Lucky Luke and Tarkan: A structural comparison of two comics

Researchers like Propp, Todorov, Beaugrande & Colby tried to show in their works that literature texts can be divided into its units and literature is also a system which has its own rules like language. This structuralist method can also be applied to comics which uses both picture and writing at the same time in a complementary manner and forms a schematic structure using contrasts.Comics have been a research topic as a product of the popular culture, especially in the last decades. In Turkey, comics have begun to publish on child?s magazines in the 1930s and later became common on the newspapers. Among these comics, Lucky Luke, a western parody, as translated into Turkish under the name Red Kit and Tarkan with its nationalistic features are two of the most lasting ones.In this thesis, Lucky Luke and Tarkan will be considered as narrative texts and will be divided into their smallest units with a similar approach to that Propp and other structuralists utilized in their works. Then the relationship between these units will be investigated and these two comics will be compared in context and form. It will be shown that, although these two comics differ in perspective and ideology, they have similarities in their form.