Blog

  • Comics reading: Competence and performance

    Often times when I give talks, especially concerning layout or the visual grammar of sequences of images, one of the questions inevitably says something along the lines of “But, there’s no guarantee that the reader will view a page in the proper order.” The high variability of possible choices or readings of a comic page…

  • Abstract Comics and Visual Language

    Abstract Comics is a new collection of non-representational comics by a variety of authors, including my esteemed blogging colleague Derik Badman. Besides being a beautifully done work of artistry and imagination, among particular crowds it spurs the question “If these are comics, then what ‘are comics’?” To this end, the book (and the nature of…

  • Memory, Experience, and Comics Comprehension

    In my last post, I discussed some traits of this quote by Chris Ware found from this blog post “I don’t like to think of my work as ‘cinematic.’ A movie is passive — you’re watching it, taking it in. Where a comic strip, it’s completely active: you have to read it, search it for…

  • How active is comic comprehension versus film?

    Dash Shaw writes an interesting post delving into the “cinematic” nature of comics that explores thoughts from authors like Chris Ware with many insightful quotes. Relevant to some of this discussion might be that some believe comics to have predated the film techniques. Or, the idea that this is a competence versus performance issue — that…

  • (^_^) … Emoticons and the Brain

    Masahide Yuasa, Keiichi Saito,Naoki Mukawa. 2006. Emoticons convey emotions without cognition of faces: an fMRI study. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 22-27, 2006. Montréal, Québec, Canada Related to the previous post on a testing of McCloud’s “Cartoon Identification Theory” on cartoony vs. realistic images in the brain, here’s a study using fMRI…

  • Comic-Con 09: Action Stars!

    I am excited to say that my panel at Comic-Con next week should be a fun one. I’ll be on the Comics Theory panel in room 30AB on Thursday at 11:30. Here’s the official description: 11:30-1:00 Comics Arts Conference Session #2: Comics Theory— Dru H. Jeffries (Concordia University) argues that Zack Snyder’s film 300 mimics…

  • WGBH Boston: One Guest Interview

    A few months back I recorded an interview with WGBH Boston that has finally come online: They went with the “not just for kids” lines a bit, but it was a quick tantalizer into my work I thought. The most challenging thing I thought was how fast it was. We had a number of topics…

  • Comics and Film: A Narrative Perspective

    Christiansen, Hans-Christian. 2000. Comics and Film: A Narrative Perspective. In Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, edited by A. Magnussen and H.-C. Christiansen. Copenhagen: Museum of Tusculanum Press. This paper attempts to draw from film theory to inform the understanding of the comic medium. He discusses things like film shots/cuts, etc. especially…

  • 7 Years!

    Oop, looks like I forgot to post a couple weeks ago on 5/31 that this website hit its 7th birthday! Whoohooo  — belated celebration! Not much time to blog these days. I’m currently running an extensive experiment that has gone through numerous rounds of troubleshooting, so that’s occupying most of my time. If this design…

  • What is “Visual Language”? Video Talk

    A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the University of Toronto about my theories of visual language hosted by the Knowledge Media Design Institute. They have now posted this talk online to be viewed in full (beware, it’s quite long) on their website. If anyone is really interested in…