English comic version

The Analects of Confucius is one of the representative works of traditional Chinese culture and has been translated into different versions. Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version is one of the most popular among the different translated versions. It has a considerable potential to spread Chinese culture by multimodal means. A brief review shows that so far, there have been few studies on Tsai Chih-Chung's Chinese classic comics from the perspective of multimodality. This study applies the analytical framework based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s “Visual Grammar” to Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version of The Analects of Confucius, attempting to explore how the visual modes realize three meta-meanings in the English comic version. Through the analysis, it is found that the images in Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version fully realize the representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. Furthermore, most of the images in Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version realize more than just one meta-meaning, and more frequently include all three meta-meanings. By combining the texts and images organically, Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version has been successful in attracting readers to read the classic, deepening the readers’ understanding of the classic and finally making them accept the cultural essence embedded in it. This study provides a case reference for the analysis of multimodal discourse in Chinese classic comics, and also contributes to optimizing Chinese classic comics’ design and innovation.

Since comics comprise images and texts, the relations between them should be a major concern of comics studies. However, few studies have focused on the intersemiotic interaction between images and texts in the meaning construction of Chinese classic comics. This study applies Martinec and Salway’s system to Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version of The Analects of Confucius (The Analects), attempting to explore the image-text relations in Chinese classic comics. It is found that the image-text relations in Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version of The Analects can be summarized as unequal-status and logico-semantics combined. Quantitative analysis shows that the images are always subordinate to the texts, and in terms of logico-semantic relations, all of subsystems but “image more general” are included. Besides, the distribution of the logico-semantic relations of image and text indicates that two different subsystems, namely expansion and projection, integrate and work together to create meanings in this version. Qualitative analysis shows that the tactful deployment of the combinations of image-text relation in The Analects makes it visually-verbally coherent. The intersemiotic interaction between images and texts also contributes a lot to the discourse meaning construction of Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version. However, in The Analects, the image-text relation relies too much on the extension of the image by the text as well as the projection of locution. This study provides a case reference for the analysis of Chinese classic comic as multimodal discourse, and also contributes to promoting the overseas dissemination of traditional Chinese culture.