Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics redefines grammar not as a set of rules but as a resource for making meaning. He argued that any piece of language simultaneously performs three functions, which he called “metafunctions”: the ideational (what’s being represented), the interpersonal (the social relationship between speaker and listener), and the textual (how the message is organized). In Reading Images, Kress and van Leeuwen directly apply this framework to visual design, arguing that images have their own “grammar.” They show how Halliday’s three functions translate directly to visuals: representational meaning (what the image depicts), interactive meaning (how the image creates a relationship with the viewer through angle and gaze), and compositional meaning (how the elements are arranged for effect).
Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) provided the first widespread, accessible, and comprehensive vocabulary for analyzing comics as a unique art form. Using the medium of comics itself to explain his ideas, McCloud introduced and popularized key concepts like “closure,” the process where the reader’s imagination fills in the gaps between panels (in the “gutter”), and the power of visual abstraction, arguing that simple, “cartoony” images allow for greater universal identification. By deconstructing how comics manipulate time, space, and image, the book legitimized the medium for serious academic study and gave creators and critics a shared language to discuss its formal properties, profoundly influencing the fields of media studies, visual literacy, and communication.
One of the most salient features of visual narratives in comics is the way that the elements are arranged on a page—the “external compositional structure” (ECS) of a page’s layout. In this sense, the composition is “external” to the panel—i.e., it plays a role in a larger structure like a page—rather than “internal” (i.e. what is inside of a panel). In American and European comics, page layouts are thought to be read in a left-to-right and down, “Z-path” order, inherited from written language, though studies have shown that various complex spatial arrangements of panels push readers to navigate pages in ways that deviate from this path.