Blog

  • Talk talk talk… at ComicCon ’07

    Just like every year, I’ll be talking next week at ComicCon. This year I’ve got two appearances lined up (with a booksigning on Friday): Thursday– 10:30-11:30 Comics Arts Conference Session #1: Comics in Educational Settings—Comics have long been stigmatized as a lesser medium of communication than text. However, for many years comics have been making…

  • Huh?

    Every now and then I come across people who really resist the sort of work I’m doing. They dislike the idea of academic investigation of “comics,” as if it somehow degrades the value of the works that are produced. I’m also confused at the general meme that claims academics are so enveloped in their work…

  • I’m a winner!

    Apparently, I’ve won an award. I just got an email saying that my “paper, The Grammar of Comics, was selected as the winner of the M. Thomas Inge Award for Comics Scholarship for the Comic Art & Comics Area at the 2006 Popular Culture Association conference in Boston.” So… yay!

  • Blindfolded patterns

    Dirk links to this interesting post where cartoonists were asked to draw their characters blindfolded (versions on the right). This Chester Gould one is pretty impressive… What’s interesting to note is where most had problems and where they were fine. Most of the linework between the blindfolded and sighted versions are the same, it’s putting…

  • Essay in The Public Journal of Semiotics

    Way back in January, I had a piece published in the innaugural issue of the online Public Journal of Semiotics, yet kept forgetting to post about it. The essay there is an expanded version of my downloadable essay “A Visual Lexicon”, which people seem to find as one of the most interesting of the papers…

  • Yowza!

    As I’ve probably mentioned before, I’m currently building a corpus of comics to be used in research related projects. I’ve had some donations from companies already, and Dark Horse just about doubled my collection in one fell swoop! They are thanked tremendously (as are everyone else who’s donated). I’m still interested in expanding the collection,…

  • Comics definitions and distribution

    A friend of mine and I were talking about comic distribution and some interesting points came up, including how McCloud’s definition of “comics” might actually hurt the growth of the medium. I’ll get back to that one. My friend noted that “comics” are coming to be split into two major groupings of mainstream works and…

  • Abstraction

    Dirk links to this blog post with a scanlation of the manga “Abstraction” by Shintaro Kago. It’s a pretty incredible formalist experiment, and definitely worth checking out. (beware…it’s a bit “lewd” to say the least…) Go now!

  • I’ll show you my paradigm if you show me yours

    I’m shocked at the response that my quote in yesterday’s ¡Journalista! (thanks Dirk!) has generated. Is it really so hard to believe there’s a separation between the structure of a system of expression and how it’s used in “literary” contexts? Ok… maybe I’m not so shocked… For spoken language, this is simply the difference between…

  • Photo Technology

    This is pretty amazing new technology for photos that aggregates the information in many photos to create virtual environments, not to mention a pretty impressive navigational tool for photos and data alone. The potential for applying it to comics is huge. On the one hand, you could use all the information stored in various panels…