The Visual Rhetoric Of News Cartoons In International Communication

As a visual image,comics combine verbal and non-verbal ways of communicating through the use of visual symbols rooted in the thinking of text producers.Nowadays,news cartoons make the audience quickly understand the intention of news editors through simple cartoon images,which not only attracts the interest of the public to a great extent,but also attempts to guide public opinion through symbol construction.A large number of existing literature focuses on the study of cartoon communication effect from the perspective of cartoonist’s persuasive intention,but few studies discuss the effectiveness of cartoon as visual rhetoric.Based on this,this study takes Roland Barth’s "image rhetoric" as the academic access point and "visual rhetoric" as the main theoretical framework to explore the generation logic and communication mechanism of news comics.According to the above research objectives,this paper adopts qualitative comparative analysis(QCA)to select 114 war cartoons published by China Daily on the media platform Facebook since the outbreak of COVID-19,and comprehensively investigate the two indicators of strong case representativeness and regional platform transmission.A total of 53 cartoons were selected to better reflect the popularity of the media.Based on the research on the literature related to the issue of news cartoons in different disciplines such as journalism and communication,politics,sociology and psychology,four influential factors are put forward in the path of "visual grammar analysis",including "image interpretation context","cartoon type","attitude" and "narrative frame".In the path of "visual discourse analysis",four influential factors are put forward,namely "subject of comic book","theme of comic book","visual cognitive mode of comic book" and "theme of comic book values".After assigning 8variables,this paper carries out coding analysis on 53 cases,and obtains the optimal combination of news cartoon heat transmission interpretation conditions under the combined action of visual grammar and visual discourse through QCA operation.The results show that "cartoon type" is a necessary condition for news cartoons to gain high popularity in international communication."Type-subject-value" is the driving path for the hot spread of news cartoons with the largest case coverage.That is to say,the critical news cartoon points to the outside world through the main body of the visual image structure,and combines with the "ultimate values" presented by the cartoon image to better capture the audience’s eyeballs,thus causing the high heat spread.The "frame" variable,"attitude" variable and "context" variable in visual grammar appear many times.It can be seen that in the communication process of news cartoons,"conflict frame/moral frame","objective attitude" and "image interpretation context" are important conditions to assist the visual communication process of cartoons.Finally,in the form of "news cartoon",this paper explores the "production","meaning" and "exchange" of visual grammar and visual discourse in the process of visual communication.Combined with related theories of visual communication and supplemented by symbol analysis,this paper discusses the visual validity of news cartoons in international communication from three dimensions of "symbol finger","symbol movement" and "symbol criticism",and goes deep into three dimensions of "human,social and international".