Week 2

What does Baetons (2001) mean by ‘monstration’, ‘graphiation’ and the ‘graphiateur’’?

 
Graphiation is best described as the ennuciation and physical visual of the narrative, the graphiateur being the visually represented character that projects said narrative. Baetons states
"Marion proposes to call graphiation the graphic and narrative enunciation of the comics, the graphiateur the agent responsible for it."
Monstration is when the events in a story are performed by the characters themselves, through dialogue, without any narrators intervention. (Baetons 2001)
Monstration is a technique that film usually applies, sometimes also with the inclusion of a narrator. Monstration is effective in visually driven media, where quick dialogue explanations are required to move the story forward and keep the plot at an interesting pace.

What does Khordoc think the Asterix series does better than Hergé’s Tintin?

Khordoc sees the techniques used in Asterix to be more fluid and visually driven than the techniques seen Tintin.
Tintin relies on complex plots which require hefty amounts of explanation. Information that is gained through either graphiation, or a narrator; sometimes the inner monologue of the main character.

 Khardoc (2001) states that Tintin "is grounded in a fairly intricate plot, thus, it is more highly narrated.....the balloons contain direct speech, but significant proportions of it are essentially narrative.......herges speech balloons often occupy approximately half the panel."

^so here you can see that a Tintin comic requires more concentration from the reader, which results in a slower less fluid read. Tintin also suffers from another handicap from its inflated dialogue; the large speech balloons leave less room for illustration driven narrative and also (khardoc 2001)  "Herge has not displayed the full range of sound that can be displayed graphically."
The lack of space doesn't allow for the use of onomatopoeia's; which can be a clever and easy way to visually drive a storyline.
These examples of where tintin fails, but (Khardoc 2001) "in the case of asterix , the story, despite certain variations, is fairly similar in most episodes." Since the plot is usually simple and familiar, more effort can be directed at driving the more visual and humour based storyline of Asterix. Khardoc (2001) goes on "The representation of sound is therefore one of the numerous strategies in this comic which contributes to creating humour, which is the series main purpose."

References

Baetons, J.(2001) Revealing Traces: A new theory of graphic annunciation. In Varnum, R & Gibbons, C, (ed). The Language of Comics: word and image. (PP. 145-155). Jackson: UP of Mississipi

Khardoc, C (2001) The Comics Books Sound Track: Visual sound effects in Asterix. In Varnum, R & Gibbons, C, (ed). The Language of Comics: word and image. (PP. 145-155). Jackson: UP of Mississipi