Blog

  • Dispelling myths about comics page layout

    Dispelling myths about comics page layout

    There are many websites and twitter accounts that give advice about how to draw comics, and perhaps no other piece of “advice” arises more than the repeated advocacy to avoid page layouts like the one in the image to the right. Advice-givers claim that this layout is confusing because a reader may not know whether…

  • August craziness from the east side of the Atlantic

    Busy times lately: This marks my first blog post on the east side of the Atlantic! I’ve now been living in the Netherlands for the better part of August, and things have been a bit crazy moving and getting settled in. We’re now entering the new school year here at Tilburg University, where I’m teaching…

  • Moves, Comic-Con, and one crazy summer!

    Summer has been a wild one so far, and only getting crazier. In addition to several conferences in the US, I’m now preparing to move to The Netherlands for my new job as an assistant professor at Tilburg University, in the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication! It’s a big move, but I’m very excited…

  • New paper: Reading without words

    One of the most frequent questions that people ask about reading comics is “what are people’s eyes doing when comprehending comics?” More and more, I see people planning eye-tracking experiments with comics where eyes are recorded for where they move across a page or strip. I’ve reviewed a number of these studies on this blog,…

  • Dispelling myths of comics understanding

    Dispelling myths of comics understanding

    In reading through various works about comics understanding, I keep hearing several statements repeated over and over. But, several of these statements are not reflective of the way people actually understand comics. So, I’d like to go through several of these myths about “understanding comics” and explain why they aren’t true: 1. Page layout ≠…

  • Mayan visual narratives in the BBC!

    I’m very happy to say that David Robson over at the BBC has a new article out discussing Jesper Nielsen and Søren Wichmann’s chapter in my new book, The Visual Narrative Reader.  Their chapter, and the BBC article, examine the structural properties of Mayan visual narratives found on the sides of pottery. There are a…

  • New Paper: The pieces fit

    Magical things happen at conferences sometimes. Back at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference in 2014, I ran into my graduate school friend, Carl Hagmann, who mentioned he was doing interesting work on rapid visual processing, where people are asked to detect certain objects within an image sequence that changes at really fast speeds (like 13…

  • New Book: The Visual Narrative Reader

    I’m very excited to announce that today is the release date for my new book, The Visual Narrative Reader! What makes this one so fun is that I didn’t write the whole thing—it features chapters from many luminaries of studying visual narratives. Here’s how it came about… Shortly after the release of my last book,…

  • New paper: The vocabulary of manga

    New paper: The vocabulary of manga

    I’m happy to announce that my new article with co-author Sean Ehly, “The vocabulary of manga: Visual morphology in dialects of Japanese Visual Language” is now published in the Journal of Pragmatics! This paper is especially exciting, because my co-author is a former student who did this project as part of his class project. It…

  • New Paper: A multimodal parallel architecture

    I’m excited to share that I now have a new article in the latest issue of Cognition: “A multimodal parallel architecture: A cognitive framework for multimodal interactions.” This paper presents my overall model of language, and then uses it to explore different aspects of multimodal communication. The key distinctions in this paper are about multimodal…