Blog

  • Programming with Grawlixes

    Marc van Elburg has sent along a paper he’s written about “grawlixes,” which are the random symbols used often in comics to omit profanity, like $#!+! You can read his essay on it here. He follows many of the categories proposed by Mort Walker’s Lexicon of Comicana, though he departs a bit from that as…

  • Review: Narrative Structure in Comics by Barbara Postema

    Barbara Postema’s new book, Narrative Structure in Comics, joins a nice list of books on comic theory to emerge this year, and it provides some interesting analyses and insights. The book is clearly written and should be readable for most audiences. Upfront, I found it unclear who the book is aimed at. If this is an introductory book or…

  • Corpus analyses of comics

    I stumbled across this interesting project called the eBDtheque database which has started coding various comic pages to create a searchable corpus. The full project is online here, while their paper describing the project is found in this pdf. This rather large research group looks like it’s actually been doing quite a lot of computational…

  • Methodological advice for comics scholarship

    In my previous post, I drew a distinction between the type of scholarship often done by people who are creators of comics (i.e., fluent in the visual language they study) and scholarship by those who lack this fluency. I argued that there are certain things that non-fluent scholars are unable to recognize, and that such…

  • Comic creation expertise and theory building

    When I first started entering into discussions about visual language research, the fact that I actively created comics seemed like an important point that I would often stress. While I am a little more forgiving about non-creators doing theoretical work these days, I think there are some interesting trends that fall out of whether a…

  • Full year of comic theory books

    2013 seems to be quite the year for books about theories of the comic medium! There’ve been at least four volumes that have come out this year, plus my own, The Visual Language of Comics, which is due out in December. We started earlier in the year with Thierry Groensteen’s Comics and Narration, the anticipated follow…

  • New paper: Prediction, events, and the advantage of Agents

    I’m excited to say that I have a new paper out in the journal Cognitive Psychology with my good friend Martin Paczynski! This one looks specifically at the structure of events in visual narratives, particularly how people process characters acting as agents or patients. As with all my papers, you can find a link to it…

  • El Lingüista Ilustrado

    Hey Spanish-speakers! I’m excited to announce that some of my articles will now be translated to Spanish in an ongoing series in the digital comics magazine Revisita Exégesis starting with the current issue #24. The magazine features several great original short comics by various authors, articles, interviews and a lot more. You can view the issues…

  • Eurotrip 2013

    I’ve just returned from an exciting trip at the Cognitive Science Society conference in Berlin. My presentation was a brief version of my dissertation work (amusingly, roughly the same material from my talk at Comic-Con two weeks prior). My dissertation was actually awarded the Glushko Dissertation Prize this year—named (and funded by) the ever-enthusiastic Robert Glushko. Even…

  • Scott McCloud and the scientific method

    After my talk at Comic-Con I was delighted to be able to chat with Scott McCloud for awhile. He actually came to my talk, and I think it was one of the first times he’s ever seen me present my research live, despite our having known each other for about 15 years now. One of…