Blog

  • Some links and whatnots

    Steven Seagle has a decent piece up at the First Second blog about visual storytelling. He nicely taps into a simplified version of some of the same things that I’ve been pushing for my theory of visual grammar. The exercise he uses to rearrange panels is very reminiscent of linguistics methods, and is also a…

  • Thoughts on Language Evolution

    In my TA class this semester we’ve just entered talking about Language Evolution, and combined with the recent discovery of this blog the topic has been on my mind a bit lately. Some general thoughts on reframing the overall discussion… Some theories of language evolution postulate that ‘gestural language’ evolved prior to verbal language. While…

  • Art, Language, and “Cognitive Equivalence”

    When I usually speak about the Art versus Language Perspectives, I usually couch it in a view that there are “different potential ways our society treats graphic images.” As I just realized, stating it in this way maybe obscures the true intent of the distinctions. Really, this is a hypothesis about cognition. At the heart…

  • Closure’s assumptions

    Patric continues his defining of “comics” with a discussion of “closure.” I’ve talked before about the problems with the idea of closure, but it strikes me that there are a few underlying issues that people run into when addressing these issues: 1. They assume that time passes between panels, despite there being no evidence that…

  • Double Standards in Style

    I had an interesting realization the other day about the way people judge the quality of realistic versus cartoony drawing styles. It seems to me that the more someone tries to maintain a realistic style, the more harshly criticized they will be when they don’t “fully achieve” it. Cartoony styles get no critique like this.…

  • America vs. Japan: Brains and Comic/Manga Panels

    Via the TCJ message board, Nathan has pointed to an article in the Boston Globe that discusses the differences in brain activation between “Eastern and Western” perceptual processing. The study claims that “Westerners tend to focus on central objects more than on their surroundings” while Easterners “tend to focus more on the context as well…

  • The Art of Visual Language

    As much as I stress how the Art and Language perspectives/paradigms of viewing graphic communication are opposed to each other, I do think that they can be reconciled. Just to recap, I believe that a cultural force, what I call the “Art Perspective” suppresses the visual-graphic form of expression, which is closer to a “Language…

  • The Invisible Middle Ground

    A friend of mine and I had a really interesting discussion the other day about how difficult it is for a reasonable, mediating, middle-ground type of theory to survive in the scientific landscape. Within linguistics, there are a lot of debates I think a middle ground position serves the most efficient explanation. However, there are…

  • Podcast: The Functions of Panels

    The last podcast I did with the VizThink folks was so fun I decided to do another. This one is about the various functional roles that panels play in the visual language used in comics. Among the topics I hit are: • focusing information within panels• navigating page layouts• visual “storytelling”• text-image relationships It’s a…

  • Definitions of “Comics” and their unimportance

    Derik Badman has a new article up over at Comixtalk about the general trend of defining “comics” and “why we should stop bothering.” This is similar in nature to an academic article by Aaron Meskin that I’ve continually not gotten around to reviewing here for the last several months. A few concerns: In general, the…