GENRE CHARACTERISTICS OF COMICS, WHICH ARE MODERN ADAPTATIONS OF CLASSIC BOOKS

Abstract

In comics as multimodal narratives visual and verbal modes interact to create meaning. Colours play an important role in comics, the choice of warm or cold colour palette, as well as bright or muted, influences a reader’s perception and attitude to the described events. Comics have a number of narratological, stylistic, structural and other characteristics. Events in comics can be presented both with the help of a narrator (extradiegetic or intradiegetic) or nonnarratorially by means of images. Strategies of verbal representation, characteristic for comics, include narration boxes, speech balloons and thought bubbles. The temporal structure of the narrative in the analysed comics is linear with some flashbacks. Spatial indicators are incorporated into both verbal and visual components. Mediated focalisation is signaled by such cinematic devices as the over-the-shoulder shot and eyeline match. The analysed comics, which are transformed variants of classic fairy tales, contain modified initial and final fairy-tale formulas and well-known dialogues. Stylistic peculiarities of comics include onomatopoeia and ideograms, i.e. certain symbols with fixed meaning. Quantitative analysis of panel transition types in the analysed comics has demonstrated that in comics with a dynamic plot the action-to-action transition prevails, while in comics containing a detailed description of only several actions the moment-to-moment transition is the most widespread.