Blog

  • Not MIA!

    Unfortunately blogging has had to take somewhat of a back seat lately, as my workload has been just crazy. At the end of this week I should finish running participants through my brainwave study using comics, though I can already confirm that the results are just fantastic. I think I can confidently characterize how the…

  • Transition Overload!

    I’ve frequently heard it said that every panel in a comic has to connect to every other panel. I’ve tried to go about showing the problems with individual transitions or McCloud’s closure, but I have yet to tap into this issue on the blog. Potentially, this could be at least somewhat the notion behind Groensteen’s…

  • Learning to read your brain(waves)

    So, today marks a minor milestone for me, as I ran my very first study of comics looking at people’s brainwaves. The image here to the right is from that first participant, and each of the lines is of a different type of sequence that we are experimentally testing. So, what does this tell us?…

  • Review: Adventures in Cartooning

    Adventures in Cartooning is a fun and creative book by James Sturm and two of his graduates from the Center for Cartoon Studies, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost, and published by First-Second. It is designed as a how-to create comics book, though the lessons almost wholly come in narrative form as the Magic Cartooning Elf…

  • Review: The Power of Comics

    Duncan, Randy & Matthew J. Smith. 2009. The Power of Comics. New York: Continuum Books The Power of Comics is a recently released “first textbook ever” for “comics studies”, authored by Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith (book website here). Perhaps to be expected from a book on the general “comic studies”, it includes a…

  • Panels connected by sequentiality

    Derik has a short post that makes a nice note about how understanding of individual panels is sometimes conditioned by their context in a sequence. I think this is a very important point that is well illustrated by his example. Sometimes, understanding of the elements in an individual panel relies on the information in other…

  • Review: Metaphor and Metonymy in Comics Storytelling

    Kukkonen, Karin. 2008. Beyond Language: Metaphor and Metonymy in Comics Storytelling. English Language Notes 46 (2):89-98. This paper from the literature point of view explores meaning-making in comics, particularly from metonymy and metaphor. It argues that the “semiotic” approaches of European comics scholarship that dissect parts into structrualist “minimal units” are insufficient to capture the…

  • Japanese children, drawing, and imitation

    These are a couple great articles by Brent Wilson about how children in different cultures learn to draw, particularly contrasting the Japanese with other cultures. Both articles contain more extensive discussions that I’ll mention here, only focusing on some of the highlights… Wilson, Brent. (1999). Becoming Japanese: Manga, Children’s Drawings, and the Construction of National…

  • Leigh’s Paintings

    As long as I’m recharging a bit for future blogging and managing my preparation for the new semester here at school, I felt I should at least devote one blog post to shill for the new website my father established for his paintings. He’s put up numerous works of his along with essays about them,…

  • Blogging MIA

    I have unfortunately been remiss in blogging lately. I actually just got back from an intense 8-day long Soo Bahk Do martial art test (not to mention the month and a half intense training preparing for it), and am just now reintegrating into “normal life” (if you can call what I do “normal”)… This week…