Blog

  • Big year behind, big year ahead

    Happy New Year! Between finally finishing my PhD, moving back to California to start at research fellowship at UCSD, and being featured in a Discover Magazine article, 2012 was a big year. However, 2013 looks to be even bigger… First off, this Fall will see the release of my book, The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the…

  • Spider-Man’s naughty adventures within or between panels

    A friend of mine recently pointed me to an unusual debate that’s raging about a recent Spider-Man comic where Peter Parker apparently is within the mind of Dr. Octopus and is forced to see his memories. One questionable scene occurs with Aunt May, where the scene is unclear whether she and Dr. Octopus kiss (and…

  • Basic structures of visual language

    One of the important basic tasks of doing research on the visual language used in comics is to identify the foundational components that go into our comprehension of sequential images. In Understanding Comics, McCloud implicitly broke down the medium into a few parts: 1. Graphic Style2. Iconography and symbolism3. Panel-to-panel relationships4. Text-image relationships These parts…

  • Blog-iversary and updates

    So, today marks 7 years that my blog has now been online, and 10.5 years for the website. How time flies! I’ve received a lot of great feedback from people about my profile in Discover Magazine, so it’s worth having a post here to just review what I’m working on. My original study described in the…

  • Discover Magazine article

    I’m proud to say that I’m featured in an article in this month’s Discover Magazine! The article was written by the excellent Carl Zimmer, who good-naturedly let me run him through my experiment for the sake of the article. I’d actually read articles by Carl for many years, so it was fun to interact with…

  • Sequence vs. Singles in “visual language”

    In my last post, I addressed the basic idea for a “visual language” as being a sequence of meaningful images guided by a system of constraints (i.e., a grammar). In the comments, I was asked a very good question: Why is a sequence necessary for the graphic form to be considered “language”? There are two…

  • Revisiting “visual language”

    I’ve now had this website for over 10 years, and have been blogging for almost 6 years, so it may be worth revisiting the fundamental ideas of my research over the next few posts. Hopefully by this time next year my book, The Visual Language of Comics, will be out and describing these ideas in…

  • New Article: Explaining “I can’t draw”

    I’m happy to say that I have a new article published in the journal Human Development that argues that learning how to draw is similar to learning how to speak. I’ve always thought that this was among my best ideas, and apparently the journal agreed: they thought it was provocative enough that they invited two…

  • The Graphic Canon Vol. 2

    On the non-theory front, I’m happy to announce that I have a piece in the recently released second volume of The Graphic Canon edited by Russ Kick. It’s a collection of great literature, in this case from the 1800s, and adapted into graphic form by various authors. The book is beautiful inside and out. My contribution…

  • Review: How fast can you comprehend comic panels?

    In this study, the authors wanted to know how much time it would take to comprehend each image of a sequence of images, both for how long each panel stayed on the screen, and for how long the time was between each panel (“interstimulus interval” or “ISI”). They compared normal four-panel long strips with sequences…