Tourist traps in comics land*: Unpublished comics research
In a series of Twitter posts, I recently reflected on the pitfalls of various comics research that hasn’t been published. Since I think it contains some valuable lessons, I’m going […]
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 […]
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 […]
Using the theory of narrative grammar
As people have now started reading my book and papers, they’ve naturally started to try to apply my theories of “narrative grammar” to sequential images found in comics. My “narrative […]
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 […]
Violating comics… for science!
Every now and then, I see or receive commentary from people about my studies where they object to some of the stimuli in my experiments. They exclaim things like, “But, actual […]
Methodological advice for comics scholarship
In my previous post, I drew a distinction between the type of scholarship often done by people who are creators of comics (i.e., fluent in the visual language they study) […]
Comic creation expertise and theory building
When I first started entering into discussions about visual language research, the fact that I actively created comics seemed like an important point that I would often stress. While I […]
A Caveat: misunderstanding comics and the brain
Via this article I stumbled onto this dissertation which promotes using comics in educational contexts (a topic I am very interested in). In one of the chapters of the thesis, […]
A checklist for decent scholarship
I’ve read a ridiculous amount of research on the comprehension of sequential images the last few years. Many people have written papers about this topic, often from many different disciplines. […]