Manuale Di Lettura Dei Fumetti (which translates to Manual for Reading Comic Books) is a book published by ERI (Edizioni RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana) in Italy in 1982. The paperback book is written by Ulrich Krafft, with an introduction by Michele Rak and translation by S. Bernardini. The book is an academic/semiotic study dedicated to breaking down and understanding the specific “language” of comic books.

Manuale Di Lettura Dei Fumetti is a soft cover paperback book containing 240 black and white pages, with illustrations found amongst the Italian text throughout the book to support commentary. The cover features a notable, stylized collage of famous comic strip and comic book characters within a single word balloon, reflecting the book’s cross-genre analytical nature. These characters include the Phantom, Charlie Brown and Scrooge McDuck.

The back cover of the book provides us with a small description of what to expect within Manuale Di Lettura Dei Fumetti. Translated to English, it reads:

The book aims to reconstruct some of the unities of comics language. In particular, two sets of signs are considered: space signs and movement (or action) signs. Both of these classes are significantly “open”: that is, the reader largely integrates them to achieve a sufficient level of comprehension of the text. To do this, he evidently draws on a knowledge that is not exclusively “comic book” based, drawing on the universe of stories he knows. This hypothesis allows us to reconstruct many parallels between some realistic comics and their literary models, although it proves less suitable when considering comics in which the interaction between verbal and visual is very limited. In any case, comics tell more or less well-known stories and often rely on the reader’s knowledge, who already knows them and therefore recognizes certain sequences. In this way, the comic’s text can leave gaps or make leaps without losing the narrative thread.

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