, in their respective media). In attempting such innovations, many literary artists sought to revitalize language. Others intended to estrange their readers in order to express and do justice to feelings of alienation. Thus many modernist works intentionally include elements that efface or obscure any attempt at a straightforward interpretation.
Iconic Solidarity
Interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the double characteristic of being separated...[and] plastically and semantically over-determined by their co-existence. (Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics )
Feelings of Alienation
Much modernist writing is motivated by feelings of alienation (and often the desire to overcome it). The causes of this structure of feeling are many and, in addition to those related to the loss of value and the crisis in meaning, include 1) the increasing anonymity of modern life as many left traditional rural communities for the quickly expanding urban centers (this was the era when the first skyscrapers were built). Much modernist fiction features alienated protagonists sometimes, it's true, as a twentieth-century extension of romanticism but overall with a less heroic sensibility. (And in the case of a modernist like T.S. Eliot an explicit rejection of the romanticism's glorification of personality.) Many modernist writers attempted to limn the causes of this sense of alienation, and some attempted to overcome it through their writing.
Ekphrasis
Narrowly conceived: "the special quality of giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art object" as in epigrammatic tomb inscriptions (Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray ); more broadly conceived: "the verbal representation of visual representation" (W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation). In the first sense, word balloons are a form of ekphrastic writing in that they give voice to the drawn characters. However, I introduced this term as a way of describing the chapters on the origin stories of The Escapist and Luna Moth in The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Technically, these would be faux ekphrastic inasmuch as they seem to be verbal representations of the drawings in comics that never actually existed.
High Art in Opposition to a Debased Mass Culture
Part of the reason for the modernist embrace of difficulty was to distinguish literary art (or "Art" with a big A) from the cultural products of mass consumer culture. And many modernist artists, on both the political left and right, believed that literary and cultural values were incompatible with those of consumer capitalism. (In this sense, modernist literary works, especially difficult ones, demand a more active relationship between reader and text, because they invite a process of sophisticated and open-ended reflection, than that of consumer culture.)
Braiding
Resurgence of an iconic motif (or of a plastic quality) across a work (similar to the repetition of keywords across a non-graphic literary text). (Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics )
Hokusai Manga
Scholars differentiate between modern manga (signified with a katakana characters) and an "older form of comics [(signified with kanji characters), dating back to Hokusai Manga, the Edo-period serial ink-drawing monographs by artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Hokusai's works started out as loose sketches of humans, animals, and plants, and later transformed into satiric arts that parodied and criticized the feudal government. Because of this historical association, the kanji term emphasizes the satirical function and is preferred by manga scholars with an art history background" (10). (Natsu Onoda Power, God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga)
Gutters
Space between panels; demands closure from the reader to relate the panels and create the narrative or other aesthetic effects of juxtaposition (Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art )
Status Anxiety
The idea that comics creators and their admirers are acutely aware that comics have been a stigmatized medium considered to be lacking in genuine artistic merit because of their commercial and ephemeral character and the belief that they are mainly for children. Much writing about comics (e.g. The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) as well as many comics themselves thematize this issue. (We will introduce an associated term in our final week of class.)
Continuous Action
The idea that the narrative breakdown gives the reader the sense that they are witnessing a continuous sequence of actions rather than just, say, the highlights. I would draw a parallel between continuity editing in filmmaking, which gives the viewer the illusion that they are watching a temporally cohesive scene as in a stage play in contrast to, say, a montage.
Panoptic field
The page or double page of a comic book considered as a static spatial entity (as opposed to the moment-to-moment reading of the narrative). ( Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics )
Anaclitic
This is a term I borrowed from psychoanalysis which borrowed it from Greek—wherein it means to rest upon or lean on—to characterize the relationship between Chabon's literary fiction and the genre of superhero comics. We might also say that certain comics have an anaclitic relation to literature in that they borrow literary techniques, values, and sensibilities to create aesthetic distinction for their works.
Word Balloons
This is the purists preferred term for the encapsulated writing, whether speech or thoughts, in a comic.
Breakdown and Page Layout
Two related concepts, the first relates to how a narrative is split apart and turned into visual units. The second refers to physical form that the panels take on a page. (It is my understanding that in the history of comics production page layout sometimes precedes the breakdown and at other times breakdown determines the page layout, and I'm sure it's often a dialectical process for independent or alternative comics creators.)
Closure
observing the parts but perceiving the whole; fundamental reason why comics arts involve the reader in a way that film does not; the narrative always exists on a virtual plane (Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art )
Ut Pictura Poesis
usually translated: "as in painting so in poetry" (phrase from the Roman poet Horace's Ars Poetica or The Art of Poetry, 19 BCE)
