Blog

  • Fun with Text

    While preparing the Peanut strips for my next project, I came across a fantastic integration of text subtly hidden in this panel: If you look carefully, at the center of the starry smack mark where the ball hit the bat, there is text reading “.315”, which I assume is a reference to Pig-Pen’s batting average…

  • Manga “decompression”

    In Understanding Comics, McCloud made the claim that manga supposedly uses more circuitous storytelling because of the formats of their books. In my paper on Japanese VL, I dismiss this on the grounds that nothing about longer formats gives people the drive to make slower paced narrative. Just because you have ample space doesn’t mean…

  • Garfield experimentalism

    Apparently we’re upon the 30th anniversary of Jim Davis’ Garfield strip. As a ten year old I was pretty obsessed with the Garfield books, and can probably mark meeting Jim Davis at the ABA as a highlight of my fourth grade life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve gotten about seven emails from people linking to the Garfield…

  • Comics and the Brain… almost

    Nagai, Masayoshi, Nobutaka Endo, and Kumada Takatsune. 2007. “Measuring Brain Activities Related to Understanding Using near-Infrared Spectroscopy (Nirs).” In Human Interface and the Management of Information. Methods, Techniques and Tools in Information Design, 884-93. Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Looks like I was beat to the punch… I’ve found a study from last year that analyzes the…

  • Collaborative drawing

    Last weekend on public television I saw a fantastic biography about Pete Seeger, the influential folk singer and activist. Throughout, Seeger stressed his desire to sing with people, not to people — motivating music as a collaborative endeavor. This sentiment is echoed in the accessible book, This is Your Brain on Music, which points out…

  • My “Homopholganger”

    Huzzah! Today is the sixth year this website has been online! If I remember correctly, I posted everything online while the Lakers were in the playoffs about to go to the championships… and lo and behold the past is repeating! (yes, I’m a Laker fan… which will certainly be interesting living in Boston as they…

  • Random!… panel sequences that is

    As long as we’re on the topic of comics that people clip out for me, here’s another one that my advisor passed along. For some reason, he’s rather partial to Zippy the Pinhead (I think because of the philosophy jokes), and this one caught his eye. Particularly this first panel over to the side. Zippy…

  • Rory Root, we’ll miss you

    I learned to great shock and sorrow this morning that Rory Root, owner and operator of Comic Relief in Berkeley, has passed away. Rory was a phenomenal presence in the comic industry, and I remember fondly being first introduced to him by Beau Smith as having “the best comic store anywhere” when I was still…

  • Split planes

    I haven’t gotten a newspaper at home in years, but every now and then my father sends me clippings of comics or articles. The comic that he seems to send the most is Pearls Before Swine which has a periodic flair for formalism. In the last set that he sent, the characters do a fair…

  • On PowerPoint

    I was recently asked by the VizThink people to devote a post to the prompt: PowerPoint: A powerful tool poorly used or a poor tool overused?, so… here goes… I do think that PowerPoint** can be a powerful tool that is misused, but its functions and autofills can also be overused. In many ways this…