Blog

  • Review: Drawing Words & Writing Pictures

    Drawing Words and Writing Pictures by Matt Madden and Jessica Abel Before I started reading DW&WP, Matt Madden warned me that it was a book for praxis, not theory. As amusing as I find it that such a disclaimer needs to be given to me, the book draws upon aspects of theory throughout in an…

  • Visual Linguistics of “Comics” Course

    I am ecstatic to say that I’ve just learned my course for teaching a “Visual Linguistics of ‘Comics’” course next Spring semester ’09 has been approved! This will be the first course of it’s kind to cover my own visual language research and related studies in a complete package. I’m beyond excited about it, so……

  • Panels as Attention Units

    I stumbled across this article recently about how current theories of perception are similar to what magicians have been exploiting for years. Essentially, the idea is that we can only “see” what our attention is focused on at a given time. They liken it to a “spotlight” which roams around and only let’s you take…

  • Review: The System of Comics by Thierry Groensteen

    Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Translated by B. Beaty and N. Nguyen: University of Mississippi Press. Printer-friendly pdf The best thing about the new translated work The System of Comics by Thierry Groensteen is that it hopefully reflects an increase of English translations of international works on comic theory. There are numerous offerings…

  • Whatnots

    Blogging has been slow lately for me what with the oncoming start of school next week. I’ve mainly been devoting my time to the set-up of my latest experiment, which, after a few behavioral studies, will finally start looking at people’s brainwaves reading comic strips. To give an idea of the scope of experiment preparation:…

  • Equivalences for “Language”

    In claiming that the graphic form (especially in sequence) is structured as a language, it might help to parse out how to make the analogy reasonably. It’s not as if no one has ever noted the similarities between the forms — in fact, it’s fairly common. However, mistakes are often made in my opinion. First,…

  • Diversity in Visuals

    At the VaIL conference a few weeks ago, one of the frequent conversations revolved around the issue of creating a universal graphic system. The belief that visuals are universal is not new, and largely stems from the fact that most drawings look like what they represent (“iconicity”). This is also a motivating factor behind so-called…

  • Vocab gaps

    This interesting and quite fun essay/post reviews the book Reading Comics and ponders the definition of “comics” and some other terminological issues. Its biggest query is ‘what is the word for the act of making a comic… the producing of sequential images bit?’ (paraphrased). I agree there’s somewhat of a gap in vocabulary, but think…

  • Comics, Webdesign, Closure, Cartooning

    A friend of mine sent along a link to this lecture by Andy Clarke about how comics can inform webdesign. Most of the talk is a regurgitation of McCloud’s theories, but he has some interesting parallels and ideas. (There’s an mp3 of the talk that you can flip through the slides with). Also, while I…

  • Talk talk talk…

    I’ve been remiss in my reminders this year, but I have a few talks coming up if anyone is around San Diego. The first is another appearance at the Visual and Iconic Languages Conference on July 21-22, which I believe is closed to the public (more’s the pity), though my talk will be on a…