Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

audience in the cinema does the same, but the gaps are not usually that evident in time
and space. Also, if we compare comics with films, every comic frame can be considered
a scene that the reader needs to put together in order to organise a sequence. The role of
the reader is very active because comics ‘cannot truly show the world of the story, but
can only suggest it by employing the device of the synecdoche, using a part of
something to represent the whole of the thing’. 17 The reader will perform all these
activities and give sense to the story inside the comic and to the references that it makes
by using previous knowledge of similar situations from his own reality. According to
Umberto Eco, ‘los parámetros que hacen aceptable o no una intriga no radican en la
propia intriga, sino en el sistema de opiniones que regulan la vida social’. 18 The
plausibility of comics does not come from the image, the characters or the actions, but
from the concordance in the narrative according to the construction of the characters
and the reader’s cooperation during the process of reading.
Román Gubern asserts that there are three elements which belong specifically to
comics and that were considered through the analyses. 19 One of them is the balloon
which is a ‘convención específica de los comics destinada a integrar gráficamente el
texto de los diálogos o el pensamiento de los personajes en la estructura icónica de la
viñeta ’. 20 The balloon has appeared since the earliest comics as a way for the characters
to express themselves phonetically, although it has changed with the passage of time.
Balloons always point to the person who is speaking, so the reader can identify that
person. The balloon by itself can be studied according to its shape: a regular one to
express a normal conversation, a chainsaw to show agitation, a cloud when refers to a
17
Randy Duncan, Matthew Smith, The Power of Comics. History, Form & Culture (New York, London:
Continuum, 2009), p. 158.
18
Umberto Eco, El Superhombre de masas (México: De Bolsillo, 2007), p. 14.
19
These three categories are also recognised by Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith but grouped into
two categories: sensory diegetic images and non-sensory diegetic images. Duncan, Smith, The Power of
Comics…, pp. 155-158.
20
Gubern, El lenguaje de…, p. 140
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