Blog

  • Elements of Page Layouts

    Belgian graphic design student Chris Vosters sends along this 7-page pdf graphic essay that expands on my paper, Navigating Comics, on how people move through page layouts. Chris does a great job of categorizing both explicit and implicit ways in which an author can direct the flow of movement across a page layout without relying…

  • The interface of humor and narrative

    This Zippy the Pinhead strip from a week or so cuts to the core of the canonical joke pattern in comic strips: What’s interesting to me about this is the choice of descriptors here. “Conflict” and “punchline” here have to do with joke telling, and could correspond to varying parts of an actual narrative arc.…

  • Resolutions and some such

    Happy New Year! Bonne Année! 明けましておめでとう！ Various fun is brewing out here in visual language land. Given the several requests I’ve been receiving about my upcoming Visual Linguistics of Comics class, I’m now looking into finding a way for the course to be offered digitally via podcasts. If you’re interested in taking such a course,…

  • Legitimation of “comics”

    Comics scholar Domingos Isabelinho posts a critique of Thierry Gröensteen’s paper on comics’ search for legitimation. Domingos keys in on this quote in particular, so I’ll do the same: “Although comics have been in existence for over a century and a half, they suffer from a considerable lack of legitimacy. To those who know and…

  • Status report

    I have, unfortunately, once again been struck by so much work that blogging has fell by the wayside. Thankfully, this is a good thing in many ways, because I have a whole lot of really cool stuff going on! For example, I’m busy planning my new class here at Tufts on The Visual Linguistics of…

  • Action!

    In discussing this post of mine with Derik, I realized that I should post on the technique I used of substituting a whole panel for an “action star,” like this: This usage is somewhat similar to what I talk about in this older article on metonymy, and the same phenomena creeps up overtly in McCloud’s…

  • Continuity across panels

    Derik posts a quote from this article on Narration in Comics that discusses cognitive schema and comics. I’d read the article awhile ago, but seized on this part of the quote : “An extrinsic norm crucial to comics is the interpretation of a figure reappearing in several panels as one and the same figure shown…

  • The Development of Language

    This related to both sequential images and linguistics, so how could I not post it? Via LanguageLog:

  • For example…

    I’ve been working very hard lately on a few projects and papers that have been occupying a lot of my time and energy. One of them is a write-up of my model of visual language grammar that I’ve been developing over the past several years. This one is particularly important to me because it will…

  • Camera angles and meaning

    Kraft, Robert N. 1987. The influence of camera angle on comprehension and retention of pictorial events. Memory and Cognition 15 (4):291-307. Kraft explores the semantic associations made to different camera angles (high, eye-level, low) in a four frame photo story. Subjects were asked to rate the story along a 7-point scale, use a recall test…