Terminology

This is just a short list of the terminology you may find in this website, much of which you will need to accurately discuss comic art in a critical manner.

• Artist/Penciler – draws the original images

• Bleed - images that are drawn to be outside of panels

• Captions - small boxes of text overlaid on panels, containing either descriptive or narrative information, or internal monologue

• Colourist – colours the art

• Gutters - the space between panels

• Implied motion - additional lines to suggest movement such as shaking, running, etc.

• Inker – renders original art into an inked final

• Juxtaposition - placing two ideas next to one another for comparison or contrast purposes

• Letterer – Places speech bubbles and writes dialogue and narration

• Lettering - the written words on the page

• Metonymy - representing the whole with a term related to that whole

  • (eg, 'the crown' when referring to the Commonwealth of Australia, 'The White House' when referring to the Government of the USA)

• Onomatopoeia - sound effects written as words

• Pace - the quickness (or slowness) of a story

  • Decompressed - shows as much detail as possible

  • Compressed - quicker stories, generally more of a focus on action

• Panel - the boxes in which images are drawn

• Speech/thought bubbles - shapes that contain dialogue, different shapes may have different connotations

• Speed lines - lines drawn to suggest motion (see 'Implied motion')

• Spread - images that are drawn over two side-by-side pages

• Tier - a row of panels

• Vector - the line the eyes take when travelling across the page

• Writer – writes the script

Ready for revision?

Play this 30 question Kahoot with your class and friends and see who comes out on top!

Activity

Highlight each of the core aspects of comic book design using this activity.

Best printed in A3 and displayed on the wall!

(Spider-Man comic source provided by author via Twitter!)

Use this as an example for how to annotate a page: