Goffman’s Frame Analysis, modality and comics

This article explores how comics can ‘frame’ experience by instantiating borders in various ways, temporally, spatially and socially. It approaches ‘frame analysis’ in two senses: first, the ‘framing’ of comics in the sense of their nesting in bookended narrative structures, drawing attention to the hypotaxis inherent to graphic narrative, and highlighting parallels to the framing of experience in Goffman’s sense. Second, with a focus on the frame itself, the panel border: attending to how this can be used to signal the status of the material enclosed, that is, to modalize the narrative in ways parallel to those suggested by Goffman. The article will bring together Goffman’s social pragmatics and M. A. K. Halliday’s functional approach to multimodal texts, offering not only an approach to the reading of comics texts but also a method for comics creators to present imaginary, fictional, remembered and otherwise ‘framed’ experience. During the course of discussion, the article will also consider disruptions of framing, and transitions from frame to frame, both in the sense of panel-to-panel and from modality to modality.