The Visual Language Research Corpus (VLRC) Project was our first effort to compare the patterns across comics from different cultures. We analyzed over 300 comics from more than a dozen countries in North America, Asia, and Europe.
Some of our analyses focused on the cross-cultural differences between comics, showing for example that comics from different parts of the world vary in systematic ways. Some of our analyses also focused on the changes that occur over time to comics, for example showing the comics from the United States have changed across time in their page layout, visual storytelling, and multimodality.
Below you’ll find blog posts related to the building and analyzing of the VLRC.
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 […]
2019 so far has been a flurry of published papers for me, and here’s yet another. My paper “Structural complexity in visual narratives: Theory, brains, and cross-cultural diversity” is now […]
I’m excited to announce that our paper, “The cultural pages of comics: cross-cultural variation in page layouts”, has been published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics! It actually […]
I’m excited to announce we have another new paper, “A picture is worth more words over time: Multimodality and narrative structure across eight decades of American superhero comics,” now out […]
I’m once again excited to announce the publication of another of my students’ projects. Our paper, “Pow, Punch, Pika, and Chu: The Structure of Sound Effects in Genres of American […]
I’m excited to announce the publication of our latest paper, “The changing pages of comics: Page layouts across eight decades of American superhero comics” in the latest issue of Studies […]
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 […]