A survey of comics research in computer science

TL;DR

This survey reviews computer science research on comics, covering image analysis, user interaction, and content generation, highlighting past work and future outlooks in the digital transformation of comics consumption.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of comics research in computer science, identifying key areas and future directions in digital comics analysis and creation.

Findings

Research spans image analysis, user interaction, and AI.

Digital transition influences comics creation and consumption.

Identifies gaps and future research directions.

Abstract

Graphical novels such as comics and mangas are well known all over the world. The digital transition started to change the way people are reading comics, more and more on smartphones and tablets and less and less on paper. In the recent years, a wide variety of research about comics has been proposed and might change the way comics are created, distributed and read in future years. Early work focuses on low level document image analysis: indeed comic books are complex, they contains text, drawings, balloon, panels, onomatopoeia, etc. Different fields of computer science covered research about user interaction and content generation such as multimedia, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, etc. with different sets of values. We propose in this paper to review the previous research about comics in computer science, to state what have been done and to give some insights about the main outlooks.