Blog

  • How to analyze comics with narrative grammar

    Over the past several years, I’ve presented a lot of evidence that panel-to-panel “transitions” cannot account for how we understand sequences of images in visual narratives like comics. Rather, I’ve argued that narrative sequential images use a “narrative grammar” that assigns roles to panels, and then groups panels into hierarchic relationships. Though there are many…

  • Dispelling emoji myths

    Dispelling emoji myths

    In my recent BBC article and my blog posts about emoji, I have tried to explain how emoji are not an emerging language, but that they do serve important functions that resemble other limited communicative systems. Having now poked around online quite a bit looking at what people say about emoji, I’m particularly struck by the repetition of…

  • New Paper: Narrative Conjunction’s Junction Function

    I’m excited to announce that my new paper, “Narrative Conjunction’s Junction Function” is now out in the Journal of Pragmatics! This is the first major theoretical paper I’ve had in a long time, and it goes into extensive detail about several aspects of my theory of how narrative image sequences are comprehended, Visual Narrative Grammar.…

  • Emoji and visual languages

    I’m excited that my recent article on the BBC website about emoji has gotten such a good response. So, I figured I’d write an addendum here on my blog to expand on things I couldn’t get a chance to write in the article. I of course had a lot to say in that article, and…

  • New paper: Getting a cue before getting a clue

    It seems the last few months on this blog have been all about inference generation… I’m happy to say this post is also the case! I’m excited to announce that I have a new paper out in the journal Neuropsychologia entitled “Getting a cue before getting a clue: Event-related potentials to inference in visual narrative comprehension.”…

  • Inference generating comic panels

    Since my last post discussed my new paper on action stars, I thought it would be worth doing a refresher on these types of panels in the visual language of comics. “Action stars” are a type of panel that replaces a primary action of a sequence with a star-shaped flash, which on its own usually…

  • New paper: Action starring narrative and events

    Waaaay back in 2008 I first posted about a phenomenon in comics that I called an “action star”, such as the third panel in this sequence: I argued that these panels force a reader to make an inference about the missing information (in this case Snoopy getting hit by football players), and that these images…

  • Comicology conference in Japan

    For anyone who might happen to be in Japan at the end of next month, I’ll be speaking at Kyoto Seika University’s upcoming conference, Comicology: Probing Practical Scholarship from September 25-27th. The conference will be hosted by the Kyoto International Manga Museum, and there’s an impressive lineup of speakers, so it should be a great…

  • Comic reading fluency

    At my ComicCon panel, someone asked me whether I have a measure for comic reading experience. Indeed, I do! I’ve been using the Visual Language Fluency Index (VLFI) score which is computed by asking participants to self-rate how often they read various types of comics, draw comics, and their expertise for reading and drawing comics.…

  • Comic-Con 2015: The Scientific Study of The Visual Language of Comics

    Thanks to my good friend Dan Christensen, I here present my talk from Comic-Con 2015, “The Scientific Study of The Visual Language of Comics.” This was my introductory talk for a panel that consisted of three of undergraduates who had been working with me, and provides an overview how I believe that research on comics—or…