Blog

  • Syntax, narrative, grammar… what!?

    One of the aspects of my theories that people often find confusing is my claim that sequential images use a “narrative grammar” that is analogous to the grammar in sentences. This is confusing to many, because clearly individual images hold much more information than individual words. This is true, but the analogy I make cuts…

  • Fast Co.Design article

    Fast Company magazine’s Co.Design site has a write up of my research over at their site. The article focuses mostly on my “(Pea)nuts and bolts of visual narrative” article from last year (downloadable here). That was the first of my studies looking at the brain to understand the narrative grammar of sequential images, so it…

  • VLOC released in Europe!

    The day has finally come…My new book The Visual Language of Comics is now available for sale in Europe! My publisher (Bloomsbury) has an interview with me over at their blog to mark the occasion. The US release is still a little ways to go (January 30), so across the intervening time I plan to do…

  • Violating comics… for science!

    Every now and then, I see or receive commentary from people about my studies where they object to some of the stimuli in my experiments. They exclaim things like, “But, actual comics don’t have sequences/pages/images like those!” For example, in my study of page layouts (pdf), they might complain that the strange arrangements of panels (right)…

  • Guardian Article

    David Robson discusses my research and my upcoming book, The Visual Language of Comics (out in less than 2 weeks in the UK!) in a new article for the UK’s Guardian newspaper. He interestingly ties my work to aspects of cave paintings, which I’ve discussed on this blog just a little. However, the article does a very nice job of…

  • Review: Indonesian manga analysis

    I recently found this interesting paper, “Impacts of manga on Indonesian readers’ self-efficacy and behavior intentions to imitate its visuals,” that attempts to dissect the factors influencing why Indonesian comic fans imitate the drawings in manga (pdf at academia.edu…account may be necessary to access). They gave readers a copy of a manga (Naruto) and a non-manga…

  • Tufts Magazine

    The latest issue of Tufts Magazine has a nice write up about my talk from this year’s Comic-Con. Go check it out!

  • Coming soon…

    My first printed copy of my upcoming book arrived in the mail today! The book looks beautiful inside and out, and it makes me even more excited in anticipation for its release very soon: December 5th in the UK and January 30th in the US, though preorders are already available. As the release date(s) get…

  • New Paper: Beyond Speech Balloons and Thought Bubbles

    I’m pleased to announce that my paper, “Beyond Speech Balloons and Thought Bubbles,” (PDF) has now been published in the journal Semiotica. The paper dissects the ways in which text and image connect to each other. I argue that speech balloons and thought bubbles are actually two “surface” representations of a deeper structure where the…

  • Review: Comics and Language by Hannah Miodrag

    Among the many books on “comics theory” published this year, Comics and Language by Hannah Miodrag may be the most relevant for my own interests. It directly analyzes the relationship between comics and language, especially proposals that “comics are a language.” There are many complex aspects of this work, and I could easily spend great lengths discussing…