Blog

  • New Essay: Japanese Visual Language

    For the first time in a long while, I’ve got a new essay up for download. This one discusses the visual language that underlies manga, and will be part of the Manga: The Essential Reader collection published next year by Continuum Books. Here’s the abstract: Over the past two decades, manga has exploded in readership…

  • Big Game Poem, 2007

    Ode to The PlayBy Neil Cohn, November 2007 Hello stanfurd Cardinal, this Big Game is a treatAs it marks the occasion of an incomparable feat. Twenty-five years, we celebrate this nightOf giving the sports world its most riveting sight After all of these years, we still watch its reprise,Shouting and screaming like it’s before our…

  • Projects galore

    Wow, three blog posts in three days, and I’m not even on winter break yet! Lots of stuff has been going on. First off, my buddy Alexander alerts me to a strip over at the Comics Reporter that somehow slipped my eye when I was over there this morning. It’s a good treatment on graphic…

  • Reruns: Fight the Comic Aristocracy

    I have a “rerun” of my older article Fight the Comic Aristocracy over at Sequart. It deals with the the “aristocratic” structures that are in the comic industry and the democratizing force that the notion of “visual language” can have in contrast to it. I used the term “aristocratic” there pretty much to stand in…

  • Eye-movements reading comic pages

    Omori, Takahide, Taku Ishii, and Keiko Kurata. 2004. Eye catchers in comics: Controlling eye movements in reading pictorial and textual media. In 28th International Congress of Psychology. Beijing, China. A team of Japanese researchers perform two experiments examining eye-movements across comic pages to show that both page layout and balloon placement factor into how readily…

  • Capturing vs. Generating Comics

    A good friend of mine who works for the company that produces Second Life sends over this link about using the Comic Life software with Second Life screenshots. I’ve expressed my displeasure with Comic Life before, but I haven’t really thought about comic creation of video game clips before. Something about it rubs me the…

  • Is this a Comic?

    Patric Lewandowski joins the club of discussing the definition of “comic” with a new column over at Comixtalk. He has yet to mention my split between comics and visual language, but did use the magic VL words, so perhaps he’s on his way there? Seems to be the start of a potentially interesting treatise at…

  • Graphic non-fiction links galore!

    Wow, all of a sudden I have a ton of great links to share, all about graphic non-fiction. And sometimes you find them in the darndest of places… Last night I was hanging out in a pub on the MIT campus and happened upon Joost Bonsen, the creator of an interesting new book called Howtoons…

  • Ambiguous signage in words and pictures

    Things have been crazy busy lately, so blogging has been a bit sparse. However, here’s a few signs I found around the Boston area that struck me as interesting for their ambiguity. First off… This sign posted outside a fence to a lumber-yard features a line I’ve noticed more and more around here, which is…

  • Panoramic Comic

    Via the TalkAboutComics blog comes a link to this very cool comic where the entire story is depicted using successive panoramic viewpoints. It’s a very interesting use of the Infinite Canvas. Narratively, most of the comic is what I’d call “passive/negative entities” — just a non-active cityscape — though it oscillates with scattered glimpses of the…