The Speech Bubble, Between Text and Image

International one-day symposium

Friday, March 14th, 2025

 

Location: Room Jacques Glowinski, Collège de France, 11 place Marcelin-Berthelot, 75231 Paris cedex 05

Event held in person with a virtual attendance option (Zoom link provided upon request).

 

With the support of the Maison de la Culture du Japon à Paris and the East Asian Civilizations Research Centre (CRCAO)

Contact (information and Zoom link: marianne.simon-oikawa (ät) u-paris.fr)

 

Presentation

 

This one-day symposium aims at showing the full complexity of the speech bubble, an object that has been largely neglected by research until now, and that cannot be defined solely as ‘the curve surrounding the words spoken by comic strip characters’ (Trésor de la langue française). Based on the observation that the speech bubble often also contains images and even blank spaces, and that its forms and functions vary according to the objects, periods and geographical areas in which it is present, the papers presented during this symposium propose to analyse the complex relation between speech bubble, text and image in a number of visual sources objects drawn from Japanese corpora or indirectly linked to Japan.

This one-day symposium is the first event organized within the ‘Histoires de bulles’ programme (CRCAO, East Asian Civilizations Research Centre, 2025-2029), which aims to study the speech bubble and turn it into an object of knowledge, both in terms of its own characteristics and its visual and wider cultural ecosystem, in order to ultimately identify an “economy of the bubble”, or even sketch out a general theory of it.

 

Website: https://www.crcao.fr/recherche/formes-du-texte-usages-de-limage-dans-les-livres-japonais/?lang=en

 

 

Program

 

Morning session

 

Chair: Matthias Hayek (École Pratique des Hautes Études-PSL, to be confirmed)

 

09:30-09:45. Opening remarks. Marianne Simon-Oikawa (Paris Cité University)

 

09:45-10:30. Marianne Simon-Oikawa. Fukidashi, Building an Object Between Text and Image

In Japanese, the word fukidashi, which designates the speech bubble, does not refer to any specific form or content. It instead designates a breath exhaled out of an unidentified source. The variety of objects in which the speech bubble appears in Japan during the Edo period makes it necessary to draft a list of the types of objects in which it is concentrated, and to make a few initial hypotheses about it, which future research may support, develop or contradict. This presentation will focus on selected examples that challenge the definition of the bubble as a container for speech.

 

10:30-11:15. Estelle Bauer (Musée Guimet). When Pictures Start Talking. Dialogues and other Texts Written in Emaki (gachûshi 画中詞)

If speech bubbles are a way to make characters talk, some emaki achieve the same effect by writing dialogue directly next to them. We will look at a few examples to reflect on the role these gachûshi play in the production of the visual narrative: they provide details about the characters’ actions and emotions; they introduce a sense of time into the picture.

 

11:15-12:00. Jaqueline Berndt (Stockholm University). Speech Balloons Beyond Speech: The ‘Return’ of Pictorial Contents?

Manga researchers have approached fukidashi mainly as speech balloons – “transdiegetic devices” that turned manga into “audiovisual comics” (Exner 2022) and visual modifiers of dialogue lines’ auditory properties (Manga no yomikata 1995). Attention has also been paid to speech balloons’ placement on manga pages and their role in visually guiding the reader’s gaze, while the analysis of their contents has considered hand-writing and type, font variations, and punctuation marks. Inspired by pictorial dream balloons from the late Edo period, my presentation focuses on non-linguistic contents: small pictures of characters’ heads inside the balloon, as well as pictorial runes such as sweatdrops and cross-popping veins attached to a balloon rather than the respective speaker. These devices internalize the external parts of Hosoma’s “speaker–listener–object” triangle (2023), ultimately foregrounding relationalities through a blurring of previously clear divides. In addition, pictorial balloon contents serve exaggeration (both humorous and affective) and instruction (efficiently providing information), as well as an economy of space. This sets them apart from Edo-period imagery, which nevertheless may help challenge simplistic assumptions of ‘speech’ balloons as providing an auditory experience.

 

Afternoon session

 

Chair: Thomas Lamarre (The University of Chicago)

 

14:00-14:45. Blanche Delaborde (Fukuoka University). The Spatial Paradox of Speech Bubbles in Manga

Speech bubbles in manga form a surprisingly complex narrative device. In particular, although the space delimited by the outline of the bubbles initially appears as a two-dimensional space analogous to that of the page, many examples contradict this idea. For instance, speech bubbles outlines are often porous, especially in the presence of handwritten secondary lines. In other cases, the bubbles carry iconic or conventional signs (keiyu) that suggest some depth. In addition, the anchoring of the balloons to the three-dimensional diegetic space presents many ambiguous cases, that blur between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces.

 

14:45-15:30. Ladan Niayesh. From Playscript to Mangascript: The Speech Bubbles in Manga Shakespeare’s The Tempest

As the spearhead of the ‘Self Made Hero’ company’s endeavour to break through a heavily Asianised global manga market, the British ‘Manga Shakespeare’ series paradoxically enlists that icon of European culture not hegemonically, but as a mediator gesturing East. Speech bubbles occupy a key position in this process of cultural negotiation in one of the early volumes in the series, The Tempest (2007), illustrated by a British mangaka but set in a post-industrial, environmentally damaged island beaten by Hokusai-style waves. The speech bubbles keep about forty percent of the original Shakespearean text, but adapt it to visually and culturally navigate between a theatrical script and the aesthetic alphabet of the manga. This involves for example playing on bubble contours to express emotions and speech volume in the opening tempest scene, sticking in that to the received conventions of Japanese manga. But the artist also instills less common and inventive features into the manga format, such as deleting the speech bubble altogether to blend thought and nature for monologues. Eventually tailored into strips of paper carrying identity, speech is what both the spirit Ariel and the magician Prospero dissolve into in the final pages of the volume, recalling a dilapidated folio of Shakespeare’s complete works scattered and lost to the winds, or alternatively and more optimistically Prospero’s magic book travelling east over the oceans for a fresh lease of life with a rejuvenated audience.

Next January, the DFG-funded research project “Comics as Educational Media in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1960s-1980s” will hold an international final workshop in Hamburg on the topic of “Comics as Educational Media in the 20th Century: International Perspectives”, co-organized by Sylvia Kesper-Biermann. Participation is possible, but due to the limited space available, please register by December 31, 2024 with Anna Strunk (anna.strunk (ät) uni-hamburg.de).

Organizers’ Note:

“At present it seems like common sense that comics can be a beneficial tool for educational purposes. Their ability to explain and illustrate even complicated topics as well as their motivational impact seem to make them perfect to “loosen up” the classroom. However, in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), this approval of comics only came after a phase, during the 1950s, of vehement rejection and fear with regard to the supposed dangers of comics. They were accused of causing analphabetism, increasing juvenile delinquency and keeping children away from “good literature”. Similar to the FRG, other countries experienced their own struggles and discussions surrounding the use of comics in educational contexts. The upcoming workshop “Comics as Educational Media in the 20th Century: International Perspectives” aims to focus on these developments in East Germany, Poland, France, Great Britain, the USA and Japan. Six speakers will shed light on comic reception and usage in education in their countries of research, opening up a room for comparison and discussion.

Continue Reading: Complete Program

On Monday, June 17 2024, José Alaniz (University of Washington, Seattle, USA) will give a guest lecture at the University of Siegen (English Department), for which attendance via WebEx is possible. If you are interested, please register at stein [ät] anglistik.uni-siegen.de to receive the link.

“Comics of the Anthropocene:Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature”

How have comics artists depicted the human-caused destruction of the natural world? How do these works resonate with the ethical and environmental issues? How have comics mourned the loss of nature over the last five decades?
José Alaniz’s lecture explores the representation of animals, mass extinctions and climate change in the era popularly known as the Anthropocene in (mostly) US comics, primarily since the first Earth Day in 1970.

Key words: Critical Animal, Studies, Environmental Humanities, Affect Studies, Comics Studies
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Daniel Stein, Svitlana Stupak

Announcement poster
To the event page

Next Friday, ComFor member Elizabeth ‘Biz’ Nijdam is organizing and chairing a panel discussion at the Goethe-Institut Montreal for the German Studies Association’s Comic Studies Network with comic artist Birgit Weyhe and Dr. Priscilla Layne (UNC-Chapel Hill) about their recent collaboration on Rude Girl (2022). Involved are also the UBC Comic Studies Cluster and the Department of Classics, Modern Languages, and Linguistics at Concordia University. For those interested, online registration and participation is possible.

More information:
“In 2018, Birgit Weyhe joined a room of German comics scholars at a GSA (German Studies Association) panel on diversity and inclusion in German-language comics to bear witness to a presentation by Dr. Brett Sterling that openly criticized her graphic novel Madgermanes (2016) for its representation of Blackness and cultural appropriation. While this commentary was far from welcome, it marked the start of the author’s journey in revaluating her power and privilege as a comics artist. Soon thereafter, Weyhe met Dr. Priscilla Layne, an Associate Professor of German Weyhe und Layne in MontrealStudies at UNC-Chapel Hill with Caribbean roots. Over the course of the next few years, Weyhe and Layne collaborated on the graphic novel Rude Girl (2022), which explore Layne’s life growing up in Chicago, experience of racism, and path to German studies, all the while interrogating what it means for a White artist to represent Black lives.

This panel will take the form of a conversation with the co-creators of Rude Girl, discussing Layne and Weyhe’s collaboration and the role of comics in intersectional explorations of Black identity.”

Go to the registration site