Frames & Framing

Kieron Brown
 Questions

• Is it a comic? If so, what type/format (collection of strips/comic book/graphic

novel etc.)
• Is it a stand-alone work or part of a series?
• Has it been published in another format before?
• Is it an adaptation of another work?
• What genre is it? Is it a story (one or several)? Is it something else?
• Is it fiction or nonfiction?
• What kind of artwork do you expect to find inside?
• Is it cheap or expensive?
• Is it mainstream or niche/independent?
• Is it conventional or experimental?
 Bateson

[Play] could only occur if the participant organisms were capable of some
degree of metacommunication, i.e., of exchanging signals which would
carry the message “this is play” (Bateson 1972, p. 179)
 Bateson

Every metacommunicative message is or defines a psychological

frame (Bateson 1972, p. 188).
What is it that’s going on here?

I assume that when individuals attend to any current

situation, they face the question: “What is it that's going
on here?” Whether asked explicitly, as in times of
confusion and doubt, or tacitly, during occasions of
usual certitude, the question is put and the answer to it
is presumed by the way the individuals then proceed to
get on with the affairs at hand (Goffman 1986, p. 8).
 Primary Frameworks

Natural frameworks identify occurrences seen as undirected, unoriented, unanimated, unguided,

"purely physical." Such unguided events are ones understood to be due totally, from start to finish, to
"natural" determinants.

Social frameworks, on the other hand, provide background understanding for events that
incorporate the will, aim, and controlling effort of an intelligence, a live agency, the chief one being
the human being […] These doings subject the doer to "standards," to social appraisal of his action
based on its honesty, efficiency, economy, safety, elegance, tactfulness,
good taste, and so forth (Goffman 1986, p. 22)
 Keys & Keying

A key is “a set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of
some primary framework, is transformed into something patterned on this activity but seen
by the participants to be something quite else” (Goffman 1986, pp. 43–44).

Examples of keys include make-believe, contests, and various forms of ceremony. These
activities are usually accompanied by cues “for establishing when the transformation is to
begin and when it is to end” (Goffman 1986, p. 45).
 Frames & Framings

Frames (cognitive frames, schema, schemata etc.) are “basic orientational aids
that help us to navigate through our experiential universe, inform our cognitive
activities and generally function as preconditions of interpretation (Wolf 2006, p.
6).
 Frames & Framings

Framings are “codings of abstract cognitive frames that exist or are formed within,
or on the margins and in the immediate context of, the framed situation or
phenomenon and – like the corresponding frames – have an interpretive, guiding
and controlling function with reference to it” (Wolf 2006, p. 6)
 Paratext

The paratext is an “‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside, a zone
without any hard and fast boundary” (Genette 1987, p. 1).

The “threshold” that the paratext entails is “always the conveyor of a commentary that
is authorial or legitimated by the author” (Genette 1987, p. 2). It constitutes a zone “not
only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a
strategy” (Genette 1987, p. 2).
 Peritext & Epitext

Peritextual elements: front Epitextual elements: author

and back covers, inside covers, correspondence, interviews,
forwards, endorsements, newspaper features, reviews,
dedications, chapter headings, YouTube videos, academic papers,
other material/format position in bookshops/libraries,
considerations. advertising, awards etc.
 Key Frames: Medium

Ryan suggests three dimensions of media:

The…
• Semiotic dimension concerns the codes and sensory channels that
support various media.
• Technological dimension regards the raw materials (e.g., clay for pottery, stone for sculpture, the
human body for dance) and the technologies that support the various semiotic types.
• Cultural dimension isn’t always predictable from semiotic type and technological support. Some
“distinct” media from a cultural point of view lack a distinct semiotic or technological identity. (Ryan
2006, pp. 18—23)
 Key Frames: Medium

If I have been speaking all along of conventional delimitations and conventionally distinct media, I
have been doing this very consciously. In my view, the functioning of intermedial configurations is
always based on relations between media or ‘medialities’ that are conventionally perceived as
distinct, or, to put this in other terms, it is based on the possibility of calling up specific medially
bound frames in the recipient (Rajewsky 2010, p. 61).
 Key Frames: Narrative
I suggest regarding the set of all narratives as fuzzy, and narrativity (or “storiness”) as a scalar property
rather than as a rigidly binary feature that divides mental representations into stories and nonstories:

1. Narrative must be about a world populated by individuated existents.

2. This world must be situated in time and undergo significant transformations.
3. The transformations must be caused by nonhabitual physical events.
4. Some of the participants in the events must be intelligent agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the
states of the world
5. Some of the events must be purposeful actions by these agents, motivated by identifiable goals and plans.
6. The sequence of events must form a unified causal chain and lead to closure.
7. The occurrence of at least some of the events must be asserted as fact for the story world.
8. The story must communicate something meaningful to the recipient (Ryan 2006, p. 7—8).
 Key Frames: Narrative

Storyworlds are “mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where,
why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate […] as they work
to comprehend a narrative” (Herman 2005, p. 570)

These mental models function in both a “top-down” and a “bottom-up” (Herman

2005, p. 570) way; they guide high-level inferences about the parameters and
possibilities of a story, but these assumptions are subject to being “updated,
revised, or even abandoned with the accretion of textual cues” (Herman 2005, p.
570).
 Key Frames: Genre

Genres may “emerge from the intertextual relations between multiple texts, resulting
in a common category” (Mittell 2004, p. 8) but such categories are necessarily
“culturally operative within a number of spheres of media practice, employed by
critics, industries, and audiences” (Mittell 2004, p. 10)
 Key Frames: Genre

Competent readers of a genre are not generally confused when some of their initial
expectations are not met - the framework of the genre can be seen as offering
‘default’ expectations which act as a starting point for interpretation rather than a
straitjacket […] Familiarity with a genre enables readers to generate feasible
predictions about events in a narrative. Drawing on their knowledge of other texts
within the same genre helps readers to sort salient from nonsalient narrative
information in an individual text" (Chandler 2000, p. 8)
Key Frames: Fiction/Nonfiction

The concept of the storyworld “applies both to fictional and nonfictional

narratives. All narratives have world-creating power, even though, depending
on the kind of narrative involved, interpreters bring to bear on those
storyworlds different evaluative criteria” (Herman 2004, p. 16).

Nonfictional narrative “advances claims of referential truthfulness whereas

fictional narrative advances no such claims (Schaeffer 2013, n.p.)
 Line

Unlike an average photographic image, a drawing is literally and figuratively “signed”

[…] The artist not only depicts something, but expresses at the same time a visual
interpretation of the world, with every drawing style implying an ontology of the
representable or visualizable. The viewer is obliged to share this figurative view of the
maker (Peters 14), since he or she cannot look at the object in the picture from any
other point of view (Lefèvre 2011, p. 16)
 Line

John Porcellino, King-Cat

Jon J. Muth, M (2008)
Classix (2007)
Line

Paul Hornschemeier, Three Paradoxes (2007)

Line

David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (2011)

 Panel & Layout

There are six important functions of the frame, which I call the function of
closure, the separative function, the rhythmic function, the structural
function, the expressive function, and the readerly function. All of these
functions exert their effects on the contents of the panel […] and, especially, on
the perceptive and cognitive processes of the reader (Groensteen 2007, p. 39)
Panel & Layout

Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, American Splendor No. 2 (1977)

Panel & Layout

Richard McGuire,
Here (2014)
 Text

Baetens and Frey suggest four “rules” or assumptions of the use of text in comics. They refer
to this as the “rhetorical ‘unconscious’” (Baetens and Frey 2014, p. 160)
of the graphic novel’s use of text:

1. The different types of text or “lexias” will be given separate locations.

2. Different text types will be underscored by variation in visual appearance.
3. Each text type will establish an “internal hierarchy between words, letters, syntagms, and
sentences” (Baetens and Frey 2014, p. 157—158) E.g., the shift from normal to bold or from lowercase to
capitals.
4. These rules do not significantly change throughout the work.

(Baetens and Frey 2014, p. 157—158)

Text

Posy Simmonds, Gemma Bovary (1999)

Text

Art Spiegelman, One Row (Raw) (1983)

Text

Will Eisner, The Spirit (11941, 1948)

 Paratext/Materiality

Many comics make it impossible to distinguish between text per se and secondary
aspects such as design and the physical package, because they continually invoke
said aspects to influence the reader’s participation in meaning-making. Material
considerations influence not only the total design and packaging of a publication but
also matters of style and technique (Hatfield 2005, p. 60)
 Paratext/Materiality

Baetens and Frey offer the following functions of paratextual elements:

• Classification and identification of the textual object

• Presentation and summary of the contents
• Promotion of a work intended for sale
• Suggested instructions on the text
• Material occupation of the cover space
• Safeguard of hierarchy between text and paratext

(Baetens and Frey 2014, p. 155)

Paratext/Materiality

Sonny Liew, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2016)

Paratext/Materiality

Chelsea Cain and Kate Niemczyk, Man-Eaters, Vol. 1

(2019)