Blog

  • Various concerns

    Yesterday I had arthoscopic surgery to remove a tear in the cartilidge of my hip, so I’m currently spending most of my time laid up on the couch (with the occassional field trip on crutches around the house. Recovery seems to be going well). I’m using this time as my “vacation” before summer school starts,…

  • Coercion… of meaning!

    Today I gave my big first year project presentation to the psychology department. From what everyone has said, it went very well. Of course, the project itself is still underway, and I will be running several more subjects in the lab, while probably continuing the study as a whole throught the summer. This shot is…

  • 16 panels that are Still Conventional whether you think they work or not

    I neglected posting this ealier in the week, but John Morris has a parody/homage to Wally Wood’s 22 Panels that always work over at Comixpedia entitled 16 Panels That I Don’t Think Work All That Well. There are a couple things I find theoretically interesting about it. First off, it is a great compilation of…

  • Reviews coming soon (hopefully)

    I recently got Endnote for my computer, a program that manages citations and automatically generates bibliographies (a dream program for someone like me who writes a gazillion essays). I had previously been writing little reviews for books and papers into a text file, but now I can put them in Endnote nicely organized. As I’m…

  • Character Design for Graphic Novels

    An excerpt from my drawn Comixpedia article along with some quotes from your’s truly appear in the new book Character Design for Graphic Novels, written by Steven Withrow and Alexander Danner. After they’d asked me to be in it, Alexander and I happened to become friends when I moved to Boston. So, I’ve been hearing…

  • Fun with framing

    Today’s xkcd makes great use of the recursive framing that I discussed in my latest Comixpedia article. I have no idea if Randall read the article, but I wouldn’t put it past him to think up of this stuff on his own since he frequently plays with this type of formalist experimentation. He doesn’t entirely…

  • Visual Fluency… aka “Pissing off Writers”

    There’s a been a little hullabaloo lately about Jesse Hamm’s recent blog post on “Why Comic Book Writers Oughta Mind Their Own Business,” and the Mark Waid reply. Attitudes displayed by both sides aside, I actually agree with Jesse’s sentiment, but I think there’s some deeper issues going on here in this “artist vs. writer”…

  • Speaking fun

    As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m going to be speaking next week at the Popular Cultural Association National Conference here in Boston next week. If you’re interested in attending, I recommend checking out their site. I’ll be presenting once again about my work on visual language grammar. Then, I’m almost more excited to…

  • You’re a good grammatical construction, Charlie Brown

    I’ve recently been thinking quite a lot about how best to start testing my theories of visual language grammar. Since I’m in a psychology program, I’ve got to actually think of experiments that might yield reliable and significant results (hopefully). One of the main ideas I had was starting off using a corpus of comic…

  • New Article: Loopy Framing

    At long last, I have a new article up at Comixpedia called “Loopy Framing”! This one tackles the similarities between word balloons, thought bubbles, and panels, arguing that they are all essentially the same thing. Oh, and it reveals some nice aspects of human cognition along the way. I should also note that this article…