The sequential units of language (i.e. words) have often been characterized by a tension between diversity and universality in the triangulation between information content, length and frequency. Here we examine similar tensions in the sequential units of visual narratives (i.e. panels) by focusing on how many entities appear per panel in visual narratives from the TINTIN Corpus of 1,030 annotated comics from 144 countries (76,000+ panels). Rates of entities per panel differ in regularized ways between styles of comics that cut across global regions, implicating typologically different ‘visual languages’. Entities per panel were also associated with panel size, where greater numbers of entities were associated with larger sizes of panels. Finally, a negative association appeared between panels with different numbers of entities and their frequency, reminiscent of a Zipf’s law of abbreviation. As associations of both size and frequency with character per panel persisted in a uniform way across styles, it implies universal tendencies transcending the diversity across systems, consistent with typological properties of languages.

The ability to reconstruct a missing event to create a coherent interpretation – bridging inference – is central to understanding both real-world events and visual narratives like comics. Most previous work on visual narrative inferencing has focused on fully omitted events, yet few have compared inference generation when climactic events become replaced with a panel employing numerous inferential techniques (e.g., action stars or onomatopoeia). These techniques implicitly express the unseen event while balancing several underlying features that describe their informativeness. Here, we examine whether processing and inference resolution differ across inferential techniques in two self-paced reading experiments. Experiment 1 directly compared five distinct types, and Experiment 2 explored the effect of combining techniques. In both experiments, differences in processing arise both between inferential techniques themselves, and at subsequent panels allowing the bridging inference to be resolved. Analysis of inferential features suggested that the explicitness of the inferential technique led to greater demand in processing, which later facilitated inference generation and comprehensibility. The findings reinforce the necessity of discussing the diversity of narrative patterns motivating bridging inferences within visual narratives.

Inference has long been acknowledged as a key aspect of comprehending narratives of all kinds, be they verbal discourse or visual narratives like comics and films. While both theoretical and empirical evidence points towards such inference generation in sequential images, most of these approaches remain at a fairly broad level. Few approaches have detailed the specific cues and constructions used to signal such inferences in the first place. This paper thereby outlines several specific entrenched constructions that motivate a reader to generate inference. These techniques include connections motivated by the morphology of visual affixes like speech balloons and thought bubbles, the omission of certain narrative categories, and the substitution of narrative categories for certain classes of panels. These mechanisms all invoke specific combinatorial structures (morphology, narrative) that mismatch with the elicited semantics, and can be generalized by a set of shared descriptive features. By detailing specific constructions, this paper aims to push the study of inference in visual narratives to be explicit about when and why meaning is ‘filled in’ by a reader, while drawing connections to inference generation in other modalities.

Drawing on recent visual and spatial turns in history writing, this paper considers AIDS posters from the perspective of their museum ‘afterlife’ as collected material objects. Museum spaces serve changing political and epistemological projects, and the visual objects they house are not immune from them. A recent globally themed exhibition of AIDS posters at an arts and crafts museum in Hamburg is cited in illustration. The exhibition also serves to draw attention to institutional continuities in collecting agendas. Revealed, contrary to postmodernist expectations, is how today’s application of aesthetic display for the purpose of making ‘global connections’ does not radically break with the virtues and morals attached to the visual at the end of the nineteenth century. The historicisation of such objects needs to take into account this complicated mix of change and continuity in aesthetic concepts and political inscriptions. Otherwise, historians fall prey to seductive aesthetics without being aware of the politics of them. This article submits that aesthetics is politics.