Blog

  • Interactive Comics

    Interactive Comics

    This article was originally written for my periodic column at the online magazine Comixtalk in February 2005. Sometimes, when people hear my proposal that the “comics medium” is literally a visual language (VL), I receive a response of disbelief stating something like, “What, do you expect people to carry around little pads of paper so they can ‘talk’ in…

  • Comic Theory 101: Passing Judgment

    Comic Theory 101: Passing Judgment

    This article was originally written for my periodic column at the online magazine Comixtalk in January 2006. By now, most readers of this site know that I have been developing a theory that sequential images can actually be a language. Combined with written language, this visual language is found primarily in the cultural artifacts that we all…

  • Comic Theory 101: In Place of Another

    Comic Theory 101: In Place of Another

    This article was originally written for my periodic column at the online magazine Comixtalk in October 2005. One of the most famous theories that Scott McCloud set forth in Understanding Comics was that of “closure.” He stated that this was the phenomenon by which people’s minds “fill in” what occurs between two comic panels. Now, in other writings of…

  • Comic Theory 101: Seeing Rhymes

    Comic Theory 101: Seeing Rhymes

    This article was originally written for my periodic column at the online magazine Comixtalk in June 2006. As you probably know, I’ve been expounding on a theory that sequential images can actually be called a language — a visual language — which emerges along with text in comics. In this article, I’m going to take a…

  • Comic Theory 101: Visual Poetry

    Comic Theory 101: Visual Poetry

    This article was originally written for my periodic column at the online magazine Comixtalk in November 2006. In this column I’d like to continue our discussion of the potential for visual language poetry that I began way back in my last column, with visual rhyming. At the end of that column, I created a visual poem by…

  • Comic Theory 101: Too Many Twos

    Comic Theory 101: Too Many Twos

    This article was originally written for my periodic column at the online magazine Comixtalk in March 2006.

  • Comic Theory 101: Loopy Framing

    Comic Theory 101: Loopy Framing

    This article was originally written for my periodic column at the online magazine Comixtalk in March 2007. by Neil Cohn and Tym Godek Over the years, some graphic elements have become synonymous with “comics.” Foremost among these are speech balloons, thought bubbles, and panels. While they seem pretty straightforward in their meaning, these fairly ubiquitous signs…

  • Creating new face emoji

    Creating new face emoji

    It’s been awhile since I’ve done a blog post, but here’s some fun news… I helped create several of the new emoji that have recently been added to phones, and it seems people got excited about it!  I was contacted several years ago by Jennifer Daniel at Google, who works on their emoji and is…

  • From “learning to draw” to “acquiring a visual vocabulary”

    From “learning to draw” to “acquiring a visual vocabulary”

    Many people feel they “can’t draw”, which seems odd given assumptions about drawing as a direct pathway to visual concepts. Most of us can see, so why can’t we draw? This was originally a thread on Twitter, but here I’ve turned it into a blog post about why everything you know about learning to draw…

  • 2019: My publications in review

    2019: My publications in review

    It’s now become an annual tradition for me to summarize my publications from the past year (2016, 2017, 2018). Well, 2019 has been an exciting year of papers for me, mostly because almost all of them are review papers—many of which I’d been working on for years! So, here’s what came out in 2019… Your…