Iconicity in the language of comics: A Swedish case study

Comics are multimodal forms of storytelling, where images and linguistic items combine to create lively narratives. They also offer rich material for investigating lexical iconicity. Expressive items in both dialogue bubbles and panels commonly add dimensions of sound (bang), motion (swish), sensory experiences (yuk), and inner feelings or cognitive states (argh, gak). Even though comics are silent and visual, readers’ understanding of the sound dimension of written words affords iconic mappings that bring sound and emotion to the stories (Oyola 2011). Petersen (2007, 2009) describes how readers experience the sounds through a form of sub-vocalisation, triggering iconic mappings and creating a form of narrative erotics. Iconicity in comics also extends beyond properties of words and includes iconic aspects of font sizes and styles (Forster et al 2012) or shapes of dialogue bubbles (Forceville et al 2010).

Expressive Items in comics are often discussed as onomatopoeic expressions or interjections (Forster et al 2012; Guynes 2014). However, the full scope of relevant expressive items in comics cannot be covered by these categories. As the examples in the first paragraph illustrate, iconic mappings do not relate only to sound. Some recent studies have acknowledged this limitation and are instead treating the items as ideophones (e.g. Pischedda 2024). Ideophones display iconic mappings between form and meaning, including, but extending beyond, the sound dimension (Akita & Dingemanse 2019). Like ideophones, expressive items in comics depict sensory imagery not only of sound but also of movement, other sensory experiences, inner feelings and cognitive states (Dingemanse 2012).

This study aligns with recent work (Pischedda 2024) in treating expressive items in comics as ideophones but extends the research into new territory. To date, no detailed linguistic studies of expressive items in comics originally written in Swedish exist. This study addresses the gap by analyzing ideophones in the Swedish comic Rocky by Martin Kellerman: known for its realistic representation of spoken Swedish interaction (Fägersten 2019). Through manual analysis of the first Rocky album (Kellerman 1999), ideophones are identified and categorized by lexical status. English influence on both spoken Swedish and the language of comics (Valero Garces 2014; Pischedda 2017), necessitates checking items against both Swedish and English dictionary sources. Items not found in the sources are categorized as non-lexical. These are further sub-categorized as ‘comics items’ (if found in comics items’ compilations like Gasca & Gubern 2008 and Taylor 2018) or ‘creative constructions’ if not.

Findings show that Rocky contains a high number of items depicting sensory imagery. While most items do have iconic sound mappings, they often represent feelings, reactions, or cognitive states through depicting human vocalizations. Many are fully lexicalized interjections in Swedish, often written in larger fonts or elongated (åååååååååååh). Swedish lexical words dominate, but the material also includes English lexical words (crunch, yikes), comics items (fwoom, blam), and creative constructions (frodobolf, uööözzz). Creative constructions with related meanings can show form similarity, guäck (‘disgust’), guläck (‘negative taste experience’), and uuääck (‘vomiting’), with possible influence from related lexicalized words äckel (‘disgust’) and äcklig (‘disgusting’).

References

Akita, Kimi and Mark Dingemanse (2019), Ideophones (Mimetics, Expressives), in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dingemanse, Mark (2012), Advances in the cross-linguistic study of ideophones, Language and Linguistics Compass6/10, 654–672.

Forceville, Charles, Tony Veale and Kurt Feyaerts (2010), Balloonics: The visuals of balloons in comics, in J. Goggin, and D. Hassler-Forest (eds), (2010), The rise and reason of comics and graphic literature: Critical essays on the form, Jefferson NC: McFarland & Co, 56–73.

Forster, Iris, Susanne R. Borgwaldt, and Martin Neef, (2012), Form follows function: Interjections and onomatopoetica in comics, Writing systems research 4.2, 122–139.

Fägersten, Kristy B. (2019), Linguistics: Comics conversations as data in Swedish comic strips, in M. J. Smith, M. Brown and R. Duncan (eds), (2019), More critical approaches to comics: Theories and methods, New York: Routledge, 145–159.

Gasca, Luis and Román Gubern (2008), Diccionario de onomatopeyas del comic, Cátedra.

Guynes, Sean A. (2014), Four-color sound: A Peircean semiotics of comic book onomatopoeia, Public Journal of Semiotics 6.1, 58–72.

Kellerman, Martin (1999), Rocky, vol. 1, Stockholm: Ordfront Galago.

Oyola, Osvaldo (2011), This is not a sound: The treachery of sound in comic books, in Sounding Out: The Sound Studies Blog, Retrieved from http://soundstudiesblog.com/2011/06/

Petersen, Robert S. (2007), The acoustics of manga: Narrative erotics and the visual presence of sounds, International Journal of Comic Art 9(1), 578–90.

Petersen, Robert S. (2009), The acoustics of manga, in J. Heer and K. Worcester (eds), (2009), A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 163–171.

Pischedda, Pier Simone (2017), Anglophonic influence in the use of sound symbolism in Italian Disney comics: A corpus-based analysis, Open Linguistics 3.1, 591–612.

Pischedda, Pier Simone (2024), The sound of the Italian comic book: Representing noises, senses, and emotions across 80 years, Open Linguistics, 10(1).

Taylor, Kevin (2018), Ka-Boom!: A Dictionary of Comic Book Words, Symbols & Onomatopoeia, Kevin J Taylor.

Valero Garces, Carmen (2014), Onomatopoeia and Unarticulated Language in the translation and production of comic books, in F. Zanettin (ed), (2014), Comics in Translation, 237–255.