# A survey of comics research in computer science

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05490 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05490/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [CoMix: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Task Comic Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03550/) (2024)
- [DAF:re: A Challenging, Crowd-Sourced, Large-Scale, Long-Tailed Dataset For Anime Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08674/) (2021)
- [MangaUB: A Manga Understanding Benchmark for Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19034/) (2024)
- [One missing piece in Vision and Language: A Survey on Comics Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09502/) (2024)
- [Re:Draw -- Context Aware Translation as a Controllable Method for Artistic Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03499/) (2024)
- [Toward accessible comics for blind and low vision readers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08248/) (2024)
- [How Panel Layouts Define Manga: Insights from Visual Ablation Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19141/) (2024)
- [CPST: Comprehension-Preserving Style Transfer for Multi-Modal Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08695/) (2023)
- [Semantic Similarity is a Spurious Measure of Comic Understanding: Lessons Learned from Hallucinations in a Benchmarking Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01950/) (2026)
- [Studying Comics at Scale with Artificial Intelligence: The PAGE Framework and Three Studies of American Comics and Japanese Manga](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13840/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.