Although there is no stable definition of comics, interaction between verbal and the visual components is more or less ubiquitous in the different descriptions of the medium. Thierry Groensteen claims the visual component is dominant, arguing that a sequence of images can create a coherent narrative without any verbal elements added, as the example of silent comics shows. These visual sequential narratives communicate through pictures exclusively. According to the structuralist approach of comics studies, the comics medium operates as a language, a system of several smaller signifier units, including page layouts, strips, margins, speech bubbles and panels. These are used to convey a narrative following the rules of the “grammar” of comics: cartoonists break the narrative down by framing, sequencing and organizing the images in the space of the page so that the reader can decode them in the right order. How the cartoonist constructs the page layout determines the order and the mode in which the panels are read. If we scramble the order of the panels, or if we remove some, we either lose the meaning or we generate a new one. In this manner, we destroy (and reconstruct) the braiding, which is how the visual elements of the page layout are linked together, how their division is bridged, creating a network of visual motifs across the graphic narrative. Whenever we look at the page layout, we see a multiframe: the panels that we are actually reading share the same space with panels about the past and the future of the story-time. Some cross-cultural differences exist, however, between the visual languages of the various comics cultures of the world (e.g., manga is read from right to left).
