The properties of panels in global comics: frequency and size of 76 K panels in 1,030 comics from 144 countries

Abstract

Panels are a fundamental unit of comics, yet basic data about their usage in comics from around the world has not been widely investigated. Here we analyze panel information in the TINTIN Corpus consisting of 1,030 comics from 144 countries—comprising over 14,000 pages with over 76,000 panels—all annotated using the Multimodal Annotation Software Tool (MAST). We examined both the number of panels per page and the relative size of those panels to their pages, finding that they varied in dimensions of the style that they are drawn in, the global region they come from, the typological properties of the languages spoken by their authors, and the year of their publication. In addition, a clear tradeoff occurred between these dimensions of structure, where larger panels appeared for fewer panels per page, and vice versa. This relationship appeared to be “universal”, persisting similarly no matter the variation across style, region, language, or publication date of the comics. Altogether, this work reveals that the structure of panels on comic pages involve a tension between variability across numerous sources and universal consistencies of properties that persist across all comics.