Faces in comics

Tan, Ed S. 2001. The Telling Face in Comic Strip and Graphic Novel. In The Graphic Novel, edited by J. Baetens: Leuwen University Press.

This study looked at the knowledge of faces and facial expressions in comics assuming that facial expressions are universal and thus comics rely on these universal cues in representation. In the analysis of Tintin comics, consistent basic emotions are depicted, often with hyperbolic exaggeration. In comparison, the emotions in Maus are more downplayed and minimally focused upon. This is hypothesized as due to the “seriousness” of the comparative subject matter.

Ultimately it concludes (like in McCloud’s Making Comics), that comic drawing uses a small set of emotional primitives that are employed in combination for universal emotional expression. Curiously, though McCloud expresses they are universal in his book, his recent blog post on the topic implies that he thinks facial expressions are also a learned behavior.

On the whole, I'm curious what this would do with data from countries like Japan that vary from findings of universal facial expressions. Would Japanese manga also reflect the different interpretations of expressions held by their culture? Does this mean that the facial expressions manga might sometimes be misunderstood by non-Japanese reading them?

On the whole, this paper could have benefited from more systematic coding than the roughshot sampling of expressions in selected pages from a limited sample size. How many expressions were there? Of what kinds? How do people from those different populations interpret the expressions from differing countries? Etc.

More on the Burnt City Bowl

Apparently I've been getting linked to a lot for my previous post on the Burnt City animation drawing of an illustrated goat jumping along the outside of an earthenware bowl.

In my post, I argued that — contrary to the fairly dubious claims that this was the "world's earliest animation — this is better suited to be thought of as just an ancient example of visual language use. The closest modern analog would be a "comic", though I hate applying the term to ancient artifacts.

Now, I was recently revisiting the claims that this is animation based on some of the comments to the original that redid an animation based on the bowl. Admittedly, these do look better than the original. I suppose the idea would be that this bowl would be spun on a base where the "flip-book" quality would emerge.



However, what I'm wondering about is why would anyone expect that this would have such a usage? Isn't it a lot more logical just to assume that it was used as a bowl. Why would we think that ancient bowls with sequential images on the outside are somehow exempt from their normal use as receptacles for holding things?

In fact, beyond the modern coffee mugs that do this, we have lots of historical examples as well. For example, there is a whole huge collection of these types of bowls from ancient Maya.



So... why shouldn't we think that its primary function is just as a bowl, and that it just happens to have a cool example of sequential images on it with absolutely no intended use as "animation"?

Diversity in Visuals

At the VaIL conference a few weeks ago, one of the frequent conversations revolved around the issue of creating a universal graphic system.

The belief that visuals are universal is not new, and largely stems from the fact that most drawings look like what they represent ("iconicity"). This is also a motivating factor behind so-called "universal writing systems" like Blissymbols, Icon Language.

However, when looking at drawings as reflecting patterns in the mind, then there is actually quite a lot of diversity. Patterned styles like those of Japanese manga compared to stereotypical American superhero comics reflect culturally diverse conventions of different populations. Even more relative are the sand drawings of native Australian communities, and the constraints they place on recognizing other graphic depictions. Several other stories exist of people not fully understanding iconic drawings as well, such as the story Mort Walker tells about natives (I can't recall where) who thought that a person's legs were cut off, despite just being "out of frame."

Given this, perhaps it's time that we get over the idea of a universal communication system, and we come to accept that populations of humans will always develop idiosyncratic and in-group tendencies.

While globalization especially has raised a desire for inter-cultural communication, diversity in communication systems may have had evolutionary advantages. Having an identity tied to your language separate from others' means you can identify your group members, and even more helpful that you can keep secrets from other groups. If it wasn't beneficial, we would all be speaking the same languages (or so the argument could be made... diversity could just be a useful "spandrel" for the way other cognitive functions happened to turn out).

Perhaps instead of attempting to create universal systems, we should instead acknowledge the diversity that comes along with the way our brains are wired for social interactions. By accepting it, we can then strive to work with the constraints that our cognition and diversity brings or allows. That way, it will cease the fighting against the tide of inevitable diversity with rose colored glasses of universality, and instead invites appreciation for relative systems and cooperation to meet common goals of communication.

America vs. Japan: Brains and Comic/Manga Panels

Via the TCJ message board, Nathan has pointed to an article in the Boston Globe that discusses the differences in brain activation between "Eastern and Western" perceptual processing. The study claims that "Westerners tend to focus on central objects more than on their surroundings" while Easterners "tend to focus more on the context as well as the object." From the article:

To use a camera analogy, "the Americans are more zoom and the East Asians are more panoramic," said Dr. Denise Park of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas in Dallas. "The Easterner probably sees more, and the Westerner probably sees less, but in more detail."

"Literally, our data suggest that people see different elements of pictures," Park said. "If you're looking at an elephant in the jungle, the Westerner will focus on the elephant and the Easterner is going to be more thinking about the jungle scene that has the elephant in it."

In a way, these findings are supportive of McCloud's claims that manga use more "wandering eye" type of panel "transitions." The evidence from my own more formal study comparing panels from Japanese and American comics (in my paper Cross-Cultural Space) seems to support this conclusion... somewhat.

My study found that American comics by far used more comic panels that featured a whole scene ("Macros"), while Japanese manga used equal amounts of panels with whole scenes and individual characters ("Monos"). Manga also used a great deal more "Micro" panels, which feature a "zoom."**

These results would seem to support a view that Japanese panels allow a focus on the broader environment, since they are breaking up the single environment into smaller parts. However those smaller parts are giving focus to the smaller parts instead of to the larger whole. So, in a way, manga panels are getting both the environment and the detail of the objects.

Unfortunately, my coding in this study was a little deficient, since at the time I lacked an "Amorphic" category that contains purely environmental information. These panels were coded as Micros at the time, but really should be their own category. On the plus side, I now have a larger and more diverse sample of comics to code and a richer coding scheme, I just need to get the peoplepower to do it (read: undergrad research assistants).

Update: An additional thought I just had related to this is the extant to which these claims are generalizable into two categories of East vs. West. At least regarding the graphic form, will we find that American books are the same/different as various European books? Can Japanese manga really be lumped in with Chinese, Korean, and other Asian comics' structure? Perhaps we'll find that there's a lot more diversity out there than we suspect...

**(The graph above shows a reanalysis of these numbers, getting rid of two American books that had "high manga influence" — the difference is slight but significant. Check the paper for initial interpretation/numbers)

Manga facial symbols

I've been putting the finishing touches on my first draft of a book chapter for a textbook on Japanese manga recently. Mainly, the last things I had to do was draw my examples. Also being a "comic author" is a big advantage as a scholar, since I can create my own examples when I don't want to deal with issues of copyright and permissions.

For this one, the challenge was drawing in the "manga style," which I rarely do. For better or worse, here's some symbolic faces I've whipped up:

This section on graphic symbols/conventions was one of the hardest portions of the actual paper to write. While most of us know that manga uses a ton of wacky conventions, there aren't many places referencing them outside of informal listings like wikipedia. At most, various sources mention one or two different conventions, but I couldn't find any extensive type of cataloging. (though, if anyone is aware of such a thing, please let me know)

I started trying to make a cross-cultural list like this back when I used to have the forum, but that project seems to have stagnated. This is a research project just waiting for someone to take it up (like oh so many)...

Lessons from manga

I found an interesting discussion in this thread over The Engine discussing this quote from a PW article:

Still, if there’s a manga feel to the books, it’s not an accident. “I went into my local bookstore, and there were two shelves for the entire history of American comics and 12 shelves for manga,” Crilley said. “Whenever kids come up to me and say, ‘Look at this drawing I made,’ nine times out of 10 it is in the manga style. For this generation, comics are manga. This is the language of this generation, and I’d better learn how to speak this language or I’ll never reach them.”

Recently I've been finishing writing a book chapter for a new textbook on Japanese manga, so these sorts of comments and discussions are particularly salient for me right now. This quote is revealing about a lot of theoretical issues, beyond simply calling it a "language." Or, perhaps more accurately, I think manga shows us many of these issues, which are kindly wrapped up into this quote. Among these are:

1) It acknowledges that the system of representation and expression used in manga is different than in American comics. Underlying message: Graphic systems are not universal

2) It notes that one graphic system can influence another one (just like languages do when they have contact with each other). Underlying message: Graphic systems (or rather, human minds that produce graphic systems...) are fluid and changing

3) People who draw in one manner can adopt additional manners of drawing. Underlying message: Multilingualism in visual language!

4) Manga are extremely popular, and that popularity is tapped into by adopting its system of expression. Underlying message: Having a consistent style might increase readership (ahem... among many other factors)

5) Children are choosing the "manga style" en masse to draw in — a consistent style which is beyond the scope of a single author and belongs instead to a community. Underlying message: Children learn to draw by imitating others

Visual Fluency... aka "Pissing off Writers"

There's a been a little hullabaloo lately about Jesse Hamm's recent blog post on "Why Comic Book Writers Oughta Mind Their Own Business," and the Mark Waid reply. Attitudes displayed by both sides aside, I actually agree with Jesse's sentiment, but I think there's some deeper issues going on here in this "artist vs. writer" clash.

What's really at issue here is the level of fluency a person has in producing this visual language that is used in comics. Most of the time graphic production is viewed as a matter of skill — how good someone is at "drawing pictures" or maybe "telling a story" as opposed to being a fluent vs. not fluent producer in an explicit system of expression.

"Artists" — those who are demonstrably graphically fluent — rightfully are justified in feeling perturbed at being dictated to by writers, whose graphic fluency might be questionable. Jesse's post highlights the disjunct that occurs when "artists" are being directed by a writer who is not graphically fluent.

There is a difference between fluency in comprehension and production. Children whose parents speak different languages than the general populace sometimes might be able to understand what their parents say, but they might not speak it. This occurs en masse in our society for visual language — especially since it's a print culture with no reciprocal exchange of expression. Most people in our culture are fluent readers of visual language, but just being able to comprehend is not sufficient enough to be able to produce.

Beyond proudction, there are some cultures — and individuals — that cannot comprehend sequences of comic images. Reading ability between fluent comprehenders also varies as well. Experimental eye-tracking data show explicit differences in the path of eye movement between "expert" and "non-expert" comic readers when navigating through comic pages. Other studies have shown that skill in comprehension of panel sequences and memory of them increases with age, indicating a maturation of expertise.

Further experiments show that children from countries with limited comic reading (i.e. like America) cannot produce sequential images at a high proficiency (in some studies, over 2/3 of the subjects could not create sequences where one panel has some connection to its adjacent panels). In a truly fluent populace like Japan where most all children read and draw manga as part of the culture, 100% of children tested can create sequential images at a high degree of proficiency using complex visual grammar.

We need to move beyond the naive belief that drawing is just a "skill" in a "universal" "art form" (that is equally expressible by those who do or don't have the skill) and towards the cognitive reality that it requires a graphic fluency in an explicit system of expression that must be learned and developed... leaving a large group of people with degrees of limited fluency.

(... just like any other language).

Sand Talk

I've frequently mentioned in my writings about sand narratives created by various Australian aboriginal communities. This article from the Transient Languages & Cultures blog at the University of Sydney has a nice summary of some of the work done researching sand drawings, as well as a bit on how researchers record it. In addition to this shot below, it has some nice photos in it and linked from it that can give some perspective for those who are curious what this all looks like.

Codex Boturini

My old friend John Jacobson passes along this link to the final pages of the Mexica Aztecs’ Codex Boturini which shows some very interesting text/sequential image combinations. It’s definitely worth reading through the Brief Readings of each page, and at least perusing the essay.



One of the things I find interesting about it is its use of footprints to provide the "path" of the gods, which helps "unify the design of the manuscript." Structurally, this is interesting because the footprints retain an aerial view while the rest of the images feature a lateral viewpoint. This is reminiscent of some of the drawings by Arrernte children who unite the aerial view of sand drawings with the lateral view of Western representation.

It also seems that the reading of the manuscripts is somewhat as a mnemonic – not fully a visual narrative that draws its meaning from the properties of the graphics alone, joined by the meaning of the words. Rather, it lies on the cusp area of my CMGS where the drawings represent mnemonic signs for "set of concepts that could be verbally formulated in a number of different ways," used as a supplement to oral performance.

This type of visual concepts is an interesting feature of many older systems (including the Tibeto-Burman Naxi as well as several others). It’s kind of a halfway usage of the visuals without, in my estimation as yet, fully becoming a visual language, while also not using the transcription system as its own stand-alone system of "writing."

Reposted 8/11 with fixed links

Manga Literacy

I've made a couple additions to the Reference Bibliography, including this one:

Nakazawa, Jun. 2005. Development of Manga (Comic Book) Literacy in Children. In Shwalb, David, Jun Nakazawa, Barbara (Eds). Applied developmental psychology: Theory, practice, and research from Japan. Pp. 23-42

This English piece is a nice summary of the work of Japanese Psychologist Jun Nakazawa, as well as several other Japanese studies on "manga literacy." His various experiments cover a lot of ground, usually looking at students from 1st through 8th grade. Most all his findings show increased understandings with aging and expertise. I'll discuss only a few of the many studies in it.

The study I liked the most asked children to arrange randomly given four panels into a strip, finding that correct answers grew from fairly low for kindergarteners and 1st graders (5.2 and 6.6%) to high for 4th and 6th graders (around 80%). Another task on that test asked for students to fill in the blank of a missing panel, which no K/1st graders could get right with increasing percentages along older grades. Comparatively, adult college students were far better than the children.

He also has designed a "story comprehension" test to examine how fully they can recall plot aspects of a ten-page Doraemon manga. He showed again that the biggest growth came between 1st and 4th grades.

He also did some eye-tracking studies comparing the eye movements of an "expert" versus a "non-frequent" manga reader. The "non-expert" fixated far more on word balloons than images and had higher reading times. On the other hand, the "expert" reader made "fewer useless eye movements" that were smoother, in addition to a higher rate of skipping over more panels and balloons. However, the expert also had higher story comprehension recall than the non-expert, despite reading faster and skipping elements.

The second part of the paper looked a lot at the role of manga in education. One interesting finding showed that frequent reading of manga correlated to achievement in language arts (particularly sentence comprehension) and a liking of social sciences, though "not significantly with liking for art class." Several studies also indicated a higher comprehension for learning from manga than from pure textual "novelized" writing.

In all, the piece presents several very interesting findings related to children's (and some adults) understandings of manga, and it is a veritible treasure trove of citations and studies. It presents a "cognitive processing model" based on this work, though it's so general that it could apply to any type of media. Along those lines, it doesn't really break up understanding into any sort of "grammatical" components as I'd like to see, lumping in aspects of things together (like manga consisting of pictures, emblems, text, etc rather than breaking those things down). The best part of the paper is its overall picture: that the skills required to understand the "comic medium" are learned and increase over age and practice.

Art v. Language

The debate rages on over at Comixpedia. Despite the baseless personal attacks against me and totally mischaracterization of my positions, I'm grateful for the help its lent in clarifying my ideas. I think that my articulation of the "Art vs. Language" issue was done clearer than I've ever done before, so I'm reposting it here:

I believe that the mentality of conventionality for creating graphic images is actually the predisposed nature for ALL humans. The cognitive preference for everybody is for imitation. The human mind is a pattern receiving/making machine, whether you're Japanese, American, Arrernte, Warlpiri, French, Chinese, Somalian... whatever.

The "cultural force" I speak of (that I call "Art") works against that natural inclination for conventionality that is naturally wired into all people by insisting on individuality of drawing style. The evidence that this influence exists is right in the quandry from the very first post of this thread, which is why I commented on it.

A community is a collection of individuals. Each of those individuals responds to the balance between conventionality and the Art pespective in different ways (probably more like a gradient, but discrete here for clarity):

1. Some use conventionality to a maximal degree and don't care about individuality at all (though as a unique individual mind there is always some degree of individuality).
2. Some embrace conventionality to a high degree and mark out their individuality in small and fine-grained ways.
3. Others make huge breaks with conventionality to create styles that hardly look like any other person or group at all.

Cultures are created by the collection of these communities composed of individuals. Various communities and cultures respond to all of the things I've described above in different ways, based on the choices the individuals make in response to the stimuli around them (both graphic stimuli and community attitudes). Some may respond more like #1, some may do more like #2, and some more like #3. These responses happen in all cultures, distributed in different ways: in America, in Japan, in Australia, in France... all of them. In no culture will every single person follow any one type of tendency, so long as the influence of Art is present in that culture (which is just about everywhere at this point).

Burnt City animation VL

Last year there was the rather striking discovery out of Tehran of a 5000 year old "animation" of a goat found on an earthenware bowl. Like many, I found this fascinating and recently wanted to take a closer look at the actual sequence to see what its structure looked like. This ended up becoming a bit of an internet treasure hunt for me. First, I found the animated clip they had created from it:



However, upon closer inspection, this seemed really odd. First off, why are there two trees if this was going around a bowl? Shouldn't that be one tree, that just becomes ancillary to the next "panels" representation? Of course, that's not a big deal...

But, when I dissected the animation, things really got interesting. It's made of 9 images, yet it features several repeated goat images (watch for the white dot on the goat's behind which appears and disappears). The way this animation was made simply took the overall background (note that the trees never change), then cut and pasted the goat figures several times in different places!

Upon further searching, I found this great page showing the archiving of the bowl, which actually looks like this:



Quite immediately I could see that all the 9 frames could not fit on such an object. The most interesting shot by far though, was this one:



Note on the bottom is a recreation of the actual sequence of the goat. It only contains five "frames," and the goat only jumps once, as opposed to the two hops taken nine frames in the animation. So, the animation exaggerates the degree of movement — as well as how one can really consider it "animation" in the first place. Looking at the bowl, unless someone put the hollow bottom on a "point" of some sort and spun it, real animation couldn't come from it at all.

To me, calling it "animation" is a presumption about its function and usage in society, which there has yet to be expressed evidence for. Creating a false animation from the pieces of it – which doesn't accurately reflect the original – simply misrepresents the discovery. In my opinion, this is irresponsible scholarship (or potentially journalism, depending on "who made the call" for terminology).

In searching for a modern comparison, would it be so hard for research to just have called it a "comic" (or "fumetti," given that the archeologists were Italian), or would that have been too demeaning for them? From my visual language perspective, the original turns out to be quite interesting. Another good ancient example of VL grammatical structures, just as I suspected.

---EDIT 2/25---
Additional thoughts on "animation" in the Burnt City Bowl can be found in this post.

Mayan Visual Language?

I haven't done a review for a while, so here's an absolutely fascinating one (again, listed in my bibliography):

Nielsen, Jesper, and Wichmann, Søren. 2000. America’s First Comics? Techniques, Contents, and Functions of Sequential Text-Image Pairings in the Classic Maya Period. In Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Magnussen, Anne, and Hans-Christian Christiansen (Eds.).

This absolutely fascinating article provides a structural analysis of what could be interpreted as Mayan Visual Language. Some examples very clearly use the VL grammatical categories I've been researching, such as this one here (read here, R-to-L, click for high res.):



Most of these artifacts were taken from “vessels” (vases), so the sequentiality of the reading (layout) would be gained by turning the object itself. This is reminiscent of the 5000 year old goblet found in Tehran with sequential art on it. The authors also speculate on the usage of speed-lines and speech balloons, which have semantic variation in representation (speech balloons turn into flames used to show anger – a notable conceptual metaphor in its own right).

They also note writing and images exist sometimes exist independently of each other, but by and large are overshadowed by text-image pairings with sequential art. It's interesting the reverence placed on image-text pairings in contrast to Western counterparts:

"In Western society, the combination of text and image was, for centuries, considered a debased form of communication. Only artists who directed their work towards a mass audience, predominently the lower classes, dared venture into text-image pairings. The Mayas, however, considered the combination of text and image the most exquisite and exclusive form of artistic communication, and reserved it for elite consumption only." (p.73)

Would that we achieve what they had. All in all an absolutely amazing piece. I wish more analyses on cultural systems were done like this.

The Character of "Comics"

Recently, one of the elementary school kids that I teach found out that I “drew comics” after she mentioned that she wanted to be an artist. What intrigued me (besides a 10 year old girl's exuberance that drawing comics was “cool”) was her first response: “Have you made up any characters?”

Its rather striking that the defining feature of comics to kids is characters, as opposed to say, drawing one’s own book or writing a story. Though, this shouldn’t be too strange, since much of the industry of comics is permeated by a recurring theme of characters – in strips, in books, etc. Unlike stories, characters provide a foundation for merchandising, which is where the real money is. Marvel’s website directly totes them as “one of the world’s most prominent character-based entertainment companies.”

Characters versus story also becomes one of the defining differences, I think, between “comics” and “graphic novels.” As a form of literature, graphic novels are more plot/story based in contrast to the characters of comics. This difference underscores the business side of things too. Whereas publishers put out stories by authors, companies put out characters as corporate properties.

While these characters may undergo storylines, the characters are always the primary draw. No one reads X-Men or Batman because the character-titled books have a specific story that someone finds appealing. Rather, they read the books continuously because they like the characters, and seeing what various “creative teams” subject them to. And this is never ending, so the product can be pushed endlessly.

In contrast, the characters in graphic novels take a backseat to the stories. They exist solely as pieces in the greater whole of the conveyed narrative. And, it's a narrative that will have a conclusion at some point.

The web scene seems to balance both of these. Strips by and large remain character driven, while experimental and "artsy" graphic novel-esque works (like Derek Kirk Kim) remain story driven.

Japan meanwhile seems to have the best of both worlds. While they do feature very strong (and marketable) characters, there is almost always a specific story path that they traverse. No matter how much of a character oriented juggernaut Pokémon is, the outline of a story dominates those characters. The characters exist because of the story and don’t stray from its constraints.

This is different from say, X-Men, which merely creates a premise for having characters. The X-Men aren’t moving along some grand storyline, they just interact based on a theme that “mutants exist in the world as a superpowered minority” (and can thereby also cameo in other off-theme books).

Personally, I’d think that this can be added to the list of reasons why manga have seen success in recent years amongst American audiences. Its easier to get readers hooked onto good stories with interesting characters than by character driven soap operas where the plot is auxiliary.

Kid's sequential drawings

This is a summary/review of an article I thought had particularly compelling evidence for why understanding sequential images is a learned trait. Highlights are all mine.

Wilson, Brent, and Marjorie Wilson. 1987. Pictorial Composition and Narrative Structure: Themes and the Creation of Meaning in the Drawings of Egyptian and Japanese Children. Visual Arts Research, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Issue 26). Illinois: University of Illinois

Narratives of urban Japanese children (manga) were compared to those of village Egyptian children. The argument was made that development differs based on graphically “rich” versus graphically “poor” environments. Egyptian children teach each other how to draw (“world of childhood graphic imagery rather than adult imagery” p. 10). Egyptian children’s drawings were floating, static, 2D, and symmetrical– more a reflection of perception (“intrinsic and intuitive bias towards simplicity”…”reflect humans’ innate preference for simple nonoverlapping shapes” p. 15). Japanese children’s drawings were often occluded, cropped, with lots of visual elements, had some sort of plane to ground the images, and employed “cinematic” techniques– similar to that found in manga (Japanese children by 8 or 9 may have passed the point where they are inspired by innate factors– p.15).

Over 2/3 Egyptian children drew narratives where the contents of one frame was not sequentially related to the next frame. All Japanese children drew sequential narratives – and at a “higher level of story structure” (p.16). “Japanese children were three or four times more likely to depict a related series of events or process.”

Their conclusion is that the urban versus village lifestyle, plus other cultural factors encouraging drawing are what lead to the difference in representational ability. My response would be that its not the urban/village lifestyles that cause this, but exposure to VL and practice with it. Japanese kids live in rich visual language culture (manga), and actively develop those this graphic fluency. They do note though, that Egyptian children did not have access to comics, and “television for the Egyptian children seems not to provide a functional model for producing the structure of graphic narrative plots” (p16). Manga, of course, does provide that for Japanese children.

This is another example of how looking at graphic creation through a Language perspective alters the way data is interpreted. Because drawings look like what they represent, the Art POV will attribute influence to all sorts of perceptual and societal influences. A Language perspective focuses mainly on the exposure and devlopment of those particular structures in their cultural surroundings: if you're going to produce (visual) language, what (visual) language is around you?

Musings on Time and Space

One of the papers I’m currently writing is about how “time” is understood across sequences of panels. Scott McCloud’s basic position on this is that “time = space,” so moving through space means that time is passing in graphic form. I have numerous problems with this, but more than anything it has made me question why this equation might be made.

I’ve been particularly into Benjamin Lee Whorf’s writings, who argued that the language we speak affects the way we think and perceive reality. A class on this "lingustic relativity" in college is what basically motivated me to study the relationships between linguistics and “comics” in the first place.

Whorf argues that the tense system found in most European languages is what (in part) has created our sense that time is a linear thing. Because we have a past, present, and future tense, it lines up all events in a row. He makes similar arguments to the extant that we create a sense of “space” out of our quantifiers and plural system that relates back to our understanding of time.

So, this begs the question: Will the people who speak a language without a tense system (like Hopi, as Whorf shows) have a different manner of conveying concepts graphically? Would their visual languages lack sequential events entirely in favor of something else more amenable to their spoken language? Would this make the visual langauge grammar dependent on the concepts from the spoken, or can both exist with different systems of conveying events?

This is one of the most fascinating possibilities for research I think: whether the language one speaks affects the language that one draws. In some ways, this is the question that a lot of my work is leading up to. All in good time I suppose...

Cross-Cultural Space

I have a new essay available at my site entitled "Cross Cultural Space". This paper is not very heavy on theoretical issues, but rather represents my efforts to diversify my methods through the coding of individual panels. For this one, I looked at 300 panels in each of 12 American and 12 Japanese books to compare the way they depict various types of spatial representation.

Another major issue that I'm dealing with here is that of "Diversity." So often the graphic form is assumed to be universal, whereas Language is always thought of as being culturally relative. I think that this is an illusion cast by iconicty. Since the meaningful elements look like what they mean, we immediately assume that everyone can understand them. But, no matter what, graphic images still must pass through the filter of our minds, which allow for relativity far more than they allow for universality (at least on such surface type things). Identifying the structure of various cultural visual languages, and how they might differ from each other, is an endeavor I'd love to see delved into more.