Blog

  • Please help

    Just one more pleas for helping my colleague… www.nalinineedsyou.com. Please watch, repost, and help us save the life of an amazing woman:

  • Help Nalini Now

    This is not going to be your normal post on comics and visual language. This post is a plea for help from anyone who might read this blog and anyone compelled to help save someone’s life. I summarize here much of what’s said in a blog post from my colleague Sam Sommers. From 2006 to…

  • New article: Visual narrative structure

    I am happy to announce I have a new paper published in the journal Cognitive Science that outlines my theory of sequential image understanding. I argue that approaches like “panel transitions” cannot account for the creation of meaning in sequential images, and I offer a new theory of “Visual Narrative Grammar” that better accounts for…

  • A Caveat: misunderstanding comics and the brain

    Via this article I stumbled onto this dissertation which promotes using comics in educational contexts (a topic I am very interested in). In one of the chapters of the thesis, it looks at the understanding of comics and includes a “neuroscience” section. Now, even when I disagree with them, I am always one to encourage…

  • Hearts and bulbs

    Here’s another great recent Savage Chickens comic by Doug Savage. I’ve commented on this great strip before, and here’s another good “meta”-comic: As we all know, hearts are symbolic of love (especially over the head), while lightbulbs over the head represent inspiration. I call “over the head” symbols like these “upfixes” since they are like…

  • Science and Eddie Campbell’s rules of comics comprehension

    In Eddie Campbell’s recent article at The Comics Journal, he described several potential “rhetorical rules” that authors of comics can follow in order to make them more understandable to inexperienced readers. In a previous post, I tackled the broader issue of what factors go into limitations to understanding. In this post, I discuss what scientific…

  • Fluency and dialects in understanding comics

    In a recent article at The Comics Journal, Eddie Campbell describes the challenge facing some people who “can’t understand comics,” and offers “rules of comprehension” to help aid readers along in their ability to read comics. I thought the piece was really interesting, and Campbell intuitively taps into many ideas that are fundamental to sequential…

  • The Principle of Equivalence

    An overarching theme across my research is the idea that the structure and cognition of drawing and sequential images is comparable to that of language. I have tried to formalize this notion under the umbrella of the “Principle of Equivalence“: The human mind/brain treats all modalities in an equal way, given modality specific constraints. There…

  • Eye-umlauts

    Savage Chickens never seems to fail to give me a laugh. This one especially had me chuckling… The reason I liked this one so much is that it plays on a common convention where certain symbols (like hearts) replace the eyes of a character. I’ve likened this type of substitution to a kind of morphological change…

  • Language and culture development

    I’ve been a big fan of Jorge Cham’s comic PhD Comics for a long time, and I’ve really been impressed with his recent foray into short educational videos. I found this one to be particularly fun, and since it overlaps with my research interests, I figured I’d share it here too: