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  • The Comic Strip and Film Language

    Lacassin, Francis. 1972. The Comic Strip and Film Language. Film Quarterly, 26(1), 11-23. In this piece translated by David Kunzle, French theorist Francis Lacassin discusses the similarities between the “syntax” of film and comics, noting that they both use “shots” as their base units. For him, this includes various things, like various degrees of framing…

  • A Time Sex Thing!

    In response to this Language Log post, my best friend John sends along this wacky revamped movie poster: As he put it “A google image search for ‘pulp sci-fi novel’ turns up some great material for this title.” Indeed.

  • Perhaps I should avoid the slopes…

    After the conference in New Mexico let out, a bunch of us went on an excursion to the top of a mountain that overlooks Albuqurque. At the top, we found this sign on the side of a building: Given that we’d all just talked about visual signs for a day and a half, many of…

  • Biblio clean up

    Just some housecleaning to report… I’ve updated the Reference Bibliography with some long-overdue entries that have been building up for quite awhile. I’ve also added a whole page listing all the papers I’ve reviewed here on the blog (also accessible in full through the Bibliography tag). Hopefully this will make it easier for people to…

  • VaIL ’07

    I recently got back from my keynote talk at the Visual and Iconic Languages conference at the University of New Mexico. The conference went very well, and a lot of very interesting conversation was had in a very short (1.5 days) amount of time. People seemed to enjoy my talk on visual language grammar, so…

  • Thought Bubbles, Children, and Autism

    These are several articles I found particularly interesting looking at the understanding of thought bubbles, and using them to help autistic children. Wellman, H. M., Hollander, M., & Schult, C. A. (1996). Young Children’s Understanding of Thought Bubbles and Thoughts. Child Development, 67, 768-788. Several experiments on 3 and 4 year olds show that thought…

  • The Art Perspective

    A friend of mine got an advanced copy of a book on comics that will be coming out this summer. I’d prefer not to identify it by name here, but it had a great paragraph summarizing what I would call a driving viewpoint of the “Art Perspective”: “The fact that drawing style is the most…

  • Comic-Con Report ’07

    As ever, I had a great time at Comic-Con this year, seeing lots of friends and giving a few talks. My convention floor highlights were pretty subdued I think, as my favorite was perusing the gorgeous original Alphonse Mucha prints at the vintage art dealer. I would have liked to meander the hall a bit…

  • Pre-literate understanding of speech balloons

    Yannicopoulou, A. (2004). Visual Aspects of Written Texts: Preschoolers View Comics. L1- Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 4, 169-181. This study assessed preschool aged children’s ability to understand various features of Carriers (i.e. thought bubbles and speech balloons), despite not being able to understand written language. Tests showed: – 87.1% recognized angular balloons meant…

  • Blasphemy!

    As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently designing a series of experiments that will use Peanuts strips for stimuli (kindly donated by Fantagraphics). Lately, I’ve been doing the arduous process of scanning them in and coding them. Since I’m only trying to look at how sequences of images create meaning, and because the inclusion of text…