Text-Image Relations

This chapter offers an overview of the different approaches to the analysis of image-text relations in comics. It begins with a summary review of the wider discourses surrounding image-text relations in the humanities, drawing from the works of Lessing, Barthes, and Mitchell, and the early English-language works of comics practitioner-theorists Eisner and McCloud. Moving away from these influential, yet exploratory works, the discussion focuses on the contemporary cognitive linguistics approach of Cohn and the Franco-Belgian semiotic approaches to comics studies in the works of Baetens and Lefevre and Groensteen. Finally, in contrast with the formally preoccupied approaches that precede it, a historicist approach to image-text relations is outlined in the final section of the chapter.