Blog

  • Why Do You Make Comics write in visual language, If You Do?

    Over at TalkAboutComics, Joey Manley asks “Why do people draw comics?”, and makes the observation that… A lot of people who read comics also make them. Maybe even most people.…Almost everybody I’ve ever met who reads comics has, at some point or another, actually made one, even if he or she never showed it to…

  • More on the Burnt City Bowl

    Apparently I’ve been getting linked to a lot for my previous post on the Burnt City animation drawing of an illustrated goat jumping along the outside of an earthenware bowl. In my post, I argued that — contrary to the fairly dubious claims that this was the “world’s earliest animation — this is better suited to…

  • Help my Science!

    If you have roughly 15 minutes to spare, please take my comics related experiment! I am currently working on an a fairly extensive project that I’ve been able to put one portion of online. Hopefully this will be the first of many that will be accessible from my website, but right now I need your…

  • The Pictorial and Linguistic Features of Comic Book Formulas

    Neff, William Albert. 1977. The Pictorial and Linguistic Features of Comic Book Formulas. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Denver, Denver, CO. Neff compares the patterns of formal properties for comics in different narrative genres of Adventure, Romance, Mystery, and Alien Beings or States. He analyzes the fields of panel shape (vertical, horizontal, square, circle), angle of…

  • Origins of narrative

    A friend of mine forwarded me this facetious article about the narrative structure in films, which left me thinking about why exactly a consistent structure like the one that is found in Freytag’s Triangle might be found so prevalently. Studies on “story structure” have consistently found that people (in our culture) have better memory for…

  • “The 99” Panel Discussion

    As I mentioned in my last post, last week I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel discussion here at Tufts with alum Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, creator and publisher of the comic The 99 and Dr. Chip Gidney of the Tufts Child Development Department. That video has now been put online and is viewable…

  • I am Tufts University!

    Apparently, someone over at the Tufts website thought my work was interesting enough that they decided to do a feature on me. SO… I am very flattered to report that, for this week only, I am featured on the homepage of the Tufts University website. From there you can link to an interview with me,…

  • “Visual literacy”

    The phrase “visual literacy” is one that is often bandied about these days, and has begun to grate on my nerves a bit — if only because it is a bit vague and vacuous in meaning. The phrase at this point is basically being used to mean a familiarity with anything that is an image…

  • Anyone speak Croatian?

    For anyone out there that speaks Croatian or just wants to check it out for the sake of novelty, my article “Un-Defining ‘Comics’: Separating the Cultural from the Structural in ‘Comics’” (which was published in the IJOCA and the first chapter of my book Early Writings…”) has just been translated in the Croatian magazine Zarez.…

  • ありがとう！

    Lots of stuff going on round here… First off, thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes yesterday, especially The Comics Reporter. This week marks the first week of school, and I’m greatly looking forward to my first lecture on Wednesday of my Visual Linguistics of Comics course. It seems I’m once again a little bit…