ABSTRACT
Words and images frequently co-occur in everyday life: adverts, instruction manuals, comics, and cartoons are merely some instances in which both media are used to inform, entertain, or tell a story. This chapter intends to investigate the characteristics of comic reading shown in eye movements and compare these to the measures previously found in text reading. It examines what features of the comics themselves influence such characteristics of comic reading, such as the number of words, the nature of the image, and the location of text within a panel. High number and increased percentage occupancy of words was associated with longer dwell times on panels, along with character-focused images, and larger panels. That text exerts a strong influence on dwell time is unsurprising: text features have been found to capture attention when presented within real-world images. The size of saccades differed between text and image regions, with larger saccades within the image region than the text.
