Blog

  • Towards a visual sociolinguistics

    I’ve heard some people complain that a “language” approach to drawings and sequential images is overly formal and washes out the ability to talk about socio-cultural issues. I actually think it’s quite the opposite. Linguistics has long been acutely aware of social factors such as race, gender, geography, etc. which factor into the structure and…

  • Fantom Comics interview

    For anyone who missed my recent video interview with the Fantom Comics store, you can now watch it all online here or at youtube. We had some technically difficulties getting it up and running, so that limited some of the questions we got from the Internet audience. I also had a screensharing mishap, so about…

  • Fantom Comics Live Video Podcast

    I’m excited to say that this coming Sunday at 6:30pm Eastern Time I’ll be doing a live video podcast in conjunction with the Fantom Comics store in Washington DC. You can watch online via a Google Air Link, I’ll be taking questions directly from the crowd in the store and from those posted on the…

  • Commander Mark and visual vocabularies

    I got a blast from the past today when my old friend and awesome comic artist Dan Fraga posted this video of “Commander” Mark Kistler’s classic drawing show from PBS, The Secret City: I took Commander Mark’s drawing classes during the summers when I was a kid. He was actually from my hometown, and his…

  • Some January notes…

    Here’s just a few notes from recent developments… For all you Spanish speakers, a new translated article of mine appears in the latest Revista Exégesis, revisiting some of the ideas I had about the comic industry and definitions of “comics” from my “Visual Language Manifesto.” I recently submitted a response to an article in Trends…

  • VLOC released in the US!

    I’m excited to say that it looks like my new book, The Visual Language of Comics, is now available in America! The official release date for the book is still set for next week (January 30th), but it appears that you are now able to order (and hopefully receive!) copies ordered online. So, if you’ve…

  • Metaphors in the Bayeux Tapestry

    Here’s an interesting article examining semantic aspects of the Bayeux Tapestry that just appeared in the latest issue of Review of Cognitive Linguistics. I’ve written before about Charles Forceville’s work applying conceptual metaphor theory to aspects of the visual language of comics. His approach has subsequently been applied by other researchers looking at comics, animation, and…

  • Universality and diversity in visual languages

    One of the interesting byproducts of my theory of visual language is the implication that drawings are not universal. Because images look like what they represent (the are “iconic), they are often taken to be universal in their ability to convey meaning. While this is often the case, it is not the whole story. Visual…

  • Updates and such

    With the year closing, now’s as good a time as any to survey some of the things going on around here… Now that The Visual Language of Comics is out in the UK/Europe, I am eagerly awaiting its release in the US at the end of January. For those of you who are reading it,…

  • Der Spiegel article

    For all you German speakers, the latest issue of Der Spiegel has an article about my research. Unfortunately, the full content is not available unless you’re a subscriber, but a friend of mine has translated the preview content. Here’s what it reads in English… “An American psychologist claims that pictures speak their own language, with…