한국영상문화학회

This paper, as an effort to diverge from semiotic-based comic studies, attempts to discuss multimodality and affective discourse in comics through a cognitive approach. The reason to break away from the semiotic evaluation of comics is that there is a growing demand for a new truth discourse system in the climate of the Post-Truth media ecosystem, where confidence in truth discourse composed of objective facts has been seriously challenged. Coincidently, the interest and popularity of non-fiction comic formats have been increasing in the media. Traditionally, comics are considered to be ill-suited for non-fiction because it doesn’t provide factual objectivity of worldly events. Instead, comics, utilize alternative social discourse, in that it coordinates diverse socio-cultural meanings and allows multiple interpretations derived from the intersubjective collocation of creators and readers. More studies on the discourse system of non-fiction comics are warranted. This paper suggests linguistic and multimodal theories from a cognitive perspective to replace logos-centric semantics and analytical discourse which has given rise to the current crisis. Accordingly, metaphorical interpretation of non-fiction comics through multimodality is not insufficient to construct cognitively shared real world amongst participants of meaning making.