It would be useful to see this approach reconsidered in a future edition, and a fuller glossary offered. The glossary is a little idiosyncratic - giving extensive discussion of some terms (notably, cartooning), and omitting others (for instance, emanata), and surprisingly conflating yet others ( caption and word balloon are treated as one). Interestingly, Postema defers the sort of general potted history of comics which you might expect to find in an introduction to a separate section in an appendix, where she also offers a glossary of key comics terms. This short and readable book is structured in five chapters which builds an account of comics narration from smaller to larger elements, with a short framing introduction. Where Cohn pursues a ‘scientific’ approach to comics form, based on the linguistics of Noam Chomsky, and Miodrag challenges the very idea that comics can be ‘a language’ (having no minimal units), Postema takes a middle line and pursues a reading of comics texts that draws on a wide range of semiotic theory and narratology and aims to synthesise these with the work of comics studies theorists, including the newer approaches offered by Groensteen ( 2009, 2013). In the same year, two other books in different ways used the resources of language and literature studies to craft an approach to comics: Neil Cohn’s The Visual Language of Comics ( 2013) and Hannah Miodrag’s Comics and Language ( 2013). Copyright © Rochester Institute of Technology. Book cover for Narrative structure in comics: making sense of fragments, by Barbara Postema (New York: RIT Press, 2013).

Comics and Language by Hannah Miodrag