ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the study of comics by a stylistic analysis of a large corpus of book-length comics, or graphic narratives. It explains empirical research in the field has yet to move beyond the analysis of a limited canon. The chapter describes the motivations for building a corpus of graphic narrative, presents the principles underlying the corpus design, and details the basic measurements and procedures on which our analysis of comics images is based. In order to measure the stylistic diversity within a text, we calculated the standard deviation of the three basic measures: brightness, entropy, and number of shapes for all pages of a graphic narrative. Quantitative, as much as qualitative, methods need a strong grounding in theory—a cultural theory that lays the groundwork for operationalizing its concepts and connects different media and aesthetic structures.
