Cover not available
Part of
Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse
Edited by Minna Palander-Collin, Maura Ratia and Irma Taavitsainen
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 6] 2017
► pp. 267–293

Chapter 14
Newspaper funnies at the dawn of modernity

Multimodal humour in early American comic strips

This article offers a model for the analysis of comics, focusing on a classic of American Sunday newspapers: Outcault’s The Yellow Kid. As an early form of Press humour, these strips provide lavish material for the analysis of multimodal discourse and at the same time lend themselves to a study of the sociocultural and ideological constitution of America at the emergence of modernity. The analytical model is a threefold framework covering structural elements (“modes”), sociological elements (“functions”) and semantic elements (“mechanisms”). With these interpretive tools, it is expected that the construction of humorous meaning, as well as the usage of various semiotic resources for amusement purposes, becomes clearer. Moreover, the article glimpses at the nature of late nineteenth-century American society, in its vibrant, yet challenging, evolution.

Keywords: Comics, multimodality, humour, press, discourse, semantic, semiotic
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Tracing the origin of comics
  • 3.Legitimizing comics: Popular culture studies
  • 4.Analysing comics: Semiotics, visual rhetoric and linguistics
  • 5.A model for the analysis of comics
  • 6.The Yellow Kid: Applying the model
    • 6.1Feudal pride in Hogan’s Alley
    • 6.2Real Enjoyment
    • 6.3Merry Xmas Morning in Hogan’s Alley
    • 6.4The War Scare in Hogan’s Alley
    • 6.5The Yellow Kid Experiments with the Wonderful Hair Tonic
    • 6.6A Dark Secret; Or How the Yellow Kid Took a Picture
  • 7.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 29 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.6.14erm
References
Ahrens, Jörn & Arno Meteling
(eds.) 2010 Comics and the city: Urban space in print, picture and sequence. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Balzer, Jens
2010 Hully Gee, I’m a Hieroglyphe – Mobilizing the gaze and the invention of comics in New York City 1895 In Ahrens & Meteling (eds.), 19–31.Google Scholar
Bailey, Peter
1983 Ally Sloper’s half holiday: Comic art in the 1880s. In History Workshop 16. 4–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barthes, Roland
1977 The rhetoric of images. In Image – Music – Text. 32–51. Selected and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Beaty, Bart
2005 Fredric Wertham and the critique of mass culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
2007 Unpopular culture: Transforming the European comic book in the 1990s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Berger, Arthur Asa
1973 The comics-stripped American. What Dick Tracy, Blondie, Daddy Warbucks and Charlie Brown tell us about ourselves. New York: Walker.Google Scholar
Bindman, David
1997 Hogarth and his times: Serious comedy. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Blake, Norman F.
1981 Non-standard language in English literature. London: André Deutsch.Google Scholar
Bramlett, Frank
(ed.) 2012 Linguistics and the study of comics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chalou, Barbara Smith
2007 Struwwelpeter: Humor or horror? 160 years later. Plymouth: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Chapman, Raymond
1994 Forms of speech in Victorian fiction. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Cohn, Neil
2010 Extra! Extra! Semantics in comics! The conceptual structure of Chicago Tribune advertisements. Journal of Pragmatics. 42(11). 3138–3146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Couperie, Pierre & Maurice Horn
1968 A history of the comic strip. New York: Crown Publishers.Google Scholar
Cummings, E. E.
1965 E. E. Cummings, A miscellany revised. University of Michigan: October House.Google Scholar
Denney, Reuel
1957 The astonished muse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Devarenne, N.
2008 ‘A language heroically commensurate with his body’: nationalism, fascism, and the language of the superhero comic. International Journal of Comic Art. 10(1). 48–54.Google Scholar
During, Simon
2003 The cultural studies reader. 2nd edn. London / New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Eerden, Bart
2009 Anger in Asterix: The metaphorical representation of anger in comics and animated films. In Charles Forceville & Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal metaphor, 243–264. Berlin: Mouton.Google Scholar
Eisner, Will
1985 Comics and sequential art: Principles and practice of the world’s most popular art form. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press.Google Scholar
Ellis, Rod
1994 The study of second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
El Refaie, Elizabeth
2009 Metaphor in political cartoons: Exploring audience responses. In Charles Forceville & Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal metaphor, 173–196. Berlin: Mouton.Google Scholar
Ermida, Isabel
2008 The Language of comic narratives. Humour construction in short stories. Berlin and New York: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Forceville, Charles
2005 Visual representations of the idealized cognitive model of anger in the Asterix album La Zizanie . Journal of Pragmatics. 37. 69–88. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Forceville, Charles & Urios-Aparisi, Eduardo
(eds.) 2009 Multimodal metaphor. Berlin: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Foss, Sonja K.
2004 Framing the study of visual rhetoric: Towards a transformation of rhetorical theory. In Charles A. Hill & Marguerite Chalmers (eds.), Defining visual rhetoric, 303–313. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Fuchs, Wolfgang J. & Reinhold Reitberger
1972 Comics: Anatomy of a mass medium. Boston: Little Brown & Co.Google Scholar
Gabilliet, Jean-Paul
2010 Of comics and men: A cultural history of American comic books. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Gilbert, James Burkhart
1986 A cycle of outrage: America’s reaction to the juvenile delinquent in the 1950s. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Ian
1998 Comic strips and consumer culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Gravett, Paul
2004 Manga: 60 years of Japanese comics. London: Laurence King Publishing.Google Scholar
Groensteen, Thierry & Benôit
(eds.) 1994 Töpffer: L’invention de la bande dessinée. Paris: Hermann.Google Scholar
Groensteen, Thierry
2000 Why are comics still in search of cultural legitimization? In Jeet Heer & Kent Worcester (eds.), A comics studies reader, 3–12. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Harvey, Robert C.
2001 Comedy at the juncture of word and image. The emergence of the modern magazine gag cartoon reveals the vital blend. In Robin Varnum & Christina T. Gibbons (eds.), The language of comics: Word and image, 75–96. Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Hick, Darren Hudson
2012 The language of comics. In Aaron Meskin & Roy T. Cook (eds.), The art of comics: A philosophical approach, 125–144. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hickey, Raymond
(ed.) 2010 Varieties of English in writing: The written word as linguistic evidence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Inge, M. Thomas
1990 Comics as culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
1998 Comics as culture. In Nancy A. Walker (ed.), What’s so funny? Humor in American culture, 185–192. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc.Google Scholar
Johnson-Woods, Toni
2010 Manga: An anthology of global and cultural perspectives. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Kress, Gunther
2010 Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen
1996 Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London and New York: Routledge. Reprinted 2005.Google Scholar
Kress, Gunther & Theo Van Leeuwen
2001 Multimodal discourse: The modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Kukkonen, Karin
2008 Beyond language: Metaphor and metonymy in comics storytelling. English Language Notes. 46(2). 89–98.Google Scholar
2013 Studying comics and graphic novels. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kunzle, David
1986 Marie Duval: A caricaturist rediscovered. Woman’s Art Journal. 7(1). 40–48.Google Scholar
1973 The early comic strip. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
2010 Father of the comic strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson
1980 Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lopes, Paul Douglas
2009 Demanding respect: The evolution of the American comic book. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Mainardi, Patricia
2007 The invention of comics. Nineteenth-century art worldwide. A journal of nineteenth-century visual culture 6(1). [URL] (23 May 2014.)
Malin, S. D.
1965 Eye dialect in Li’l Abner. American Speech 40 (3). 229–232. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCloud, Scott
1993 Understanding comics: The invisible art. Northampton, Massachusetts: Tundra Publishing.Google Scholar
McLuhan, Marshall
1951 Mechanical bride: Folklore of industrial man. New York: The Vanguard Press.Google Scholar
1964 Understanding media. The extensions of man. New York: McGraw Hill.Google Scholar
Meskin, Aaron & Roy T. Cook
(eds.) 2012 The art of comics: A philosophical approach. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nye, Russel B.
1970 The unembarrassed muse: The popular arts in America. New York: Dial Press.Google Scholar
Perry, George & Alan Aldridge
1967 Penguin book of comics. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Petersen, Robert
2007 The acoustics of manga: narrative erotics and the visual presence of sound. International Journal of Comic Art. 9 (1). 578–590.Google Scholar
2011 Comics, manga, and graphic novels: A history of graphic narratives. Santa Barbara: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Preston, Dennis R.
1985 The Li’l Abner syndrome: Written representations of speech. American Speech. 60 (4). 328–336. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Raskin, Victor
1985 Semantic mechanisms of humour. Boston: Reidel.Google Scholar
Rauch, S.
2004 We have all been sentenced: Language as means of control in Grant Morrison’s Invisibles. International Journal of Comic Art. 6 (2). 350–363.Google Scholar
Riesman, David
1953 The lonely crowd: A study of the changing American character. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Salgueiro, J.
2008 Synesthesia and onomatopoeia in graphic literature. International Journal of Comic Art. 10 (2). 581–597.Google Scholar
Schilperoord, Joost and Maes, Alfons
2009 Visual metaphoric conceptualization in editorial cartoons. In Charles Forceville & Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal metaphor, 213–242. Berlin: Mouton.Google Scholar
Seldes, Gilbert
1924 The seven lively arts. New York: Harper & Brothers.Google Scholar
Sheridan, Martin
1942 Classic comics and their creators: Life stories of American cartoonists from the Golden Age. Arcadia, CA: Post-Era Books.Google Scholar
Shinoara, Kazuko & Yoshihiro Matsunaka
2009 Pictorial metaphors of emotion in Japanese comics. In Charles Forceville, & Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal metaphor, 265–296. Berlin: Mouton.Google Scholar
Steinbeck, John
1953 Introduction. In Al Capp (ed.), The world of Li’l Abner, 5–17. New York: Ballantine Books, Incorporated with Farrar, Straus and Young.Google Scholar
Storey, John
2006 Cultural theory and popular culture. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma, Gunnel Melchers and Päivi Pahta
(eds.) 1999 Writing in nonstandard English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Teng, Norman Y.
2009 Image alignment in multimodal metaphor. In Charles Forceville, & Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (eds.), Multimodal metaphor, 197–212. Berlin: Mouton.Google Scholar
Tysell, H. T.
1935 The English of the comic cartoons. American Speech. 10(1). 43–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Varnum, Robin & Christina Gibbons
(eds.) 2001 The language of comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar
Wallace, Derek
2005 The Yellow Kid. Virtue. 1(14). 48–59.Google Scholar
Walker, Nancy A.
(ed) 1998 What’s so funny? Humor in American culture. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc.Google Scholar
Waugh, Coulton
1974/1947 The comics. New York: Luna Press.Google Scholar