The doctor and the monster in a graphic novel: a metafunctional analysis of interpersonal, ideational and compositional meanings

Abstract

Comics or sequential art communicate in a language that relies on visual experiences common to their creator and their audience. Modern readers are expected to have an easier understanding of the word-image junction, and such understanding requires the reader to make use of their interpretative skills, representing an act of aesthetic perception and, at the same time, an intellectual search.  The main objective of this article is to analyze the graphic novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2021) considering its interpersonal, ideational and compositional elements to identify how such elements come together in the production of meanings and the transmission of sociocultural and ideological characteristics to readers, linked to the context of production and distribution. The aim is also to understand how such elements work together, leading the reader to make inferences at crucial moments in the narrative, maintaining a level of understanding throughout the reading process. In order to active the aims, the proposed analysis includes three levels: analysis of linguistic elements; image analysis; analysis at an inferential level- identifying how the interaction between verbal and image elements, based on the use of the three metafunctions, contributes to the understanding of the narrated events and for the reader to activate their prior knowledge when making inferences. The results showed that the use of the metafunctional approach to analyze the graphic novels proved to be extremely efficient in understanding how the relationship between verbiage and image is established for understanding the story and its fundamental role in the process of generating inferences.