Books

Books by Neil Cohn. Click on a cover to learn more.

Books on Visual Language

The Patterns of Comics
December 2023, Bloomsbury

NEW! The Patterns of Comics presents a data-driven look at the differences between the visual languages used in comics from Asia, Europe, and North America.

June 2024, Bloomsbury

NEW! A Multimodal Language Faculty directly confronts centuries-old notions of language and offers a compelling reimagination of what language is and how it works.

Who Understands Comics? Book
2020, Bloomsbury.
2021 Eisner-Award Nominee
The Visual Narrative Reader
2016, Bloomsbury
The Visual Language of Comics
2013, Bloomsbury
Early Writings on Visual Language
2003, Emaki Productions

Creative works

Meditations
2005, Emaki Productions

Meditations: 1998-2002

Before delving into visual language theory, Neil Cohn spent several years experimenting artistically with sequential art. These diverse and often formalistic visual poems, short stories, and vignettes tread a journey of artistic exploration into philosophy, religion, love, childhood, and the artistic boundaries of this visual language.

We the People
2004, CoreWay Media

We the People: A Call to Take Back America

By Thom Hartmann & Neil Cohn

This 216 page non-fiction comic shows the dangers that corporations pose to American democracy. Americans have become second-class citizens to the “personhood” of transnational corporations, who have usurped control from We the People.

A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning
2012, Oxford

A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning

By Ray Jackendoff (Author) with Neil Cohn (Illustrator)


This book presents a radical new account of the relation between language, meaning, rationality, perception, consciousness, and thought, and, extraordinarily, does this in terms a non-specialist will grasp with ease…

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The Graphic Canon

The Graphic Canon, v2

By Russ Kick (Editor)

The Graphic Canon Volume 2 gives us a visual cornucopia based on the wealth of literature from the 1800s. Neil Cohn’s contribution offers an interpretation of John Keats’ haunting poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”

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Chinese Room comic with Daniel Dennett

It’s not a book, but a few years ago my former colleague, the philosopher Daniel Dennett asked me to draw a comic for him about Artificial Intelligence. Click here to read the comic!