Review of Michał Szawerna’s Metaphoricity of Conventionalized Diegetic Images in Comics: A Study in Multimodal Cognitive Linguistics. Łódź Studies in Language 54, Frankfurt am Main-New York: Peter Lang, 2017

Abstract

Artistic creativity tends to resist attempts at clean formal analyses. A good artist aims at making their texts original and unique, often transcending the limitations of artistic conventions and imagination of their times. A good researcher aims at discovering general patterns and mechanisms that transcend the idiosyncrasies of particular authors’ style. For this reason, the efforts of artists and scholars usually pull in opposite directions. Michał Szawerna’s Metaphoricity of Conventionalized Diegetic Images in Comics, an ambitious project aiming at capturing the semiotic complexities of the relatively young but incredibly rich art of comics, is no exception in this respect. Even though the wealth of comics creators’ artistic imagination tends to escape from elegant categories devised by a theorist, the theorist can nonetheless reveal much not only about artist’s imagination but also about the cognitive mechanisms of the sign-using mind. Michał Szawerna is certainly not the first one to undertake the task of offering a semiotic characterization of the comics medium; French and American scholars have been proposing various theoretical frameworks with this aim in mind for several decades. Nonetheless, Szawerna is probably the first to make such an extensive use of the tools devised in the field of cognitive semiotic and the first one to propose such a wide range of in-depth case studies. From the methodological point of view, Szawerna describes the semiotic complexities of comics employing