Comics: Studies and Reports Keep Coming

International sales of comics

The European and International Booksellers Federation released a report and it shows that, across 19 countries in the study, comics made up 10% of all book sales.

Australia is included in the report but, unfortunately, comics sales are not reported for Australia as they’re not in the top 5 categories and only the top 5 categories appear in the report.

Two countries in the report have comics in their top 5 and we have a lot of work to do to catch up with Italy 20% of the market and France a whopping 22% of the market. In fact, in France, graphic novels, comics and manga are the third biggest category after fiction 68% and lifestyle 23%. 

Sadly, Japan is not included in the report. That would've been interesting to know. 

I will be looking more into international comics sales soon.

The TINTIN Project: Visual narratives, language and cognition

It's great to see the growing body of study and research on comics and multimodality. Hopefully, I'm not the only one who thinks this kind of research interesting. I can't help it, but the media studies teacher, librarian and comics reader in me come together to be fascinated by the power, richness and depth of comics as a multimodal storytelling medium.

Comics theory writer and cognitive scientist researcher Neil Cohn is at the forefront of this kind of research. Through the Visual Language Lab, Cohn and his team explore the structure and cognition of drawings and visual narratives through the analysis of 1,030 annotated comics from 144 countries and territories. The project aims to answer big questions such as: 

• Are there cross-cultural patterns in the visual languages used in comics of the world? 
• Do those patterns connect to the spoken languages of the comic creators? 
• Do people’s languages or comic reading experience influence how they comprehend comics?

As Cohn posted on BlueSky recently: 

"We’ve been annotating the comics using our Multimodal Annotation Software Tool, and have looked at various structures like panels and their properties (backgrounds, framing, events, etc.), motion events, perspective taking, emotion, meaning changes between panels and lots more." 

Some information about this project is already out here, with more coming next year.

Or if you want to hear from Neil Cohn directly, here's a video of Neil Cohn discussing Multimodality and Visual Language (starting at the 17 minutes and 15 seconds mark).

Graphic Novels: Can We Grow Them at Home?

I'm so excited this report is finally out! Sophie Splatt has done an extraordinary job in compiling information and thoughts from a wide range of participants. 

I was honoured to contribute to this as convenor of ALIA Graphic Novels and Comics. We are seeing some big changes in the Australian publishing of graphic novels with publishers like Scribe starting to publish graphic novels for adults, Hachette working on some YA graphic novels, and Hardie Grants creating a new imprint dedicated to kid's graphic novels. 

This report couldn't come out at a better time and I have very high hopes for the future of comics and graphic novels in Australia. You can read the whole report here.

Folio: Stories of Contemporary Australian Comics

Last but not least for today, we have the Australian Folio project. This project has been going for a few years and, as I understand it, it will be publishing its final results next year. The project aims to: "map, archive and promote Australian comics and graphic novels produced in the last 40 years, and the artists who created them."

They have published some great research already. I highly recommend the series of essays by Australian creators and Lead Investigator Liz MacFarlane. They are a must read. 

The Graphic Storytellers at Work report is also great reading. The report provides a review of Australia’s contemporary comics community, and the contexts in which its artists are using and developing their skills.