The thesis concerns a critical discourse analysis of two culturally, politically and ideologically disparate publications: the American series of war comics Combat Kelly and the Soviet satirical magazine Крокодил (“The Crocodile”). Both contain multimodal texts, i.e. texts that combine two modes of communication (visual and verbal); all of these can be categorized under the genre of “comics”. Their analysis therefore makes use of the threefold methodology designed by Norman Fairclough, one of the most important representatives of CDA, combined with the multimodal theory of Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, as well as the theory of sequential art, as expounded by Will Eisner and Scott McCloud. The primary aim of the thesis is to identify, describe and contextualize the ideological content of both publications, while highlighting the importance of the formal elements that embody it. There are several important differences between the two groups of texts; namely, the fact that one publication (Combat Kelly) is sequential in nature, whereas the other (Крокодил) is not. This necessitates two dissimilar approaches to their analyses: one that focuses on the narrative structure of the chosen texts, and one where this is unnecessary, if not impossible. In spite of such and other differences, both publications are shown to reproduce similar ideological propositions, whereby they even use identical mechanisms or devices.
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