The interplay of text and image in comics: A linguistic interpretation of Will Eisner's a contract with god

Abstract

Comics was long regarded as a marginal literary genre and was generally shunned by scholars. Recently, this point of view has started to shift and a new field has emerged: comics studies. Comics is analyzed from multiple perspectives, and works published on the subject appear mainly in conference proceedings, journals, etc. While linguistics offers many possible tools to analyze the genre, linguists generally seem disinterested. Comics should be given credit for what it is - the interplay of text and image where intertextuality plays a significant role. This paper, which analyzes Will Eisner's 1978 graphic novel, A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories, focuses on the interplay of text and image in comics and shows that intertextuality helps decode the meanings hidden even in seemingly simple units formed of text and image.