Blog

  • Comic-Con 2010, PhD Comics Cameo, Facebook

    Today closes another wild and fun ComicCon. My talk seemed to go fairly well (thanks to those who came!), and I greatly enjoyed the discussions with people afterwards. This was the first year I got to present actually experimental brain data on comics, which I’d been looking forward to for awhile. I only wish I…

  • ComicCon 2010 Reminder

    Just a reminder that my talk at ComicCon, “This is your brain on comics”, will be on Friday from 1-2pm in room 26AB. I’ll be speaking about my recent experiments looking at how the brain processes the sequential images in comics. Hope to see you there!

  • Soo Bahk Do Presequenced sparring, 2010 Nationals

    This isn’t “visual linguistics” related, but this last weekend I competed at the 2010 Soo Bahk Do National Festival. In the advanced ranks division my partner, Master PJ Steyer, and I won first place with this coreographed routine, so I thought I should share. I’m the one who starts on the right with the shaved…

  • Comicon 2010: This is your brain on comics

    The official ComicCon schedule was just released, and it looks like my talk will be Friday 1-2pm, room 26AB. Here’s the official description of the panel: 1:00-2:00 Comics Arts Conference Session #7: This is Your Brain on Comics Theory— Julia Round (Bournemouth University) argues that From Hell relies on a comics aesthetic, in which all…

  • Brain damage and comprehension of comics

    Bihrle, Amy M., Hiram H. Brownell, John A. Powelson, and Howard Gardner. 1986. Comprehension of humorous and nonhumorous materials by left and right brain-damaged patients. Brain and Cognition 5:399-411. This study compared the narrative comprehension of people with damage to either the right or left hemispheres (RH vs. LH) of their brains (often from strokes…

  • 2D Drawing: comprehending and producing

    Scott points to this interesting article about the cognition motivating line-drawings. It makes the claim that people with lazy eyes may have a better ability to draw 2D figures because they have trouble with depth perception to begin with. Mostly I find this prospect intriguing, though I do somewhat question the assumptions motivating this idea,…

  • 8 years!

    Today, May 31st marks 8 years of emaki.net! That’s quite the long time for me… I had just graduated college and the Lakers were in the playoffs back then. Funny enough, I’m now still in school (ahem… grad school) and the Lakers are once again going to the NBA Finals. I guess the more things…

  • Panels in Japanese vs. American Mainstream/Indie comics

    This semester my student Amaro Taylor-Weiner did a great senior project following up to my cross cultural study comparing Japanese and American comics. He was one of my students in my “Visual Linguistics of Comics” class last Spring, and he jumped at the chance to do some work of his own. We compared the amount…

  • Advice for aspiring comic theorists

    I read just about any paper about theories of comics I can get my hands on — some are pretty good, but some leave a lot to be desired. This should maybe be expected from a still-burgeoning field. Usually, when aspects of a paper have troubles, there are some consistent problems. So, here’s some advice…

  • Book Chapter: Manga

    It isn’t entirely a new paper, but my paper “Japanese Visual Language” is now published in the anthology Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives now out in paperback. A brief description of my chapter: Over the past two decades, manga has exploded in readership beyond Japan, and its style has captured the interest…