By Dr. Diarmaid Verrier 

Summary points for this article include:  

• Comics are complex to define and involve integrating images, text, and layout.  

• Reading comics is cognitively more demanding than reading text alone.  

• Research on how people actually read comics is limited and often based on assumptions.  

• Eyetracking shows readers generally follow a zpath but frequently revisit panels. 

While we might think it’s easy to define a comic, there are actually a lot of fuzzy boundaries around what a comic is or is not. The cartoonist and comics scholar, Scott McCloud, defines them as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”.  You might think that this sounds rather academic. But there’s a reason for that – there are multiple strands of academic research looking at comics in both applied and theoretical ways. As the saying goes – “they’re not just for kids”  

Applied research looks at topics such as the potential benefits of comics for education or for communication with lay audiences. For example, using comics as a medium is often suggested as a way of improving engagement with teaching materials and the motivation of learners. Alongside that, though, there is also a need for more basic research that looks that how comics are perceived and/or mentally processed by readers. This kind of research is also crucial, as it is not necessarily straightforward to read a comic and there are substantial differences from reading text alone.  

Reading comics is trickier than you might think 

Reading comics might implicitly be thought of as “easier” than reading texts, most likely because of the association between comics and juvenile topics and the popularity of picture books and comics amongst children. However, reading a comic requires *more* cognitive processes to be brought online, not fewer. As well as reading text, readers must also engage in pictorial perception and comprehension and must navigate the spatial positioning of material on the page. They must also integrate all of this information, along with the text, to create a holistic narrative understanding of the comic. 

In addition, there are stylistic conventions that may not be intuitive to novice readers. For example, if you haven’t read a comic before, or even if you have, it might not be obvious that a round speech bubble indicates audible speech, while a cloud-like one indicates inaudible thoughts. This is another reason why a naïve expectation that using comics in schools will solve educational woes is probably unfounded. 

How do people read comics? 

Studies that investigate the way readers process information from comic books are scarce, especially when compared to the work that has been done in relation to reading text.  A more detailed exploration of these processes is needed to fully understanding the potential advantages of comics in applied settings such as education. 

For example, it’s well known that text in books is set up to be read along a “z-path”. You read along the line, get to the end, then zoom back to the start of the next line. However, what does the archetypal flow of reading look like when reading a comic? The answer to this question is not necessarily obvious, especially when you consider the enormous variation in the way that comic book pages might be structured.  

Previous work in this area has *assumed* that readers follow a z-path while reading a comic. More recently, a research group led by Neil Cohn in Tilburg University asked people to self-report how they *would* read typical assemblages of panels designed to reflect a typical page. While people did generally report following a z-path, this finding should be taken with a grain of salt as it was based on self-report data and was not based on actual comic reading behaviour. 

We (Dr Paul Aleixo, Dr Jane Morgan, and myself, Diarmaid) decided to use eye-tracking equipment to look at how people *actually* read real comics. We travelled to comic conventions, set up a stall, and asked people at the convention to read the first few pages of a comic while we recorded how their gaze moved across the page. The comic we used was Alan Moore’s Watchmen – one of the key texts in the comic book canon (art by Dave Gibbons; colouring by John Higgins). 

We found that the z-path was a great archetypal representation of how people read comics. By and large, people started off on panel 1 then travelled to panel 2; from panel 2 they were most likely to go to panel 3; they were then most likely to zoom back to the left side of the page to get to panel 4; and so on… 

However, there was also a lot of deviation from this archetypal journey. People’s gaze did not always flow onto the next panel in the expected order, and, in particular, there were lots of transitions from one panel to the *previous* panel. We interpreted this as readers checking contextual information to make sure that they were making the intended inferences and that their narrative understanding was complete.  

While this study was important for confirming what might be thought of as an obvious phenomenon (reading following a z-path), it also led to some non-obvious reading behaviours. Although the findings have their limitations (for example, the pages we looked at have a very standard 3 × 3 layout, which is very straightforward compared to some comic book pages), they provide a strong foundation for future work looking at comic book reading behaviour in more complex materials. 

For an open-access version of the full paper this blog post was based on (How Readers Navigate Comic Book Pages: Evidence from Eye Movements; Aleixo, Morgan, & Verrier, 2025), click here: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/36392/3/Aleixo-HowReadersNavigate%28AM%29.pdf