Blog

  • Going with the flow in comics

    “Flow” is a term that is often used by comic creators to describe how well a comic page directs its readers through the panels. This notion is discussed a lot, but there has actually been very little work trying to specifically describe what “flow” is, how it works, and how often it occurs. This is…

  • 2022: My publications in review

    I’m a little late to post it, but in keeping with my annual tradition, here’s a rundown of all the papers I published in 2022. There were a lot of them especially related to two of my main projects. The first is the VLRC Project, which was our older corpus of comics which we had…

  • TINTIN Project: Progress on Panels

    The TINTIN Project in my lab is gathering data about the structure of comics from around the world. We’re aiming to analyze 1,000 comics from over 75 countries. To do this, my postdoc Bruno Cardoso and I designed a fancy software program called MAST (the Multimodal Annotation Software Tool), and once we have gathered the…

  • New paper: Meaning above (and in) the head

    New paper: Meaning above (and in) the head

    I’m excited to say that my collaborator Tom Foulsham and I have a new paper out, “Meaning above (and in) the head: Combinatorial visual morphology from comics and emoji” which appears in the journal Memory and Cognition.  This paper examines the (neuro)cognition of “upfixes” which is what we call the elements that float above characters’ heads…

  • TINTIN Project: MAST

    TINTIN Project: MAST

    Our data collection on the TINTIN Project is now underway! If you’re not familiar with it, the TINTIN Project is our current research project aimed at analyzing the cross-cultural patterns in comics from around the world. We’re analyzing the structural properties of comics from over 60 countries to look for patterns, and to see whether…

  • New paper: Remarks on multimodality

    New paper: Remarks on multimodality

    I’m really excited to announce that my 2022 is kicking off with a new paper! This one is written with my colleague Joost Schilperoord, Remarks on multimodality: Grammatical interactions in the Parallel Architecture  and appears in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. When we communicate, we typically don’t use just one modality. Though speech is often given…

  • Analyzing Calvin and Hobbes

    Analyzing Calvin and Hobbes

    On New Year’s Day 2021, I posted a thread on Twitter analyzing the properties of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. People seemed to like the thread, so here’s a blog post recapping it all in once place… The Calvin and Hobbes comic strip ended 25 years ago, so let’s celebrate a New Years treat…

  • 2021: My publications in review

    2021: My publications in review

    Following my tradition over the last several years, here’s a post that summarizes all the papers I’ve had published over the past year. I find this is a nice way to collect things into once place, and gives a good entry point for people who might be curious what we’ve been up to. If you…

  • 2020: My publications in review

    2020: My publications in review

    Better late than never! A few years ago I started doing yearly reviews of all the papers I’d published in a year (all can be found here). It’s a nice way to summarize what had been done, and possibly give people an entry place for our research. When it came time to do 2020’s list…

  • Art vs. Language

    Art vs. Language

    This article was originally written for my periodic column at the online magazine Comixtalk in July 2004. In my last article, I wrote about the problems facing the designation of the “comics medium as art,” and the value of changing that conception to one viewing the “comics medium as a language” – visual language(VL). In this piece, I’ll explore…