The given work is dedicated to linguistic peculiarities of English comics in contrast

to graphic novels.

The choice of the topic is motivated by the following considerations: Despite their
during the recent years, both comics and graphic novels have not yet received a
comprehensive theoretical study in linguistic circles.

The composition and textual organization was considered by the following

outstanding linguists such as Larysa Makaruk, Mikhail Bakhtin, Inna Bilyuk etc.
Paying attribute to their great scientific input into the problem we must point out
that a series of issues have remained scientifically untouched demanding
investigation.

The urgency of this work follows from the general orientation of linguistics at
disclosing the structure and organization of different types of narratives.

The objective of the present investigation is to single out differences and analyze

the lingual characteristics of the English comics and graphic novels in comparison.
The material of analysis is represented by the English comic "Wonder Woman"
and the graphic novel "Romeo and Juliet". These two creations are similar in their
semantic contents and thus permit profound linguistics analysis.

In the process of investigation, we have solved the following tasks such as

disclosing the origin and historical premises of the English graphic novels and
comics, concretizing the terms multimodal and polycode texts. Establishing
similarities and outlining differences in structural and semantic organization of
comic and graphic novel.

The main copes of analysis counts 1103 speech samples selected consecutively
from the comic «Wonder Woman» and the graphic novel «Romeo and Juliet».

In the process of investigation, the following conclusions have been made: both
comic and graphic novel convey information by means of synthesis verbal and
non-verbal means of communication. It was found out that structurally graphic
novels manifest more complex and complicated sentences than simple syntactic
structures. For instance, the total quantity of sentences – 169. In its term, comics
tend to using simple constructions while complex and complicated sentences are
ousted by pictures, sound imitation and such like. In «Wonder Woman» the
quantity of simple sentences counts 149 sentences, while 20 and 2 complex and
complicated constructions. It must be also stressed that elliptical sentences are
more characteristic of comics. We must also point out the established regularity of
increasing verbal input in comics and its decrease in graphic novels. If comics can
be united into a certain cinematographic union without wholeness, the plot the
graphic novels preserve the author's message and plot manifested in the original
author's quotations.

Aspective the far investigation we see in contrasting graphic novels and comics
belonging to different genres of literature.