Blog

  • ImageText Vol. 3

    The latest issue of the online journal ImageText just came out with a couple articles of note (to my tastes): The first one examines the role of comics in education, a subject dear to my heart (and the topic of one of my Comic-Con panels this year). The experiment is interesting, though I would have…

  • Don’t!

    My department here at Tufts is hosting a big linguistics/psychology conference this weekend that everybody is going crazy organizing and getting ready for. I’m not really doing that much though, since I’m not presenting or participating that much (I’m actually heading to Santa Barbara on the weekend to watch my brother graduate college!). Anyhow, my…

  • Links anyone?

    Life’s been good lately. After being a bit debilitated from my hip surgery, I’m now starting to walk short distances again, though the crutches will be with me for a few more weeks still. More pertinent to my research concerns, I’ve finally finished writing my first year project paper, which was a bear to write.…

  • Review: The Language of Comics by Mario Saraceni

    Saraceni, Mario. 2003. The Language of Comics. New York, NY: Routeledge. Saraceni’s The Language of Comics is one of the few books that attempts to present a holistic theory of how comics work, and draws upon work from “applied linguistics” no less. The book is actually a stripped down version of his dissertation (as is…

  • More on Imitation in Drawing

    Brent Wilson and Marjorie Wilson have done a lot of great work on child drawing that has influenced my thinking, especially since they take comics and manga into account a lot. I got to meet Brent last year at a manga exhibit, and he was a really nice guy. Here’s another good (old) article that…

  • Art ‘n’ stuff

    Apparently, I’ve inspired Nathan Sandler enough that he devoted his inaugural blog posts to critiquing my thoughts on Art vs. Language. I’m flattered that he’s spent the time to write out his thoughts, and even more that he found my work thought-provoking enough to mull so much about them. Unfortunately, I don’t think he quite…

  • Point perspective

    Austin Kleon has a nice little post about point perspective in comics, noting his like of artists who don’t use it at all (link via Derik). The preference for point perspective is of course wrapped up in the whole desire for iconicity that readers of this blog are probably sick of hearing me rant about.…

  • All new look, same great taste!

    Today marks five full years that emaki.net has been online. That’s quite a span for me, covering four states, three bodies of water (2 oceans, 1 lake), and three universities. So, I figured it marks a good enough occasion as any to give a massive remodeling to the site (it had it coming). I’m hoping…

  • Burnt City bowl

    Apparently the 5,000 year old bowl with a graphic sequence that was unearthed from the Burnt City is now going to be on display in Tehran. I love examples like this, and I’d just like to remind those interested about my previous post analyzing the bowl’s graphics and critiquing the reporting of it. (via Journalista)…

  • Remedial Comics

    Poking around I found the Remedial Comics blog that does some theorizing about comics. It has some notable thoughts on what’s necessary for “all ages” comics, as well as some stuff on page composition. For these he makes some pretty cool flash examples of comic pages where you can select different components like text, balloons,…