Popular posts
-
Analyzing Calvin and Hobbes
On New Year’s Day 2021, I posted a thread on Twitter analyzing the properties of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. People seemed to like the thread, so here’s a blog post recapping it all in once place… The Calvin and Hobbes comic strip ended 25 years ago, so let’s celebrate a New Years treat…
-
From “learning to draw” to “acquiring a visual vocabulary”
Many people feel they “can’t draw”, which seems odd given assumptions about drawing as a direct pathway to visual concepts. Most of us can see, so why can’t we draw? This was originally a thread on Twitter, but here I’ve turned it into a blog post about why everything you know about learning to draw…
-
Knowing the rules of comic page layouts
One of my more engaged-with blog posts of recent memory reviewed the data for whether the panel arrangement on the right was “confusing.” So, here’s a post with some additional thoughts on this and the “rules” of comic page layouts**… First off, let me remind people that I’ve given this layout a name: When you have a…
-
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…
-
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 ≠…
-
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…
