Leigh's Paintings

As long as I'm recharging a bit for future blogging and managing my preparation for the new semester here at school, I felt I should at least devote one blog post to shill for the new website my father established for his paintings. He's put up numerous works of his along with essays about them, including this one below which hangs in my home.



Most of my family is highly creative in various domains. So, if you're interested in checking out some nice impressionist-ish paintings, go check it out!

Random Creative Links

As I'm coming up on Spring Break here at Tufts, all seems well as we (hopefully) transition into Springtime (hopefully — a Californian like me can't take much more of this cold before I go batty). Here are a bunch of random links that seem to have fallen my way:

Stricken Pot Pie has some fantastic comics made entirely from embroideries. While I can't say much for the story yet (it's still developing) the sheer idea of it is creative enough to warrant a link.

My friend Alexander Danner pointed me towards this interesting site, where the artist takes children's drawings and then paints/draws them in the same proportions with much more "realistic" representation. Some of the monsters are actually quite unnerving, but again, the idea is certainly a creative one.

Finally, if you're in the creative mood yourself, chalk up Strip Generator to the list of numerous low frills web-based comic creation sites out there.

Anyone speak Croatian?

For anyone out there that speaks Croatian or just wants to check it out for the sake of novelty, my article "Un-Defining 'Comics': Separating the Cultural from the Structural in 'Comics'" (which was published in the IJOCA and the first chapter of my book Early Writings...") has just been translated in the Croatian magazine Zarez. You can find it scanned and posted here (Scroll down to the second article and you'll see my sciencey illustrations).

Check it out!

Elements of Page Layouts

Belgian graphic design student Chris Vosters sends along this 7-page pdf graphic essay that expands on my paper, Navigating Comics, on how people move through page layouts.

Chris does a great job of categorizing both explicit and implicit ways in which an author can direct the flow of movement across a page layout without relying on the rule system my paper describes.

I highly recommend checking it out!

Comics, Webdesign, Closure, Cartooning

A friend of mine sent along a link to this lecture by Andy Clarke about how comics can inform webdesign. Most of the talk is a regurgitation of McCloud's theories, but he has some interesting parallels and ideas. (There's an mp3 of the talk that you can flip through the slides with).

Also, while I don't necessarily agree with the ideas, Gary Sullivan ruminates a bit on Closure.

Finally...I was sent a link to the Australian Cartooning School which has a decently formalist bent to analyzing and teaching cartooning. Definitely worth poking around the site.

Alright, heading back from San Diego soon. Perhaps I'll be able to muster up some convention/conference reports...

Garfield experimentalism

Apparently we're upon the 30th anniversary of Jim Davis' Garfield strip. As a ten year old I was pretty obsessed with the Garfield books, and can probably mark meeting Jim Davis at the ABA as a highlight of my fourth grade life.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've gotten about seven emails from people linking to the Garfield Minus Garfield strips, which I first saw a few years ago even. I was always partial to the Is Garfield Dead? premise, though Nothing Garfield strips are interesting too (though Barfield does give me a good chuckle).

More theory related, the Garfield Generator is a great example of a few points of my research. It shows that there is an overarching coherent structure built into the whole strip (at least sometimes in this case), even when the immediate linear relationships don't make much sense. This is somewhat similar to the famous Chomsky sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", and I'm actually basing my next big experiment out of 6 panel long Peanuts panels of this same nature.

In some cases with the generator though, you can easily tell that the position of the panel is somewhere it doesn't belong. The thematic role of the panel belies it's canonical positioning.

Anyhow, Happy Birthday Garfield, and thanks for the early influences on my comics obsessions!

Split planes

I haven't gotten a newspaper at home in years, but every now and then my father sends me clippings of comics or articles. The comic that he seems to send the most is Pearls Before Swine which has a periodic flair for formalism.

In the last set that he sent, the characters do a fair amount of walking on the borders of the panels (Here, Here, and Here):



"Awareness" of panel borders by characters within them is nothing new, but doing so it reveals that there are two levels of representations in this visual language of comics. There is a "Representational Plane" (RP) that the content exists in, and a "Framing Plane" (FP) that holds things like panel borders and balloons/bubbles/text boxes. Usually, the Framing Plane just lies "outside" the RP, but instances like these collapse the layers together. (see linked essay below for illustrations of this)

Another hint that these two layers exist comes from the fact that text carriers can become panels, as I discussed in my article on "Loopy Framing":



This commonality between their forms — that they both encapsulate information, both are not part of the image matter but can be interacted with in a "meta" way — go towards their being two aspects of a singular plane of Framing.

Note: For those more interested, I discuss this more extensively in my paper Interactions and Interfaces.

CogSci Comics

I am currently in the refractory period of the semester, enjoying the freedom of summer break starting and the ability to work on all those projects I usually don't get around to doing during the school year. I've now plotted out at least three papers I plan to write, plus a visual language class syllabus to refine.

I should have some more substantial blogging to do soon, but in the meantime, here's some goofy random comics related to cognitive science and linguistics:

Signifier vs. the Signified

Gava Guy

Cog Sci Supers!

Please feel free to post more as you find them... Enjoy!

Universcale

I've been ridiculously too busy to blog lately, largely due to my upcoming exam/project on biopsychology. Once that's over it's summertime! (i.e. time for me to work on projects otherwise not given enough attention while in classes). In the meantime...

Here's an interesting site that attempts to show the relative sizes of things in the universe. I like how its using digital tools to get at visualizing otherwise hard to conceive of things. In some respects it serves as an "Infinite Canvas" in McCloud's sense. (Beware has sound)

Some links and whatnots

Steven Seagle has a decent piece up at the First Second blog about visual storytelling. He nicely taps into a simplified version of some of the same things that I've been pushing for my theory of visual grammar. The exercise he uses to rearrange panels is very reminiscent of linguistics methods, and is also a good one that shows how a broader structure exists above and beyond the so-called 'transitions' between panels.

Along these lines, Matt Madden and Jessica Abel will soon have a "how to" book coming out about comics. I've been hearing that its somewhat theory oriented, so the book should be an interesting read. So, keep an eye out in the coming months.

Finally, keep an eye on this very site in the next week. I will finally — finally — be posting the results of my experiment about comic page layouts shooting for next Monday. This one has been a long time coming — I first ran the experiment almost 4 years ago and have been working on the paper since last spring! The project tested whether or not people read comic page layouts using the "left-to-right and down" path like text. A preview: the answer is "not really."

Finally, last month was my most trafficked month ever, so, thanks to everyone that's been reading my site lately!

Odds and Ends

Between school, conferences, and life, my time has become quite precious lately. A few days ago my BioPsychology professor said that we'll be dissecting sheep brains in class. That should be interesting.

I've finally gotten a chance to analyze a bunch of the data that has come in from my Peanuts experiment and things are looking very cool. I haven't yet run the actual statistics, but some initial graphing of results show signs that my predictions about visual grammar may be borne out. Time to start crunching numbers...

Bob Weber passes along a link to his blog where he posts kids' drawings and gives encouraging comments. Its a nice interactive idea. What I'm struck by most is the huge range in ability for various ages in the posts he has there.

Finally, if today is your primary, be sure to get out and vote!

Is this a Comic?

Patric Lewandowski joins the club of discussing the definition of "comic" with a new column over at Comixtalk. He has yet to mention my split between comics and visual language, but did use the magic VL words, so perhaps he's on his way there? Seems to be the start of a potentially interesting treatise at least, and I look forward to seeing where he's going with it.

At the very least, I'm glad Comixtalk has some other people writing about formalist-ish topics, since I'm far too busy to write things these days.

Graphic non-fiction links galore!

Wow, all of a sudden I have a ton of great links to share, all about graphic non-fiction. And sometimes you find them in the darndest of places...

Last night I was hanging out in a pub on the MIT campus and happened upon Joost Bonsen, the creator of an interesting new book called Howtoons that aims to get kids excited about engineering. It has all sorts of projects for things that people can make at home with commonly found items. There is also a Howtoons website featuring lots more online.

Also there was Joost's friend Drew, who pointed out to me that the latest edition of Nature features the graphic "Adventures in Synthetic Biology" teaching about DNA and engineering biology. It starts with some very basic concepts, and then ramps up to some very complex stuff (a pdf. is also downloadable from here). Very cool!

Finally, several months ago a student named Shane Smith had emailed me about an essay he was writing about "essay comics," and, practicing what he preached, that's exactly what he's created! "Academaesthetics: How the essay and the comic can save each other" is a (long!) graphic essay arguing just what that title says (linked site leads to pdf). Definitely worth reading, especially for its comparative analysis of mine and McCloud's definitions of "comics" and as a well executed use of the medium it's advocating.

Go now!

Panoramic Comic

Via the TalkAboutComics blog comes a link to this very cool comic where the entire story is depicted using successive panoramic viewpoints. It's a very interesting use of the Infinite Canvas. Narratively, most of the comic is what I'd call "passive/negative entities" — just a non-active cityscape — though it oscillates with scattered glimpses of the character in the apartment (though does not show him doing a sustained activity. The text is primarily dominant, but the panoramic certain gives a narrative feel that feels fairly unique. Check it out!

ACLU comi... I mean "graphic novel"!

Apparently the ACLU has an "online graphic novel" titled Defenders of Freedom up at their site. I find their use of wording interesting. The piece itself states, "We are not trying to disguise a civics lesson in a comic book" — though their tagline calls it their "first graphic novel" (apparently more will follow?).

This seems like another instance of "graphic novel" being used as an upscale synonym for "comics" — without regard for format (it's on the web!) — as opposed to using it to denote a separate categorical frame/artitic movement. The quote in the piece bears this out, since "comic book" is used fairly negatively here (and straight-up ties it to the notion of superheroes), when the work is obviously done in the "comic medium."

Here again a notion of a "visual language" would be useful. What the ACLU is trying to say (I think) is that they want to communicate this valuable information in a graphic form that is accessible (visual language), but they don't want it to have the stigma of "comics" (the social construct associated to superheroes, etc.) biasing people's opinions of it.

Blindfolded patterns

Dirk links to this interesting post where cartoonists were asked to draw their characters blindfolded (versions on the right). This Chester Gould one is pretty impressive...



What's interesting to note is where most had problems and where they were fine. Most of the linework between the blindfolded and sighted versions are the same, it's putting them all together that they had trouble with. I like this a lot since it shows that authors are using consistent patterns when drawing (as if people didn't know this), even when they can't see the page!

This all reminds me of some citation I saw that claimed blind people also use/conceive of speed lines to indicate motion, but I never fully got the chance to read up on it. Perhaps I'll hunt that one down...

Essay in The Public Journal of Semiotics

Way back in January, I had a piece published in the innaugural issue of the online Public Journal of Semiotics, yet kept forgetting to post about it. The essay there is an expanded version of my downloadable essay "A Visual Lexicon", which people seem to find as one of the most interesting of the papers posted (at least, that's what the vocal feedback says).

Naturally, I think the PJOS version of the paper is much better than the original, though the interface is a little funky since they're experimenting with electronic delivery beyond simple pdfs. Unfortunately, that means they lost all of my formatting, in addition to putting my images in places that don't always make sense for the flow of reading. Grr...argh.

Neverthless: an expanded essay for your reading pleasure.

Abstraction

Dirk links to this blog post with a scanlation of the manga "Abstraction" by Shintaro Kago. It's a pretty incredible formalist experiment, and definitely worth checking out. (beware...it's a bit "lewd" to say the least...) Go now!

Photo Technology

This is pretty amazing new technology for photos that aggregates the information in many photos to create virtual environments, not to mention a pretty impressive navigational tool for photos and data alone.

The potential for applying it to comics is huge. On the one hand, you could use all the information stored in various panels to create a virtual environment of the fictional landscape. Moreso though, I imagine a tool like this would offer huge ground for those who are experimentally minded about online comics and the Infinite Canvas.

ImageText Vol. 3

The latest issue of the online journal ImageText just came out with a couple articles of note (to my tastes):

The first one examines the role of comics in education, a subject dear to my heart (and the topic of one of my Comic-Con panels this year). The experiment is interesting, though I would have liked to see actual reporting of the statistics that were run, which seems like it'd be important in a piece like this.

Also, the background research seems blissfully ignorant of most of the research out there pertaining to this sort of work. Perusing the references, the books about comics are largely historical or literary treatments, and the books about psychology/education are mostly 20 to 30 years old—none of which are about comics or related research in text-image relations in educational contexts. Given a section is called 'Comics and Cognition,' it has next to no research about comics and cognition, much less the directly pertinent work that has been done in educational contexts (despite the clear overlaps in methods).

I also found it quite odd that while testing students' background experiences with images versus text, there was no question about how often they read comics. This seems like a major oversight in design, since it could correlate levels of expertise into the statistics.
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The other articles of note are Jesse Cohn's (no relation) translation of a chapter of Benoît Peeters' Case, Planche, et Recit pertaining to comic page layouts, as well as his commentary about the chapter.

Peeters proposes a taxonomy for different types of page layouts, serving decorative versus rhetorical functions (among others). I find it a bit difficult to review these theories, simply because of the very apparent paradigmatic differences between this approach and my own. We are asking very different questions to generate our different answers.

French works like Peeters or Groensteen seem to be concerned with how things function in the contexts of the "work of art." In contrast, proposals like McCloud's (and mine) do not care what the work is about, but hypothesize structural principles at work in the medium and (hopefully) cognition. To invoke an analogy: I'm interested in identifying how "nouns and verbs work." They're interested in how people "use nouns and verbs in writing."

Along these lines, I'm currently analyzing data from an experiment I did looking at page layouts (I hope to have it readable by the end of summer... this is what my other ComicCon talk will be on). Immediately apparent is the difference in the intents: I don't care what the "design" of the layout "conveys"; I want to know about the strategies people use to navigate the layout irregardless of the content. As much as people might hypothesize what order people read panels in, or how the "layout is read as a whole," no data has yet shown what people actually do. Hopefully I can show some of that.

Links anyone?

Life's been good lately. After being a bit debilitated from my hip surgery, I'm now starting to walk short distances again, though the crutches will be with me for a few more weeks still. More pertinent to my research concerns, I've finally finished writing my first year project paper, which was a bear to write. Now I can turn my focus to other visual language and comics related projects. Here's some links that have fallen in my lap recently...

Through my ComicSpace account, I was alerted to The Cape Symposium. While most of it seems to be a message board for talking about superhero comics in particular, the overall tone tries to probe a little deeper than the usual surface discussions, and some threads seem to aim towards praxis based theory. One thread has a downloadable pdf exploring the relations of text and image in comics, largely from a semiological-ish view.

Also, Tor from Comic Book Innovation emails me with word of Storytron, which seems to be a company working on technology for interactive storytelling. Seems to be pretty interesting.

Finally, Alan David Doane has a great essay about why the mainstream comic market is doomed to extinction. I think it's a great piece, and echoes many of the things I said in my first essay for Comixpedia, and in many of the writings in the "Visual Language Manifesto". Worth reading if these are concerns of yours.

Point perspective

Austin Kleon has a nice little post about point perspective in comics, noting his like of artists who don't use it at all (link via Derik). The preference for point perspective is of course wrapped up in the whole desire for iconicity that readers of this blog are probably sick of hearing me rant about.

His post got me to think about some other related issues. For instance, point perspective was developed in the Renaissance, which I imagine coincided with the Enlightenment's focus on discovery about the world and the rise of science. (Though, I have no idea since I'm not an art historian.)

What is worth remembering though is that point perspective was truly a discovery. The human mind/brain may be able to see in perspective, but we don't draw in it. There was a study** I read that talked about South African children (ages 5-9) who had trouble with understanding certain parts of images. The parts they misinterpreted the most were perspective, depth, and shading — all highly iconic and things that must be explicitly taught to people learning to draw.

Interestingly, when looking at the data, the means for misinterpretation drop for children at Grade 3 (and 9 yr. olds) in almost all categories. The conclusion of the author is that schooling teaches children how to understand images, but this could just be a coincidence in that children’s exposure to images comes in a school setting. That is, it’s not about instruction, but about exposure.

Whatever the case, perspective is not a built in part of the human graphic system. This again goes to the point that drawing is less about mimicking the perception of the world as piped through an individual's mind, and more about the way minds are enabled to convey concepts visually.

Update: I feel I should add, that there's nothing wrong with learning how to draw with point perspective, only that our minds' graphic system is not predisposed to it. As an academic, I'm not prescribing anything, just analyzing. Learning perspective requires iconic understanding that doesn't just come out of imitation of other people's drawings. That is, it once again skirts conventionality and the establishment of mental models for drawing in lieu of imitating perception.



** Liddell, Christine. 1997. Every Picture Tells a Story—Or does it?: Young South African Children Interpreting Pictures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Vol. 28, No. 3. Pp. 266-283

Burnt City bowl

Apparently the 5,000 year old bowl with a graphic sequence that was unearthed from the Burnt City is now going to be on display in Tehran. I love examples like this, and I'd just like to remind those interested about my previous post analyzing the bowl's graphics and critiquing the reporting of it. (via Journalista)

Remedial Comics

Poking around I found the Remedial Comics blog that does some theorizing about comics. It has some notable thoughts on what's necessary for "all ages" comics, as well as some stuff on page composition. For these he makes some pretty cool flash examples of comic pages where you can select different components like text, balloons, figures, panels, or reading paths to see how they combine or work together. It's an interesting take on the issues, and worth checking out if only to fiddle with the flash files for a bit.

16 panels that are Still Conventional whether you think they work or not

I neglected posting this ealier in the week, but John Morris has a parody/homage to Wally Wood's 22 Panels that always work over at Comixpedia entitled 16 Panels That I Don't Think Work All That Well. There are a couple things I find theoretically interesting about it.

First off, it is a great compilation of conventionalized patterns used in many comics. Just like WW's 22 Panels and the Peanuts patterns I've been finding recently, this list excellently shows how there are systematic and conventionalized patterns in the visual language used in comics. This is in contrast to the view that graphic creation is unrestrained because it mimics perception, and thereby lacks an experss system of mentally stored patterns. Astute observations like these 16 panels excellently show that there is systematic and patterned visual vocabulary used by "visual language speakers" (and I wish more people would do work like this!).

The second thing this list shows is a preference for the use of some representations over others (WW's 22 Panels does this too, though positively as opposed to negatively). Linguistics has often been in perpetual debate with journalists/English teachers/etc. that believe there is a right or wrong way to use language. We are often told "not to end a sentence with a preposition," or "not to split infinitives" — though these are not in any way real rules of English grammar. (They were prescribed by grammar book writers in the 18th century who were enamored with Latin — so they advocated Latin's rules for English, not at all being sensitive to the fact that, y'know, they're totally different languages!!).

This list's intent is prescriptive in the same way. Despite these being consistent conventional trends used in this visual language, they are gauged by their value in usage. An additional aspect to this is the Art perspective most invoked in the comments below the article. Most people object to these panels simply because they are conventional! They're "overused," which means they aren't new and innovative/original — which makes them undesirable to the Art viewpoint.

However, none of this mitigates the fact that these panel types are conventional. The linguist would say "they're all part of language, let's observe how people use them" while the prescriptivist says "they're part of language, but they really shouldn't be, and those who use them are less sophisticated speakers."

It's interesting to note also that no matter how loudly prescriptivism might object to such "bad" usage, it never has an effect on shaping language usage. It's not like split infinitives have gone away because people advocate against them! Nor do I suspect these 16 panels to go away either.

In some ways both aspects of a list like this shows some good headway in recognition of this visual language as a language on the whole. Not only are people recognizing the patterns, they're also judging them prescriptively, just like any other language!

Fun with framing

Today's xkcd makes great use of the recursive framing that I discussed in my latest Comixpedia article. I have no idea if Randall read the article, but I wouldn't put it past him to think up of this stuff on his own since he frequently plays with this type of formalist experimentation. He doesn't entirely use recursion in it, but the rebounding of the last two panels is a nice touch.

LSA and Reductos

The last week has been utterly crazy driving up and down California visiting friends. I spent last weekend at the Linguistics Society of America conference, where I randomly ran into my TA from the first linguistics class I ever took back seven years ago at Berkeley. One of the sessions spurned a fairly good brainstorm for my visual grammar project. Now that I'm in a psychology program I was left thinking only "now how can I do this in an experiment?" I think I have a good idea for how, but we'll see what my profs think when I get back to Boston.

In other news, Grant Thomas has taken the "Reducto" graphic poem type proposed in my Comixpedia article and is applying it in a series of poems. It's fun to see someone playing with the ideas actively, so go check it out!

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.

More reruns! Comics≠art

Continuing with the re-posting of my Comixpedia articles, Sequart.com has a posting of my old article Comics’ Identity Crisis: Claiming “Art” is a Misguided Quest. It's weird to see these older papers of mine as if they're new again, and kind of fun. Perhaps if people jump into them again they'll find something new in there...?

For anyone who surfs over from Sequart: thanks for dropping in and welcome to my site!

Time essay analyzed

In Derik's continuing exploration of panel transitions (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), he does an interesting job of dissecting my latest essay "Time Frames... Or Not." To keep things localized, I'll make my responses there, but he seems to have done a fairly thourough job of it. Worth perusing.

Also, Blogger has helpfully decided to add tags in finally, so I'll be trying to work those into all my past posts in due time.

Grab Bag Comics

Back in like February of this year when I was living in Chicago, I went out to mail a package at the local UPS store. I happened to be mailing one of my Meditations books and the guy behind the counter, Chuck, started querying me about my interest in comics. It turned out that he had graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a degree in sequential art! So, naturally we hit it off great, and he was one of the people I wish I spent more time with while I was back there.

Chuck recently began posting his online comic "Dumstruck" on his Grab Bag Comics site again after a bit of a summer haitus. I definitely recommend checking it out. He started the journal comic at the start of the Iraq war and has decided to keep on it until the conflict sees an end. (I hope you enjoy doing the comic Chuck, that might be awhile unfortunately...)

The strips now are reposting his summer entries that weren't put up before. Amusingly enough, I found I'm even in one! He does a pretty amusing version of me, complete with exuberance for linguistics and bandaged wrists from my bout with tendonitis earlier this year.

So yah, go check it out!

Links of note

Rob Vollmar has posted another installment of his "Rage of Angels" essays. This one examines some of Outcault's Hogan's Alley works. While I'm fairly ambivilent to historical-literary analyses of these types, I hit Rob with some pretty hard comments on his last essays, so I figured I should point out that this one reads pretty well. Nice to see him jumping straight into the material without the faux-neuroscience discussion; it gives a much cleaner read and analysis I think.

This webcomic is funny to no end: xkcd. Definitely worth strolling through the archives when you have some need of procrastination or manic laughter. And, to make this at least a somewhat theory related plug... After reading a bunch of them, the simiplicity of the stick figures really grows on me. It also lends towards an acceptance of the stick figure as a common conventional sign for person. I know this isn't "news" per se, but with so much variation due to iconicity in most of the Western tradition, I kind of like the consistency. (It also reminds me of the Australian systems I'm always talking about, which depict people as a "U" shape)

Oh, and if I remember to get back into the groove of uploading the files, my Meditations comics should return this Tuesday. Watch out!

Playing with Reality and Limitations

While watching the local Boston public channel I stumbled across the end of a documentary about photography that "plays with reality". I only caught the last artist profiled, but his work was so amazing I had to find him online and post about it.



His name is Arno Rafael Minkkinen, and while seeing his photos I was literally watching TV with my jaw hanging open. Most all of his works are "self-portraits" where he uses his body in combination with nature to create truly unusual and amazing images.



On the documentary, he was talking a lot about how limitations can provide you with proper constraints to do things that are remarkable (he uses no digital tools or manipulation). I think this applies to many aspects of artistry, and of the human mind. In language, the constraints and limitations of our grammar make it so that we can understand each other. Breaking those rules makes problems occur.

I actually prefer constraints in artistry. It shows that one has a control and mastery over the specific set of rules and limitations that one is faced with.

Japanese arts do this a lot. Their poetry is highly structured with syllabic restrictions and content requirements (as in Haiku and Waka). The same is true of Noh and Kabuki plays, as well as traditional Japanese music. Indeed, the shakuhachi (a Japanese flute) "sheet music" uses Japanese characters that indicate finger positions only – not tonal notes. So, when musicians play correctly, they are encouraged strictly to do the proper fingering and head motions. The sound that comes out might be different for every player and every flute, and this is considered beautiful.

In terms of "comic" creation, this same tension appears in the "Infinite Canvas" versus standard formalism debates. Though I might be grouped in with Formalists, I think I prefer working with a structured page size most of the time. It gives me the proper constraints to then be creative within. If I recall correctly, at his MIT lecture, Scott McCloud intimated some of his own reflections about limitations. His preference for an Infinite Canvas stemmed from the idea that while limitations are good to have for art, self-imposed ones are better than those that come from sheer circumstance (like the size of a page having come from the history of printing). I intend to return to this idea once I ever get around to finishing off my next Comixpedia piece on visual language poetry (uh... hopefully soon).

In any case, go check out the work of Arno Rafael Minkkinen; it's well worth the time spent.

Comic Strip Artist's Kit, and more

In the "tools for comic making with some thought behind it" category comes this blog, Temple of the Seven Golden Camels, by storyboarder Mark Kennedy. He's been posting several good entries of advice for cartooning and comic creation. Much of his thoughts come from Disney animators, as that seems to be where he works (or did work… not entirely sure).

Of particular interest was this Comic Strip Artist's Kit by famous Disney artist Carson Can Osten, which reminded me of Wally Woods 22 Panels that Always Work.



Like 22 Panels…, these pages contain tips for creation, described as being "created to help beginning comic artists deal with perspective problems and other drawing difficulties." It also seems to have been an industry meme that eventually had some parts end up in the book The Illusion of Life. Over seven pages he identifies several common problems that creators face in framing and representation, and then offers solutions and tips all around. Kindly, the pages are all downloadable in large printable sizes.

Other notable posts include these: One, Two, on Composition by illustrator Rowland B. Wilson. These also are downloadable and have some good advice in them, though they are less theoretical in my opinion than the Osten pages.

He also has a whole series on Design and Drawing. One of his comments stood out at me, because it contrasts with the opening sentiments of McCloud's chapter on character design in Making Comics. Kennedy advises in drawings to avoid symmetry, saying ," The human eye doesn't like symmetry. It's lifeless and boring." Contrast this to McCloud who calls symmetry "Life's Calling Card."

In other places, he and McCloud share opinions, like with proportions in frames, to which they both advise against symmetry and placing the focal action right in the center (though McCloud notes its uses as well).

As this post might intimate, the site is full of interesting posts and one can easily take up quite a lot of time reading it. Go: Read!

Update 9/22: It's been pointed out to me that Josh Farkas has created PDF downloads of many of Kennedy's writings and posted items. Lots easier than downloading all those jpgs at the blog, but still recommended to read the original posts too.

Essays on "Narrative Art"

Rob Vollmar has an ongoing essay up about "narrative art" on his blog, currently serialized in three parts:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

It seems like he might be going somewhere with it, but as someone who has studied a little of cognitive neuroscience (and hopefully will be doing direct research on it very soon) I am a bit put off by his continued invocation of right/left brain distinctions. So little of the brain's functioning is known that it is easy to make broad sweeping claims about it and hard to say anything truly substantial. It might seem like a picky thing, but it struck a nerve for me...

It is easy to be enticed by the desire to discuss the brain. After all, it is the hidden key to understanding human activity, and I can see how mentioning it lends a feeling of legitimacy totalks of "narrative art." However, in most discussions (like here), it is largely irrelevant. "Word, images, and writing" can adequately be described and interestingly discussed as human behavior without invoking vague pop-psychological discussions of the brain, especially for his "historical" aims.

It is very hard to make claims about neurological activity (like that "narrative art" involves right or left brain activity and/or their interactions) without some sort of experimentation. Hell, it's hard to make conclusive claims about the brain even with experimentation! (…which is partially what makes it so intriguing to study)

At this point in studies about "narrative art," (as Vollmar calls it) just discussing the functions, of how image and text work together is enough to provide fascinating reading. Vollmar clearly has intuitions that can lend to interesting observations about this topic. I hope that his future writings can tap more directly into them.

In both scholarly and public avenues, I often get asked about "comics" and the brain. The fact of the matter is, no one knows anything (yet). I know of no studies addressing it at all (yet). At this point it is wholly conjecture, and a big blank white page on which to paint any number of discoveries (or tabulate data, as the case may be).

With that I will now turn to sleep, so I can wake tomorrow, begin this adventure called "grad school," and aim to hopefullly build some contributions to this neuro-comics discussion before too long.

¡Journalista! returns and school is around the corner

Huzzah, ¡Journalista! is back online! I'd almost forgotten how amazing Dirk's breadth in blogging is. Go read and bookmark!

Lots of pre-school preparation has been going on. Yesterday I very excitedly got the keys to the office that I share with several other psychology grad students. Quite fun to get an office that's not my desk at home. My advisor, Professor Jackendoff, and I met today to make some plans for his Intro to Ling. class that I'll be the TA for. We also did some brainstorming for my first year project, which will involve experimentation. It looks like I'm leaning toward looking at event perception and its potential relationship to understanding sequences of images. I'll try to blog about it as the project progresses.

Oh, and I'm going to try to post a new downloadable essay sometime in the next few weeks if I can get around to finishing my edits of it. I'd like to get it done before school is in full swing and I get bogged down by statistics homework and grading papers.

Comics and Information Design

What with the chaos of getting ready to move, I'm going to skip updates on Meditations until I get settled into Boston in a week and a half. In the meantime...

John Soellner alerts me to his site comparing qualities of "comics" with information design. He has a nice set of links down at the bottom, though his writings seem fairly limited so far. I was a bit surprised by this, since I think there's quite a lot of overlap that can be discussed. Perhaps we can hope for more to come?

Robert Horn has made some to do about some of those connections, and Soellner seems to pick up on some of that at least (I do appreciate his using the term "information design" as opposed to Horn's meaning of "visual language" which is vastly different from mine).

Perusing some of the links there, I will vent that one of the things that bugs me about most discussions of "comics" from information design perspectives (though, thankfully, not here) is the sheer lack of treating the visual language as any sort of language. Since ID is mainly concerned with demonstrating data or information graphically, the intuituve aspects of the visual sequence seem wholly ignored for the properties of spatial juxtaposition (as if that's all there was to it).

My sense is that most of the people talking about these sort of things come from computer interface design or information design backgrounds, yet don't have much productive fluency in this visual language of "comics." In some ways, I feel like McCloud oversold the universality of creating "comics" to the point where people feel empowered to talk about it, even when they might lack the intuitions and expertise of graphic fluency. Perhaps this can be added to the list of illusions cast by that "veil of iconicity"?

Interestingly, his last post has a quote from Dennis O'Neil amounting to saying "images plus words in comics = a language." This "images + words = language" is roughly the same as the way Horn means it too. I have never understood this sort of reasoning... why should words, already a language, plus anything-else equate to some larger language (which, ahem, doesn't seem to have real intrinsic properties like a natural language)? Though perhaps less poetic, I far prefer to be accurate by saying that the visuals might become a language that then meets up with the written to become two languages working together in a broader multimodal communicative act.

This same trend has gone through gesture research too, with some people saying that "language + gesture = language". .... "1+1=1"? Huh? Why isn't it that "language + gesture = multimodalism beyond language"? This is yet another of those papers lying half written in my computer. Someday, I swear!

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

Theory informed tutorials

Well, now that I'm back online, it looks like this week is just a blogging bonanza!...

Scott links to Rivkah's blog instruction series on Paneling, Pacing, and Layout in Comics and Manga. It's broken up into a couple parts:

Part One
Part Two
(It looks like one more part is on the way. I'll update as accordingly)

These essays are very praxis-oriented theory, but still very interesting. I'm always curious about the intersection between praxis and (cognitive) theory, and actually think there is a fair amount of overlap. Praxis oriented instruction talk about how best to guide the intuitions, while structural theory seeks to probe those intuitions for their underlying rules. Hopefully we'll reach a point where a foundation of structural work is established so we can actually see where it and praxis meet up.

There's also a discussion about the usefulness of such tutorials that I've found interesting for its underlying motivating content of the Art vs. Language divide – individuality and "anti-copying" versus conventionality.

As insinuated by the above statement, my take on tutorials is similar to language classes. If you are a native English speaker, English classes help you hone your intuitions to become a better writer. If you don't speak the language already, language classes actually teach you to acquire the structure to begin with. These "visual language tutorials" are similar – they can either help improve your graphic writing, or lead towards getting graphic fluency in the first place.

Pictureless Byrne

Derik was sent a great series of pages from an old Marvel Alpha Flight issue by John Byrne that uses only words in the panels. I also second his observation about the mainstream character of the pages, despite no picture content. It's also fun to see a little formalist experimentation by such a mainstream artist like Byrne. Though, come to think of it, he has played with things like this before, like with several pages of panels shown entirely from a subjective viewpoint.

Comics Generation Thesis

Jason Alderman has completed his (downloadable) Masters Thesis on "Generating Comics Narrative to Summarize Wearable Computer Data." Here's the abstract:

As people record their entire lives to disk, they need ways of summarizing and making sense of all of this data. Comics (and visual language) are a largely untapped medium for summarization, as they are already subtractive and abstract by nature (the brain fills in the blanks and the details), and they provide a way to present a series of everyday events as a memorable narrative that is easily skimmed. This research builds upon the work of Microsoft, FX Palo Alto Labs, ATR Labs, and others to further ground the procedural generation in the comics theory of Scott McCloud, et al.

The paper poses some very intriuging ideas, and he does a great job summarizing and comparing a lot of the work that's been done in comic theory, including my own. Alderman's paper also has a good discussion of various comics computer programs and a very interesting discussion of adapting comic theory issues into programming code. The appendices also have a wealth of summarized theory and analysis as well. Particularly interesting was the taxonomy of panel types and gutter spacing. Go check it out!

He has some good criticism concerning my old model of visual language grammar though those should be asuaged by my newer work (which can be found at my ComicCon talk next month...hint hint).

And since its been mistaken before, I should point out that I don't consider my notion of "visual language" to be comparable to or a subset of the "visual language" proposed by Robert Horn (though his work informed my early stuff, and I subsequently developed a personal relationship with him when I was in college. He's a very nice man and enthusiastic about all things related to visual communication). Horn is more talking about a broader type of visual communication, largely diagrammatic, but mainly from the union of text and image. To me, the visual language is only the visuals (and only in specific conditions), which then unites with the verbal to create a multimodal whole (see my paper, Interactions and Interfaces for more).

Looking Ahead to the Past

Akin to the spirit of my last post, in the latest issue of Cognitive Science is an article about Aymara Andean metaphors for time. The authors claim that Andeans have a conception of the future as something behind the speaker and the past as in front. This is the opposite of English where most of the time we "face the future" or "look back to the past."

I have not read the piece yet, but apparently, press releases have been claiming that this reversal is unique to Andean, which the Language Log dispels quite quickly. I find it interesting that much of the data relied on gestures as well as spoken utterances, as it acknowledges the inseparability of conceptual expression in different modalities. What I'm curious about regarding this is what types of graphic narrative system this culture has (if any… I'd be floored if a culture didn't have a graphic system, but narrative — i.e. VL — is another story).

While not reliant on a front/future type metaphor, the linearity of panels in comics does echo this spatial-temporal metaphor. Would Andean allow for a similar native graphic system? I have no doubt that Andeans could learn and acquire a paneled system, but I'm more curious what sort of native system might arise, since other graphic cultural examples imply conceptual integration with language and gestures.

Hopefully before long "graphic" will become a category as centrally inquired about for studying concepts as language and gesture.

Update (6/17/06): More from the Language Log, this time a defense about the uniquness of Ayamara back/future time metaphors.

BNS, an overdue plug

Much to my surprise, Joe Zabel gives me a little hat-tip in his excellent review of Butternutsquash over at The Webcomics Examiner. Joe makes some great observations, and I wish he dissected the aesthetic qualities of even more of the strips.

To be honest, BNS may just be my favorite webcomic, and really I could (and do) include their examples in many of my projects. At one point, Joe says "Whether you refer to that quality as “closure,” “VL” or something else, Butternut Squash has got it in spades." Well, I personally just call what BNS does "good writing," which is why you should go spend an hour or so perusing their archives.

"Comic" Theory 101: Seeing Rhymes

At long last, I finally have a new "Comic" Theory 101 article up at Comixpedia. This one delves into the possibilities of "visual rhyming" and how we can play with it in practice, particularly in visual poetry.

For those who are curious, the first two examples come from a piece I did waaaaay back in 1998 called "Life is where Love is" that has yet to be posted online (though its in the Meditations book already). The large pages, of course, are from my La Belle Dame Sans Merci adaptations, the second version of which is being serialized twice a week. The final poem is brand new for the article.

"Graphic book"

This writer discovers the troubles of labels like "graphic novel" and "illustrated book." He eventually lands on "graphic book," and using "graphic" as a general adjective – which is interesting since I proposed much the same a year ago.

Secret Wars Re-Enactment Society

Ok, so maybe superheroes actualy can have a major effect on people's daily lives. Hilarious!

Some links

Dirk sends along his interesting interactive comic blog about his adventures in Japan. He's got a really cool idea where people can send him "assignments" about exploring Japan, and then he goes out and tries to do it, then writes a comic about it afterwards. Definitely worth checking out and maybe sending him some assignments.

I've also found this site that has maps of the US showing the population distribution of various religions. Noticably absent from the listing are most all Judeo-Christian religions like Hinduism or Buddhism (and, ahem, for all you Superheroes are myths people – none of those either :-P). Given that these were compiled from data garnered by a Catholic research center, I'd guess this is omission out of cultural bias not sufficient populations of those religions. I'd think there would be at least as many Hindus as Amish. Looks like other people noticed these absences too, and added the Pastafarians.

Plug o' rama

So, a couple weeks ago I finished reading Crashing the Gate by Jerome Armstrong (of MyDD.com) and Markos Moulistas Zúniga (of DailyKos) and I keep meaning to comment on it. I got the prerelease edition, but hadn't been able to get to reading it for a while after I got it. It is a very well written book with great substance to our current era in American history.

In my book with Thom Hartmann, We the People, we pointed out that the only way progressive voices can compete seriously is by taking over the Democratic Party, not by flocking to third parties, which are ultimately useless in the American politcal landscape. Crashing the Gate takes that ethos and dissects the current problems found in the Democratic establishment, while laying out a strategy for making it an effective political machine. The book is clear, concise, and a must read for anyone who want an insight into the broader political establishment and what must be done to return it to the hands of the citizens.

In other items worth plugging, Tim Godek alerts me that he posted a cleaner version of his story "One Night," which I find to be very interesting theory wise. The use of so many panels in a "iconographic" fashion (clocks, moon, sun, etc) creates cool effects to the extant that they are blatantly "concepts" as opposed to "narrative increments." I'll probably find good use for it in some future paper...



Oh, and more of my own "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is up as well.

Comixpederific!

This thread over at Comixpedia is worth checking out, which has turned into quite a heated discussion. I've mainly been discussing my Art versus Language perspectives regarding Japanese and American styles, to varying responses. I'm actually fairly grateful for the discussion and opposition to my ideas, since I've been working on some writing that pertains exactly to this topic. Nothing like a good argument to clarify my positions better.

I also think that discussions like thish are a good testament to the success of Comixpedia's site redesign. I think it allows for threaded discussions like this far better than the old one, and community stuff like this is always good.

And while I'm on the subject, I'll just throw out that I have another piece coming soon for Comixpedia... this time a little different than what I usually do... stay tuned!

Aside: Today's update of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is now online.

Bound by Law?

In the non-fiction comic department, this is a well done piece explaining copyright law. I think it makes a good argument for the place of copyright limitations and freedoms have in society.

Too Many Twos

I've got a short new piece up at Comixpedia for my ongoing "Comic Theory 101" column called "Two Many Twos." This one continues my series of short pieces where I try to illuminate issues involved with the intersection of “comic theory” and linguistics, here probing into the quandary called the "Problem of 2."

Like the last one, I've just tried to pose the issue and a little demonstrative visual puzzle, hoping that people might ponder/discuss it. Really, the whole thing just grew out of the last four panels, and I thought they'd be fun to work into a full piece.

I suppose this is also the first work I've done with my "avatar" as a narrator. Rather than turn myself into a kind of character, I've instead opted to keep it casual. I'd hoped for this to downplay the "me" in favor of the emphasizing the ideas more, but unfortunately in this case the ideas are demonstrated through the "me." Doh!

Genographic Project

The National Geographic will trace your distant ancestry for you with just a swab of your cheek. If I had a 100 bucks to throw around, I'd totally do it. Supposedly, us Cohn's have a unique genetic heritage anyhow, so I'm guessing one of the answers they'd give would just be "Mesopotamia."

Also, if people like reading about science, I highly recommend this blog by Carl Zimmer. His brother Ben also seems to be a linguist, who posts to the ever-entertaining Language Log.

Photo essays

Herman Krieger sends me this link to his photo essays which create juxtapositions within the image that then mesh with a caption. The results offer some very interesting combinations. What's most impressive to me is how he found the elements to take photos of.

Timing

Newsrama hosts the first part of three articles about Time in sequential art written by Joanna Estep. The piece is very well presented, and I like how systematic her analysis is, especially her use of diagrams to push along the theory. It's well worth reading, and I look forward to seeing what her next installments bring.

However, I also want to point out that it makes certain assumptions that are largely passed on from the Eisner/McCloud tradition. Mainly, it holds that "one panel = one moment," which simply isn't the case if you actually look at sequences of images from books (as opposed to just mental theorizing – of which I've been guilty of too). There is nothing about two panels that dictates time is passing – only content that implies temporal succession can yield this result. And, once you see that many panel sequences don't inherently push time along, you realize that problems arise in any linear notions of time across panels.

Following this, it also reinforces the ideas that "spatial distance = temporal distance." I had some thoughts on this like four years ago that I've never really worked into a full-blown paper, but the basic idea is that panel sizes create a rhythmic structure for reading. To really see if this is true I'd need to do eye-tracking studies though…

I'll hopefully be posting an essay I've been working on about Time myself sometime soon, but till then my old essay Visual Syntactic Structures (and book Early Writings...) delves into these things for anyone interested.

Update: I now see that Timing Part 2 is posted too. Again, worth reading, but continues the assuptions in McCloud that "reading time = fictitous (i.e. mental) time." I'm also curious why she includes her "hierarchies within images" as being related to time, since she doesn't measure any increase or decrease thereof. I agree with this: I don't think foregrounding is related to time at all, though I do think its related to distinguishing things like who is the focused actor and who is subsidiary.

Update #2: Timing Part 3 is up now, rounding out the articles. This one is about the integration of text. I'm not sure what real relevance it has for the understanding of Time after stripping away the assumptions I talked about above, but she certainly has some interesting things to say about composition and reading orders. Go read.

Happy Valentine's!

Hope love fills your day, no matter what kind it is. Last year to the day I finished posting my "A Love Story". Maybe now would be an appropriate day to (re)read it?

Update: While you're at it, also check out Joe Zabel's short review of "A Love Story" in this week's Webcomics Examiner. Joe is very kind in his praise. I disagree that the peak of the story is at the begining though. It might be a fairly rich scene visually, but definitely not the "peak" to the story itself – which only comes out when you focus on the philosophical subtext that the characters are indeed "mouthpieces" for. Thanks Joe!

Six degrees of Wikipedia

As many people are now discovering, there's a fun new tool called "Six Degrees of Wikipedia" which does just what one thinks: finds the connections between entries. Alas though, stumped it on my second try. It seems "Karl Marx" and "George Bush" are separated by over ten entries, so it gave me an error! Sounds about right actually...

The Antecedent

I'm always one to plug good works, especially political ones, so here's the "press release" for a new monthly strip at Comixpedia:

Bryant Paul Johnson is a very talented artist who creates a regular comic (comics are not just for kids!) called Teaching Baby Paranoia that wonderfully blends history, fiction and footnotes.

His new series The Antecedent looks at events in American history that eerily parallel current events today. The first installment "Two Fisted Shenanigans" tackled fiscal conflict of interest in the Washington administration - Jack Abramoff was not the first scoundrel in the lobbies of government. The second, just posted installment "Seditious Acts" looks at the Alien & Sedition Act in the Adams Administration - the original Patriot Act in American history.

In my book with Thom Hartmann, we bring up several parallels between older and current politics, including the Alien and Sedition Acts. Nevertheless, I encourage everyone to check out this new strip!

Sequart

I recently found Sequart.com site that professes to be "for the sophisticated study of comic books and graphic novels." The term "sequart" is meant as:

Sequart (n.) -- seh-kwart -- the artistic medium of sequential static imagery, whatever its composition, typically combined with text. The term is employed to distinguish the medium itself from particular genres and formats, such as comic books or graphic novels. "Sequart's diversity may be seen from Peanuts to Spider-Man, from product manuals to the Stations of the Cross."

So, basically they mean something close to VL (I mention my problems with the term in this article). Yet, despite their stated goal of reaching beyond genre, they almost solely focus on the mainstream and superhero comics. For instance, their book review of Superheroes and Philosophy really has nothing to do with "sequart," and everything to do with genre.

I couldn't even find much of anything on any of the major graphic novel publishers (Top Shelf, Fantagraphics, etc), while ample space is given to things like superhero continuity, etc. Concerns for webcomics are also conspicuously absent.

It is encouraging to find more intelligently written works of writing on such things on the web, even if they don't live up to their own stated pan-genre intentions.

The God That Wasn't There

I recently watched this documentary that questions whether Jesus actually existed and explores the gaps in the historical record to this effect. It had some interesting points, but could have benefited from even more exposition in the details and expanded commentary about the consequences of its conclusions.

Of similar nature is this episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit. I post it not only ‘cause its interesting and entertaining, but because it gives me an excuse to say that Penn sat at the table next to me at dinner in Vegas over the weekend.

I've found mythology, religion, and philosophy to be among my favorite of scholarly topics (lest people forget I studied Buddhism in college), and in a couple months I'll be posting a piece for comixpedia about their relationship to superheroes (I know, the rare interpretive piece, but with a linguistic twist!).

Passing Judgment

I've got new article up at Comixpedia discussing how intuitive judgments can lend towards developing a theories on the structure of visual language. I'm trying a new approach with this one, which I'm hoping to do more of: I'm laying out basic principles of methodology, and then leaving the actual theorizing to the readers. Its sort of an instructional textbooky approach.

So, my question to those who read this is: Do you like this sort of thing? Want more of it? I'd like to hear your feedback...

Origin of the Species, mon

Whoever thought of this is brilliant. I've heard that we're in the age of the remix, and this is certainly the coolest presentation of "Origin of the Species" I've ever seen. Be sure to listen to the samples, mon!