Blog

  • New paper: Building a better “comic theory”

    I’m happy to say that I have a new paper (pdf), “Building a better “comic theory,” in the latest issue of the journal Studies in Comics. In this one I critique the existing theories about “how comics are understood” and provide a framework for better research to be undertaken. Longtime readers of this blog will certainly…

  • New book on Australian Sand Narratives

    Anyone who has read my new book or followed my work online for the past several years knows that I frequently talk about sand narratives created by Australian Aboriginals as a counterpoint to the structures found in the visual language of comics. I find these drawings made in sand to be extremely interesting and important…

  • An update: Talks of future past

    I’ve got roughly a month left of my summer (yay quarter system!), and it’s been a wild ride so far. I’ve given talks in Germany, Québec City, and Seattle, and by the time summer is over, I’ll have given roughly 10 talks over three months! To cap off this tour, I’m about to head back…

  • “Bad anatomy” and body objectification in comics

    Greg Land cover and redrawn version from www.themarysue.com The recent uproar over the covers of Spider-Woman books by Marvel has lead to cries that they are both sexist and poorly drawn. I think that these covers, and especially the responses to them, make for a good opportunity to examine the idea of “bad anatomy” in…

  • Violating your drawings!

    Here’s a fun blog post by Chris Schweizer on spotting “compositional tangents” while drawing comics. For those unfamiliar, Chris does the excellent “Crogan’s Adventures” series (Crogan’s Loyalty, Crogan’s March, and Crogan’s Vengence) which I highly recommend. So, what are these “tangents” that Chris is talking about? He describes tangents as “when two or more lines interact in a…

  • Visual style and visual morphology

    While I was on the University of Bremen campus in Germany last month, I stumbled on a very appropriate poster hanging in the linguistics department (right) which sponsors a nice thought experiment about the relationship between conventionalized graphic “morphology” (like motion lines, thought bubbles, or lightbulbs/gears/hearts floating above people’s heads) and the visual “style” they…

  • Page layouts with the Golden Ratio

    I was recently sent a link to this blog post from back in May that discusses the “Golden Ratio” in the creation of comic pages by Bizhan Khodabandeh. He has some interesting ideas about how basic geometric shapes can underlie page composition in a way that’s pleasing to the eye. He therefore advocates using the “rule…

  • Recap: Cognitive Science 2014

    This past weekend I got to enjoy the annual Cognitive Science Society conference in Québec City, Canada. Unfortunately, this year’s conference conflicted with ComicCon, but in the end it was definitely worth heading up to Canada than just going a few miles down the road here in San Diego. I had several presentations throughout the…

  • Rules of Emoji

    A friend passed along this article recently which describes research by Tyler Schnoebelen that explores the rules people use when writing with emoji/emoticons. When people hear that I work on “visual language” they often think of things like this. However, Schnoebelen actually did study these things, scouring through roughly 500,000 tweets and analyzed the types of productions…

  • Germany workshops recap

    I’m a few weeks late to post on it, but my workshops in Germany were wonderfully fun! I’ve spent the intervening week traveling throughout the East Coast, so I’m only now able to get to posting photos and whatnot from the trip. It was a great time, and I greatly appreciated everyone’s enthusiasm, energy, and…