Blog

  • More changes

    As of yesterday I fully received my PhD (and the fancy hood!) from Tufts University. It was a long and great journey, but now it’s on to the next venture. As I mentioned in my last post, I will be spending next year working on an introductory book on visual language theory that is due…

  • A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning

    Lo and behold, I now have a new book out! My mentor, Ray Jackendoff, has a new book, A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning, and it is chalk full of illustrations by me! (… along with some choice Zippy strips by Bill Griffiths) He has been working on this book throughout my time as his student,…

  • Review: “Language of Comics” in Art of Comics

    The recent compilation, The Art of Comics edited by Aaron Meskin and Royt Cook contains several new articles on a “Philosophical Approach” to comic theory. This book tackles many interesting and pertinent topics about comics, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Here I’m going to focus on Darren Hudson Hicks’ article, “The Language of Comics” since…

  • Looking forward and backward

    So, after 12 years of research and 6 years of grad school, I’m proud to say that I successfully defended my dissertation yesterday and now have a PhD in Psychology studying the how people’s minds and brains understand comics. It’s been a wild ride! What’s next then? Well, I have several papers that are set…

  • Public Defense

    For anyone in the Boston area and interested in hearing about comics and the brain, I’m defending my dissertation on Monday, and it’s open to the public. I’ll be speaking about my research on the “grammar” of sequential images, as found in comics: “Structure, Meaning, and Constituency in Visual Narrative Comprehension”Monday, April 9th at 4:30pmKreplick…

  • New Article: Comics and the brain

    I have a new paper available online (pdf), and I’m proud to say that this is my first brainwave study on comics. In this paper, now published by Cognitive Psychology, we argue that sequential images use a narrative “grammar” to distinguish coherent narrative sequences from random strings of images. We conducted two experiments measuring reaction times and…

  • Art and books you should check out

    Here’s a few links I’ve been meaning to post… First, head over to my friend Helena’s website. She’s an amazing artist, so go check out her paintings! Second, if you haven’t already been seeing it in airport shelves and bookstores everywhere, you should check out the new book Situations Matter, by my friend and colleague Sam…

  • Downloadable Un-Defining “Comics” article

    It’s not exactly a new article, but I realized that my article “Un-Defining ‘Comics’” from the International Journal of Comic Art way back in 2005 was not downloadable from my site. That is now fixed! A downloadable pdf of the article is now available. This article was among my first published works on visual language (and…

  • Little busy for a bit…

    Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to blog as much as I’d like these days, and the coming months are likely to be a little quiet around here. I’m hoping to have a few big announcements to make soon. However, I’m aiming to defend  my dissertation this semester (!), so blog posts are likely to stay sparse for…

  • Eye movement in reading comics

    I’ve posted a few studies that have looked at how people’s eyes move across comic pages (here and here), and I recently found another. This short study looked at when people’s eye movements skip panels or go back and re-read them.  They found that people spend more time reading panels with text than with just…