The Function of Relay

 

While surfing the internet this afternoon, I came across this comic strip. Comic strips like this one and many others relate to what Roland Barthes describes as relay. Barthes describes relay as the use of text to create a deeper meaning of the images through the sum of the texts. He writes “Here text (most often a snatch of dialogue) and image stand in a complimentary relationship; the words, in the same way as the images, are fragments of a more general syntagm and the unity of the message is realized at a higher level, that of the story, the anecdote, the diegesis.” The function of relay in images is used to give the reader an idea about what the image is describing throughout each frame. Relay is limited and can be seen primarily in comic strips. Relay becomes important where it is used however. If comic strips were produced without any sort of dialogue between characters, or text describing what was going on throughout the frames, it would be hard for the reader to understand what was going on at all. Without relay, comic strips would just be a series of related images strung together without a reason of why there connected in the first place.

Update: After deleting the text in each of the images, it makes it almost impossible to figure out what is going on with this comic and whats the point. Thus relay is used to guide the reader to what the subsequent images are meaning individually and as a whole. Relay describes the single image as well as the summation of the images in a comic strip.