Blog

  • I’m a stub!

    I discovered that I have a stub at the ever usefulComixpedia wiki. To whoever’s writing about me: whatever lies you come up with, make’m grand!

  • Mayan Visual Language?

    I haven’t done a review for a while, so here’s an absolutely fascinating one (again, listed in my bibliography): Nielsen, Jesper, and Wichmann, Søren. 2000. America’s First Comics? Techniques, Contents, and Functions of Sequential Text-Image Pairings in the Classic Maya Period. In Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Magnussen, Anne, and Hans-Christian…

  • Art (frame-of-mind) History

    As I’ve discussed before, I think that our culture has a perspective on drawing that is oriented to an “Art frame-of-mind,” which is opposition to a “Language frame-of-mind.” While Language stresses communality and shared signs, the main threads in the Art frame-of-mind are Iconicity, Individuality, and Innovation. These are cultural orientations in the “West” that…

  • We the People, third times the charm?

    Hey, I just found out We the People: A Call to Take Back America has now entered its third printing in about two years. Not bad I’d say. Unfortunately, the subject matter will stay relevant for a long time to come, even when this administration has gone and left (assuming they do leave… gulp).For those…

  • Six degrees of Wikipedia

    As many people are now discovering, there’s a fun new tool called “Six Degrees of Wikipedia” which does just what one thinks: finds the connections between entries. Alas though, stumped it on my second try. It seems “Karl Marx” and “George Bush” are separated by over ten entries, so it gave me an error! Sounds…

  • The Antecedent

    I’m always one to plug good works, especially political ones, so here’s the “press release” for a new monthly strip at Comixpedia: Bryant Paul Johnson is a very talented artist who creates a regular comic (comics are not just for kids!) called Teaching Baby Paranoia that wonderfully blends history, fiction and footnotes. His new series…

  • Buddhism and Brains

    This month’s Wired Magazine has an interesting article about Buddhist meditation and neuroscience. While I haven’t read the actual paper, I can’t say I’m particularly surprised that the study showed a huge increase in gamma waves and altered brain structure. This would have been perfect for some of my classes as an undergrad, where much…

  • Sequart

    I recently found Sequart.com site that professes to be “for the sophisticated study of comic books and graphic novels.” The term “sequart” is meant as: Sequart (n.) — seh-kwart — the artistic medium of sequential static imagery, whatever its composition, typically combined with text. The term is employed to distinguish the medium itself from particular…

  • びくらこいた！

    Happy February! The mystery of the thumping dumpster is revealed in the latest installment of “Karuna”. It may have seemed trivial afterward, but that experience did scare the bejeezus out of me.

  • The Character of “Comics”

    Recently, one of the elementary school kids that I teach found out that I “drew comics” after she mentioned that she wanted to be an artist. What intrigued me (besides a 10 year old girl’s exuberance that drawing comics was “cool”) was her first response: “Have you made up any characters?” Its rather striking that…