Blog

  • New England Comic Arts in the Classroom Conference

    Happy New Year all! I’ve recently been confirmed as a speaker at the New England Comic Arts in the Classroom Conference, a conference aimed discussing the role of comics in education. The conference is open for registration currently, and will take place on March 26 in Rhode Island. If you are interested in attending or…

  • It’s not always about the brain

    This topic arose elsewhere recently and I thought it would be worth bringing up here. As someone who now actually does have at least a little data about how the brain processes comics, I feel compelled to talk about others who do as well… I’ve noticed several recent articles that appeal to the “cognition” of…

  • Visual Linguist salute!

    Journalista blogger Dirk Deppey has announced that today is his last day blogging on that site. Dirk has done a fantastic job as the “go to” aggregator of comic information on the web, and I’m very grateful for his promotion of this blog on his site. His help has been wonderful for promoting my research…

  • Thanks!

    Thanks to everyone who took my recent experiment, as well as to everyone that linked to it! I’m greatly appreciative for the support, and I assure you that this goes directly to insightful research on comics comprehension. This link actually had two separate experiments that it led to. I can’t reveal anything about the second…

  • Take my experiment!

    Once again I have a brief experiment online and I’d be extremely grateful for your help! This one involves looking at various strips and making predictions about them. Participation enters you into a drawing for a $50 Gift Certificate to Best Buy (either online or in store). Thanks in advance! UPDATE 12/13: I have now…

  • Review: Through Navajo Eyes

    I recently discovered a gem of a book called Through Navajo Eyes by Sol Worth and John Adair. This is a fascinating book from the early 1970s where the authors taught various Navajo how to make films, and then observe the patterns and styles of their filmmaking. The book in its entirety can actually be…

  • Going off the grid for a bit…

    I’ve been a bit absent from blogging lately, largely due to being crazy busy with work, but next week I’m legitimately going off the grid for a martial art retreat. So, I figured I’d at least give an update about things. First off, my manuscript about my model for the structure underlying sequential images has…

  • Review: “Copying and Artistic Behaviors”

    Smith argues that the negative views on “copying” demonstrated by art educators since the 50s is misplaced in some contexts. She claims that some forms of copying are good, and the relative value of copying is based on three factors: need, model, and process. She examines varying fields through use of a corpus of comics…

  • 6 Q & As

    Webcomicker William George posts a quick Q&A with me on his blog. This is part of a series of quick interviews he’s doing with various people connected to webcomics. I guess I qualify enough because of my older webcomics and writings for comixpedia (now comixtalk), but I’ll take it. Check it out!

  • Kid’s sequential drawings

    This is a summary/review of an article I thought had particularly compelling evidence for why understanding sequential images is a learned trait. Highlights are all mine… Narratives of urban Japanese children (manga) were compared to those of village Egyptian children. The argument was made that development differs based on graphically “rich” versus graphically “poor” environments.…