Younger Readers and the Comic Book as a Site of Ambivalent Sound Symbolic Collaboration

Drawing upon a broad range of disciplines, such as literary theory, visual semiotics, pragmatics, sound
symbolism and media studies, this article will introduce, explore and define the relationship between words
and pictures in imagetexts. It will then apply these findings to the discourse concerning the use of expressive
sound symbolic forms in comics, in order to elucidate the ambivalent relationship that these intrusive
sensorial elements have with images as presented in comics and with their younger audiences. In particular,
this article will show how the presence of ‘lettering’ (e.g. textual features) fosters the dynamicity of the
genre but, at the same time, poses issues when it comes to defining its close amalgamation with the visual
image. The dual main aim is, first, to show how the presence of onomatopoeia shapes the way we perceive
the conventions of imagetexts, comics above all, and, secondly, to underline the importance of the younger
reader as a ‘self-regulating’ protagonist in the process.