Review: Adventures in Cartooning

Adventures in Cartooning is a fun and creative book by James Sturm and two of his graduates from the Center for Cartoon Studies, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost, and published by First-Second.

It is designed as a how-to create comics book, though the lessons almost wholly come in narrative form as the Magic Cartooning Elf and other characters discuss the properties of comic creation while carrying out a simple and fun story. The book is aimed largely at children, and the humor reflects it (though did make me laugh aloud at parts — particularly the "Warning" on the back cover, which is just the sort of thing to get kids to pick it up).

Most of the overt instruction is fairly simple — things like what is a panel, how text can enrich images, orders of word bubbles, and the nature of different graphic devices like motion lines or dotted panel borders. The last several pages of the book also contain sections on cartooning basics that make explicit several of the lessons as well as some additional instruction.

However, because most of the instruction comes narratively, there ends up being only a limited amount of things instructed. This is a shame, because several techniques the authors use are very clever, elegant, and well worth instructing learners if they don't notice them.

For example, in one section the characters climb and then descend a mountain. On the climb, the three small square panels of the page are positioned climbing upwards left-to-right so that the line of the mountain-side is retained, while the opposite configuration occurs for the descent. On another page the characters sink down into water, with the length of the panel growing away from the top of the page in each panel to show falling deeper and deeper.

These are fun, simple, and effective techniques that comic creators can put to great use, though without the explicit instruction I fear they might be lost by less observant readers. Perhaps allowing for some additional non-narrative instruction would allow for even more of these aspects to be brought out explicitly. It would be easy to do this with the little labels and arrows used on the cover (which appear nowhere else in the book), or with the Elf character hovering outside the panels to point things out as well.

(On the flipside, I can understand why the authors might feel they just want to give kids the basics and not overwhelm them with too many concepts, though I'm inclined to think kids can handle it).

Additionally, I greatly liked how much of the book was carried out without text and the implications that text is only used to enrich visuals. This subtly reinforces the development of the visual language grammar in learning — which is no doubt the intent.

Overall, the book is a good read and would likely be a useful tool for helping young creators get on their way to creating graphic stories.

Review: The Power of Comics

Duncan, Randy & Matthew J. Smith. 2009. The Power of Comics. New York: Continuum Books

The Power of Comics is a recently released “first textbook ever” for “comics studies”, authored by Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith (book website here).

Perhaps to be expected from a book on the general “comic studies”, it includes a broad range of topics, from the history of comic books to comprehension of the medium, to creators and fandom. In many ways, the vastly disparate topics brings into question the overall utility of conceiving of a singular field called “comic studies.” Indeed, a person interested in one particular subtopic may find the entire rest of the book irrelevant. No doubt though, the scope of the book is meant to be inclusive and to at least cast the possibility that such a broad field could exist.

As a textbook, it succeeds in content, scope, and execution. The chapters are well laid out, have thoughtful questions at their ends, and several chapters end with very practical examples of analysis that serve as models for students. Chapters also reference a broad range of experts (discussed below), which further validates breadth and depth of this growing scholarship.

Given the nature of my own interests, I’ll focus primarily on the chapters dissecting the medium, Chapters 6 and 7. These chapters on formal analysis largely expand and refine Duncan’s earlier papers on “Comic Book Communication.” The theories stick largely to the expected status quo of theory: nothing overly radical or surprising jumps out, which is perhaps to be expected from a textbook.

In some ways though, this is a detriment. Despite growing works on formal aspects of the “comic medium”, most of these chapters rely on concepts inspired by Eisner and McCloud, supplemented by Groensteen and scattered others. However, much of these ideas go by with little regard for debates to their legitimacy. For example, “closure” is assumed to be true and never questioned as being valid at all (though multiple interpretations are presented). Others include the (erroneous) belief that the “gutter” somehow contributes to meaning, and the idea that each panel must be connected with every other panel in comprehension (can you say “working memory overload”?).

The primary focus of these chapters describe aspects of meaning-making, providing summaries of overview notions that intertwine across numerous levels of comprehension (sequence, layout, etc). The chapters are chock full of information, much of it useful to a beginner and some likely useful to more advanced students. I particularly liked the idea of an interplay between the reduction and expansion of information in the medium as a nice simple way to describe the status quo of considerations about the medium.

However, on the whole, numerous broad theoretical concepts are discussed without much real theoretical grist to them. Again, this might not be bad since the format is a textbook — elaboration on numerous topics would be impossible for the space.

Nevertheless, some aspects describing theories are a bit roughshot — for example describing “icon/index/symbol signs” could have benefited from better explanations, and proper terminology (it should either drop “signs” or be “iconic/indexical/symbolic signs”) and attribution to their originator (Charles Sanders Peirce) would at make for a good mention that these theories are roughly 100 years old.

Additionally, while McCloud and, at least somewhat, Eisner, are recognized for their theoretical insights and contribution to the canon, the realms of theory and praxis get blurred further in the chapters with quotes from numerous comic creators and an unheard of “comics art collector,” which among the few experts seems curious as legitimate sources. It also brings into question just what and who these chapters are aiming at: Theory? Analysis? Praxis?

Despite its limitations, The Power of Comics marks an accurate state of the field (whatever it might be) for studying comics. For good or bad, the theories in Chapters 6 and 7 reflect a particular paradigm of thinking about the medium. While it is my personal belief that formal theories have moved into a more sophisticated state, the views expressed in this book reflect what will someday be viewed as a nascent growth stage of considering the medium. For that, it almost seems like a “living history”, saying where we’ve been while knowing bigger things have and will appear.

Overall though, the book — including the theory chapters — is reasonably good for a “first textbook on comics,” and I would imagine it will fast become a standard text for those sorts of classes.

Review: Metaphor and Metonymy in Comics Storytelling

Kukkonen, Karin. 2008. Beyond Language: Metaphor and Metonymy in Comics Storytelling. English Language Notes 46 (2):89-98.

This paper from the literature point of view explores meaning-making in comics, particularly from metonymy and metaphor. It argues that the "semiotic" approaches of European comics scholarship that dissect parts into structrualist "minimal units" are insufficient to capture the complexity of comics' meanings, and is thereby a tacit argument against viewing "comics as a language" in the semiotic sense.

(Groensteen takes this same perspective against minimal units, though maintains the "comics as a language equation. I actually think that "minimal units" are *kind of* there, but it's beside the point, since linguistics hasn't really been concerned about "minimal units" since around the 1950s...)

While she does explain and support the cognitive linguistics view of metaphor taken from Lakoff and Turner, she does not actually use it in exposition. Most of the examples of metaphor and metonymy she cites are through a close reading of Watchmen, involving large scale metaphors on the scale of plots, themes, and motifs, and doesn't ever cite the correspondences of one "coneptual domain to another" that conceptual metaphor entails.

Her view of metonymy is equally broad. For part-whole metonymy she cites scenes where a whole understanding of an environment is given across multiple panels. This would imply that all instances where multiple characters are shown in their own panels but part of the same broader environment (what I call "Environmental-Conjunction") are metonymic, because they construct a broader whole by only seeing the parts. This is a curious proposition that I (mostly) like, though one that seems at least partially limited by not having a robust view on the broader narrative grammar for how sequential images are comprehended.

Japanese children, drawing, and imitation

These are a couple great articles by Brent Wilson about how children in different cultures learn to draw, particularly contrasting the Japanese with other cultures. Both articles contain more extensive discussions that I'll mention here, only focusing on some of the highlights...


Wilson, Brent. (1999). Becoming Japanese: Manga, Children’s Drawings, and the Construction of National Character. Visual Arts Research, 25(2), 48-60.

Here Wilson provides fairly striking evidence that over two-thirds of the drawings produced by Japanese children in primary education (K-6) are imitative of manga. However, even many of his "non-manga" types could have been drawn from manga and still might be drawn in that style. He also notes a developmental trajectory: There is a decline in non-manga drawings after kindergarten.

I would guess that this is in part a socialization process. Since kids at kindergarten start playing with other children in a structured arena, and all of them know manga, there is more of a motivation to draw in the style of the group than whatever way they might be drawing at home. Also, it reflects a growing sense of literacy. Since kids are learning to read, manga become reading material in addition to stimuli for learning to draw.


Wilson, B. (1988). The Artistic Tower of Babel: Inextricable Links Between Culture and Graphic Development. In G. W. Hardiman & T. Zernich (Eds.), Discerning Art: Concepts and Issues. Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing Company.

In this article, Wilson focuses on the argument against the belief that the Romantic view that children develop an inborn "artistic" capacity and that external influences are bad for it. He compares this in part to a sort of "Tower of Babel" phenomenon, where everyone has a universal inborn "language of art" that develops uniquely suited to each individual.

His theory against these claims is that graphic symbolism is a language that is transmitted through cultural patterns imitatively. He cites numerous evidence for this from numerous countries and time periods.

Pertaining to Japanese children though, he has a fascinating note that nearly all of the 6-year old Japanese children they studied could draw coherent sequential stories, compared with other countries where only about half of some groups of 12-year olds could. He also notes that Japanese children use increasingly more complex methods of graphic narrative as they age, (examples from 9 to 12), though they are all imitative of manga techniques.


These examples support that drawing ability is learned, as well as that imitation boosts abilities rather than hampers it.

(^_^) ... Emoticons and the Brain

Masahide Yuasa, Keiichi Saito,Naoki Mukawa. 2006. Emoticons convey emotions without cognition of faces: an fMRI study. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 22-27, 2006. Montréal, Québec, Canada

Related to the previous post on a testing of McCloud's "Cartoon Identification Theory" on cartoony vs. realistic images in the brain, here's a study using fMRI (brain scans) to look at emoticons which at this point are perhaps the most simplified signs for faces we use.

Faces have been the focus of a lot of debate in cognitive neuroscience, particularly about the "face area" in the brain. One side says it's an area strictly devoted to processing human faces, the other side says that it's an "expertise" area and it activates because humans are experts at recognizing faces. It is one of the most fiery debates in cognitive neuroscience, and learned about in most all intro classes.

Amazingly, this study shows no activation of this "face area" when looking at emoticons. :-O

Using fMRI, the authors compare Asian style emoticons (non rotated) with averaged faces (photos of multiple faces that have been blended to be more "generic") that were expressing the emotions of happiness and sadness. Emoticons appeared first on their own, and in a second study embedded within sentences, while non-emoticon signs using the same characters were also used as fillers (i.e. ":O*-<").

They found that photos of faces activate both areas pertaining to emotional valence (right inferior frontal gyrus) and facial recognition (right fusiform gyrus), while emoticons only activate emotional areas but not face areas. That is, as the authors say, "Remarkably, emoticons convey emotions without cognition of faces."

This finding has very interesting consequences for understanding how brains process varying degrees of complexity in images. The implication here at least is that more simplified faces become tied more explicitly to a "symbolic" meaning as opposed to their iconic meaning of resembling what they look like. That is, more simplified images strip down the meaning to its core meaning disconnected to the iconic reference that they are framed within.

It would be interesting to see a graded approach to this — such as taking different degrees of representation from McCloud's gradient of "cartoonification" (or to use my term, "haplosis"). Are there different degrees of activation for different representations? Does activation for the fusiform gyrus all suddenly drop off at a certain level of simplification? How does this affect the debate that the fusiform gyrus is an "expertise" area rather than a face area?

(^_^)

Comics and Film: A Narrative Perspective

Christiansen, Hans-Christian. 2000. Comics and Film: A Narrative Perspective. In Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, edited by A. Magnussen and H.-C. Christiansen. Copenhagen: Museum of Tusculanum Press.

This paper attempts to draw from film theory to inform the understanding of the comic medium. He discusses things like film shots/cuts, etc. especially in light of Bordwell and Thompson's work claiming that comprehension runs along a continuum of:

Conventions --> Norms --> Cross-cultural universals --> Deep structure of visual storytelling

For example, he claims that if knowledge of "cinematographic narration" comes from perceptual understandings, then it dispels the myth that these techniques were "invented" by early innovators of cinema. Rather, then would involve universal "deep structures of visual storytelling" grounded in perception.

Of course, this would assume that "cinematographic" techniques don't do anything that is out of the realm of perceptual knowledge, which isn't always the case — for example, with showing zooms alternating with panels of various characters ("Refiner Projection") and external settings that provide superordinate place information.

He also makes a case for complexity of storytelling matching genre, and says "as a rule, there is a higher frequency of point of view-structures in adventure comics than in romance comics" though provides no evidence for this claim.

While film uses movement, comics use static images. Thus, he breaks down aspects of temporal continuity between panels into three filmic types of cuts:

1) Matched cuts - where a movement is continued from one panel to another
2) Movement images - continuity created by action and shot-to-shot closure
3) Elliptical cuts - a discontinuous relation between shots that requires greater inference to understand the relationship

He argues that comics primarily use the final type of elliptical cuts the most, and that it is not disruptive in comics because of their layout on a page. He closes this appeal by stating that this process of ellipsis is actually a part of McCloud's notion of "amplification of simplification" for representing visual events, and that the way in which comics are understood may lie at the root of how film is understood at a base level (which I'd mostly agree with).

Cartoony vs. Realistic Images in the Brain

Choi, Yeojeong, Kim, Takhwan, & Jaeseung Jeong. 2008. "EEG Source Localization during Empathy of Iconic and Realistic Cartoon Characters." Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), Melbourne, Australia ,15-19 June, 2008

In McCloud's Understanding Comics he proposed his theory of "cartoon identification" that cartoony* images are "identified" with better than realistic images. This study (pdf) tested McCloud's theory by using behavioral measures of a 7-point rating and EEG measures of the brain's electrical activity.

I've found that this theory of McCloud's was a bit ambiguous, since people have interpreted it in two different ways. It can either mean that people "identify" with cartoony images meaning...

1) They are perceived cognitively at a more "base" level.
2) That they empathize with the characters more.

Critics have usually tapped into the second reading, since it is close to a claim about how people "identify" with characters in a literary sense. However, I've always been more partial to the first interpretation (which I attempted to codify further in my book), though the two views aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed, cartoony images could evoke more empathy because they are more conceptually basic. This study aimed to examine the second version, strictly with a view of the degree of "empathy" styles create.

The experimenters contrasted comic strips that featured two opposing characters who were depicted in either realistic or cartoony styles (as in the example above) and put into different scenarios to evoke reader sympathy via who wins the confrontation (strips had varying endings, ex. winner is congratulated by a woman vs. loser is consoled by a woman). Participants only viewed one depiction, and only one option for the ending.

They then compared ratings in a behavioral study on a 7-point scale measuring empathy to both "winners" and "losers", and in a separate population, measured EEG brainwaves for the same stimuli.

Brain areas were activated that related to social perception, recognizing facial expressions, and seeing another person's pain**. They found both higher behavioral ratings of empathy and greater activation in the brain for areas for the cartoony characters than the realistic characters for both "winners" and "losers" (though different brain areas for different roles). They take these results to be support for McCloud's theory of identification that indeed, cartoony images do invoke greater empathy from a reader than realistic images.

NOTES:

*The authors, and McCloud, often use "iconic" to mean "cartoony" — I'm going to avoid this because it doesn't accurately convey what "iconic" means in a semiotic sense (i.e. meaning through resemblance). Technically, both cartoony and realistic images are "iconic."

** Just a caveat for those who actually follow the link to the pdf poster. The study shows nice pretty pictures of brains with activated regions to support its hypothesis, but these can be misleading given the actual methods used. Unlike a technique like fMRI, EEG does not give much information about where in the brain something occurs, and is much better at when it appears (i.e. the timing of processing). These brain images and results were gained using a "source localization" procedure which extrapolated from the data what brain regions were being used, a technique that is commonly employed, but often controversial. This isn't to say that the results are inaccurate, but they should be understood with this context.

Review: Semiotics and comics

Magnussen, Anne. (2000). The Semiotics of C.S. Peirce as a Theoretical Framework for the Understanding of Comics. In A. Magnussen & H.-C. Christiansen (Eds.), Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Copenhagen: Museum of Tusculanum Press. pp.193-207

Magnussen's paper attempts to apply Peircean semiotics to the comic medium, though little of the actual paper focuses on those intents. Much of the paper is concerned with the definition of "comics", which is too bad, because it is nearly irrelevant for the overall claims attempted to be made. Like others, she conflates the structural aspects of the visual medium with the definition of "comics" though, so that "comics" is a sign type built out of image parts < panel < panel sequence < comic.

She makes a parallel to Van Dijk and Kintsch's 1983 discourse approach, equating panels with propositions and citing "local coherences" between panels created through inferences (which could essentially be the same as McCloud's notion of "closure"). The "global coherence" of panels relation to the whole is interpretted through narrative schemas.

Because she conflates "comics" with stories/sequential images, she states:

"For a comic not to be a story, it should be possible to create a global coherence on the basis of something other than story-structure, and in which the local coherences are made on inferences based on parameters other than actions, actors, time and place" (198).

She then gets into the usual bind regarding whether a comic without a story is actually considered a "comic" or not. If accepting that comics ≠ sequential images, this would be of no concern.

Her main analysis focuses on the semiotic elements of the example comic. She primarily focuses on icons, indexes, and symbols, and leaves out aspects of Peirce's model regarding the nature of the "Sign vehicle" that would change many of the interpretations related to conventionality. For instance, if she had those notions, simplified icons would not be interpreted as symbolic, but just types of "legisigns".

Most of her argument though is that comics use indexical signs beyond just icons and symbols. For example, she claims that word balloons are indexical because of the attribution given by their Tails. More interestingly, she claims that the "still-images of actions" are also indexical, because they only show a part of a broader temporal whole action. This is probably the most astute observation of the piece, yet receives relatively little relative attention. This is a key insight, and would be worth expanding on.

"180º Rule"... not so much

Germeys, Filip, and d'Ydewalle Géry. 2007. The psychology of film: perceiving beyond the cut. Psychological Research 71:458-466.

This experiment tests the "180º Rule" of film editing using eye movements, and finds that no evidence for negative cognitive effect is found.

The 180º Rule claims that in film editing, when showing two characters on the left and right of a shot, it would be confusing if the next shot reversed the perspective so that the characters end up on opposite sides. Filmmakers often dance around this by using over the shoulder shots that keep characters constant to their location in the frame.

The experimenters filmed two people having a conversation sitting around a table with a constant background from all angles. They cut the conversation into 22 shots and varied the number of correct vs. reversed-angle (180º violation) shots there were. This video was then shown to participants whose eye movements were tracked, measured from the "starting point" of where their eyes were located when the previous shot ended.

The results showed that eye movements were determined almost wholly by tracking who was speaking in the frame — the agent of the shot — no matter where they were located in the frame. The results showed no evidence for confusion at 180º Rule violations, nor did it show any evidence that participants were "mentally rotating" the scene to make up for those reversed angle shots.

In other words, all claims about the ill effects of 180º violations were not confirmed. They take these findings to indicate that editing rules do not cause confusion or ruin a scene's representation, and that the content of the expression overrides the way it is represented.

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.

The Pictorial and Linguistic Features of Comic Book Formulas

Neff, William Albert. 1977. The Pictorial and Linguistic Features of Comic Book Formulas. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Denver, Denver, CO.

Neff compares the patterns of formal properties for comics in different narrative genres of Adventure, Romance, Mystery, and Alien Beings or States. He analyzes the fields of panel shape (vertical, horizontal, square, circle), angle of view (lateral, high, low), and type of shot (close, wide) in comic panels. He also looks at pragmatic sentence types and parts of speech of stressed words from the text of comics.

His results show distinctions in the "formulas" of different genres, showing that different genres do use differing patterns for their distributions of these fields, and he then describes his interpretations for what those forumlas indicate about the genre (and vice versa).

While I don't doubt that such patterns for genres exist, this study had numerous problems. The categories for analysis were a little broad (only wide and close shots?) and often washed over in coding (diagonal panels were grouped as either horizontal or vertical). The interpretations of the genres' formulas also seemed a little like just so stories.

However, I take this entire study with a grain of salt because the sample size of his analysis is so small. For each genre, he uses only two comic books (pamphlets). While he does get statistically significant results using chi-squares, he pools frequencies across books, which eliminates any variation across books with no way to analyze it. Shouldn't he be using averages for this?

Two books per genre, and limited categories in the fields of analysis, are far too little to really get a sense of the patterns of an entire genre. His total number of panels in all was only about 530. In comparison, I consider my study comparing 300 panels in each of 12 Japanese and 12 American paperbacks (Cross-Cultural Space) to have been small in scope, and have just initiated a study of at least 200 books of varying genres and countries.

While I greatly appreciate the attempt at doing such corpus analyses (and am actively doing more), and especially like seeing it as a "hidden treasure" in the history of this type of study, this one unfortunately lacks the scope to be taken seriously.

Brainwaves for non-sequitur visual sequences

West, W. Caroline, and Phil Holcomb. 2002. Event-related potentials during discourse-level semantic integration of complex pictures. Cognitive Brain Research 13:363-375.

This study examines the neurocognitive processes involved with comprehending a series of pictures, like in comics. The experimenters pulled frames from an animated movie to create static picture sequences. There were two possible endings for each sequence: one with a normal ending, and one with a non-sequitur panel that did not make sense.

Comparison of these sequences used a technique called "event-related potentials" (ERP) that examines people's brainwaves with an EEG recording. The electrical field is measured off the top of the scalp through an electrode cap (like in hospitals), and by averaging out the noise at the critical point (the "event" — here the last panel) it can give you a nice smooth waveform that can tell you about the nature of the cognitive process. Unlike fMRI, ERPs don't tell you much about "where" in the brain things happen, but they do tell you a lot about "when" and a little about the nature of the process.

In this case, your brain distinguishes the difference in processing at less than half a second. The result was a "negative" deflection of the waveform roughly 400 milliseconds after the final panel appeared on the screen (panels appeared one-by-one). These waveforms are from the frontal right part of the head:



The BLUE line represents the normal sequence ending, the RED line the non-sequitur ending. Note that the lines separate and there is a bump labeled "N400" that shows the processing difference (negative is up here). Because of the separation, we can tell that the brain is working harder to process the non-sequitur panel. If it was treated the same, the lines would stay together, like at the beginning of the waveforms.

This N400 also appears in language under similar conditions: where the brain is working harder to integrate semantic information into a meaning, though with language it appears in different locations on the scalp (more back of the head than front). In fact, the first paper that found an N400 for language used this same manipulation: comparing normal and incongruous words at the end of a sentence.

Unfortunately, more experiments of this sort have not really been done with sequential images. Fortunately, it's only a matter of months until I do more. Phil Holcomb, one of the authors, is also one of my advisors. My upcoming projects will be doing these types of brainwave studies using more targeted manipulations of the visual grammar.

Review: Drawing Words & Writing Pictures

Drawing Words and Writing Pictures by Matt Madden and Jessica Abel

Before I started reading DW&WP, Matt Madden warned me that it was a book for praxis, not theory. As amusing as I find it that such a disclaimer needs to be given to me, the book draws upon aspects of theory throughout in an informed and well-measured way, and I am lead to thinking further about the relationship between theory and praxis.

First off, this book is a great resource. It’s put together well, lays out all the essential issues from hand lettering to stretching to avoid tendonitis (I know from personal experience: important and overlooked!). It even has homework and lesson plans, along with digital resources as well. For praxis, this all is fantastic.

However, no review of mine should escape looking at theoretical issues and reading this book has made me once again consider how praxis can draw from theory.

For instance, an immediate question of mine was: Why is it important to include defining “comics” at all? The book — wonderfully titled — talks entirely about the process, what I would say “writing in visual language.” So, why spend additional space trying to shoehorn various social manifestations of “writing pictures” (i.e. manga, comics, graphic novels, etc.) into the umbrella of “comics”?

First off, why should people who are aiming to create visual stories necessarily care about the arguments for what are or are not "comics"? These issues may be important for scholars, but most who read this book can just go by the "I know it when I see it frame." Truly, if they needed to have their "horizons expanded" by a broader definition, they probably aren't the ones reading this book.

Furthermore, as I see it, inviting readers into the subcuture of “comics” is unimportant to the aims of the book. Especially since they do well to state the applications of the ideas beyond genres and styles, this book is not about “drawing comics” — it’s about learning to be a visual writer. To this end, mentioning “comics” as a cover term at all belies this broad goal. What better way can people expand their applications of “writing in pictures” than by not immediately being co-opted into a subculture that they might not desire being in? Let them learn the visual language, then let them decide what they want to do with it on their own terms.

With the course of instruction, I thought the emphasis on thumbnails and not on scripts was a great choice that isn’t focused on enough. This is the central place that “writing in pictures” happens, and the assembly line style with scripting skirts this step often. It nicely reinforces the theme that this book is teaching people to be authors, not cogs in a manufacturing wheel.

I do have some problems with the instruction of panel transitions as how authors are guided to think about their craftsmanship. Now, heavily influenced by McCloud as a teenager, I did go through a period where I thought in terms of panel transitions (or at least I thought I did), and I certainly benefited from it.

However, when I look back on my thought processes with a broader theory in mind, I realize that I wasn’t just looking just one panel ahead as transitions would have us think. Really, I planned for whole sequences, to the point where (in thumbnails) I might draw an expected panel later in the sequence before filling in the ones in between. Such a process would predict that we are thinking in terms of whole sequences not linear panel-to-panel relationships — as my theories of sequential images imply. I suspect that others have had similar experiences.

On the plus side, what transitions do allow is a directed focus on storytelling methods that convey aspects of the scene beyond just the actions. They provide a cover for people to think about whether to slow “time” down, show other characters or the environment, etc. However, if we were to develop a more robust vocabulary of types of panels to be used and the potential for what panels might contain, we might not need the bootstrap of “transitions” to couch it in.

In fact, while I think that learning theory can be beneficial to practice, perhaps what would be a more direct and simple learning tool would be to see that theory in action. For example, in section 3, they discuss rhythm and pacing — the decision making for what to show and when to show it and use several variations of stories where they demonstrate different pacings. This type of section could be expanded to account for the types of things covered by transitions.

I would also have enjoyed seeing a greater discussion of page layouts and the uses that one can make with them, especially regarding meaning and rhythm. While I disagree with McCloud that the size of panels has an effect on narrative time, I do believe it has an effect on pace — the rhythm and meter of reading. Elaborating on these concepts would be very useful for beginning authors.

Finally, while it has recently become a point of research for me, I found their comments on reading order a bit wanting. Despite their specific advocacy to not use “blockage” scenarios (where two panels are vertically stacked to the left of a long panel) they praise another page by Mike Mignola that uses this layout just three pages prior. The overall message of “using unambiguous layouts” rings true, but this inconsistency (along with personal knowledge that fluent readers don’t have ambiguity in such scenarios) was a little disappointing.

Despite these issues, this book is a fantastic resource and accomplishment given other books on the topic. I wish that I had it when I was a teenager, as I probably would have devoured it voraciously, doing all the exercises and then some. Indeed, while I probably would have gotten more mileage out of it then, I plan on using its resources here on out.

Review: The System of Comics by Thierry Groensteen

Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Translated by B. Beaty and N. Nguyen: University of Mississippi Press.

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The best thing about the new translated work The System of Comics by Thierry Groensteen is that it hopefully reflects an increase of English translations of international works on comic theory. There are numerous offerings by European, Japanese, and South American authors that rarely make their way into American scholarship, and more exchange of ideas can only be fruitful to the field. Groensteen is regarded as one of Europe’s leading historians and theorists of comics, and in its original French, the Systeme de la Bande Desinée is heralded by many as a "must-read,” so it would be a logical starting point for such a trend.

Moreover, Groensteen’s book is offered by many as a “serious” alternative Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which has gained massive popularity, especially in America, yet remains dismissed in many scholarly circles since McCloud himself is not an academic. Comparisons between the two works has become commonplace (including the book’s own introduction), and this review will be no exception. For his own part, Groensteen does not engage with McCloud's theories except in a singular passing endnote, which is a shame since their ideas share many similarities.

While my French is not sufficient to assess the overall quality of translation, it certainly did not read comfortably. At times, the English felt unnatural, and word-choice often seemed clumsy if not uninformed. For instance, calling the psychological device of an "eye tracker" an "eye path follower" betrays a lack of competency and/or desire to find the accurate vocabulary (whether on the part of the translators or author is unknown). Additionally, while the endnotes were often helpful, the absence of a reference section is quite noticeable, and the endnotes do not include all the cited bibliographic information. As an “academic” book, such an oversight is a bit peculiar.

Nevertheless, the writing should only be a surface issue to the actual ideas in the book. Perhaps the most appropriate place to start is where he does: with the definition of "comics.”

Problems with definitions

Groensteen begins with what has become a common exercise in the study of comics: defining “comics” itself (no doubt bande desinée originally). He carefully deconstructs the faults of various definitions that have been proposed by various realms of scholarship. He rightly shows it cannot be guided by a single "essence" like text/image interactions, and decries a definition of comics as episodic narratives, among others.

Rather, at the outset, he identifies "comics as a language" a “system” that arises out of the "combination of a… collection of codes,” most strongly motivated by “iconic solidarity” — a fancy term for the contribution of several images. While somewhat more flexible, this emphasis on the visuals sounds a great deal like McCloud’s more rigid “juxtaposed sequential images,” but lacks a reference or engagement with his ideas despite discussing many other scholars works who Groensteen disagrees with.

Truly, in its similarity, Groensteen’s definition falls into the same formalist trap as McCloud's in failing to separate the structural notions of creating images/writing from the socio-cultural role of “comics” as objects/artifacts. This habit may have been inherited by them both from Kunzle’s influential The Early Comic Strip, whose recasting of the term “comics” on pre-1800s sequential images engendered many (like McCloud) to seek out a definition to include all possible historical examples. However, this goal is a red-herring, and as Horrock’s points out, there is no reason for sequential images from diverse historical contexts to be bound to the same socio-cultural context of the contemporary notion of “comics.”

Indeed, "comics" as a social artifact refers to numerous qualities, including 1) physical objects (strips and books), 2) a collection of genres, 3) an industry, 4) a culture/community, and others that are all tied to a context of the modern era. On the other hand, sequential images do create a language: a “visual language” that combines with text to be used within those social objects called "comics." "Comics" are not this visual language. "Comics" are a social object written in a visual language that combines with text. If novels or magazines are written in English, why should “comics” be a language, instead of be written in a language?

While Groensteen strives to strike out an abstract notion for his definition, he frequently reinforces the conflation of "comics as a medium” with "comics as a social artifact” — particularly a physical object. He writes that comics owe their birth to the technological development of lithography (8). Further on, his analysis of both word balloons (69-75), panels as “measurable in square centimeters” (28), and the expressive power of sequential images through “arthrology” rest wholly on the physicality of and across pages. However, physical objects cannot be languages — especially in the abstract sense of them being a “code” — and his reinforcement of it runs contrary to his own definition of “comics” that claims to guide the broader work.

The "System"

As invoked by the title, Groensteen’s work seeks to sketch a “system” by which “comics” operate. To his credit, he carefully moves in analysis through varying levels of interactions in comics’ structure, accounting for most of its forms. He eschews the method of previous structuralist approaches to treating the form as a “language,” which aim to dissect the medium into its minimal units, instead aiming for its broader “articulation” — larger levels of structure. However, Groensteen’s grand system is little more than an extensive taxonomy with terms that essentially mean “the principle by which (pick your taxonomic portion) operates.”

Groensteen begins by discussing the “spatio-topical system,” the various spatial elements at play in comic pages. He first notes the “hyperframe” as the delineated space of the page, in contrast to the “multiframe” — meaning the relation of all frames that constitute a comic piece, including “the sum of the hyperframes.” This chapter also includes discussions of the functions of a panel, usefulness of margins, positioning of balloons, and various facets of page layout, such as inset panels, the “strip” of a tier of panels, and possible functional roles for types of layouts.

Now, it's not that I think Groensteen's theory of comics is invalid or wrong, but that it is uninteresting.

While at times insightful, he labors through discussing details of relatively lackluster observations, such as the various ways in which a balloon visually interacts with a panel border. It is understandable why a taxonomic distinction can be made between balloons that touch the panel border and those that overlap it, but does it really add substantially to knowledge about the function and understanding of balloons as a graphic/narrative element on its own?

If this discussion led to a substantial observation about the constraints that this interaction creates on such a relationship, this breakdown would seem more significant (for instance, that two balloons cannot cross tails such that their speakers are in opposite panels than the balloons). However, no revelation of this sort is reached, and most of his analysis focuses solely on the physical aspects of the relations of balloons to panels. Such is the features of most of his discussions. All of this leaves the question of what this analysis offers a theory of comics understanding except for surface descriptions of a (fairly banal) phenomenon?

The next two sections are devoted to the principle of “arthrology” to describe either the linear relations of panels to each other (restrained arthrology) or the relations that one panel might have to others in a non-linear sense (general arthrology). Unlike McCloud’s panel transitions, Groensteen does well to recognize that panels make connections beyond their immediately juxtaposed neighbors, yet does not give any hint as to how. McCloud’s transitions at least attempted to characterize relationships between panels, which is largely why the approach is so appealing, but Groensteen leaves such detail aside, preferring instead for gross scale abstract principles. He describes “braiding” as the principle guiding arthrology — essentially the function of making connections across the multiframe.

On the surface braiding and arthrology appear to be about the creation of meaning, like McCloud’s “closure,” or perhaps a comic version of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) classic notions of local and global discourse coherence, which Saraceni (2000) also attempted to map to comics’ analysis. However, Groensteen does not even come close to talking about semantic concerns in this way — despite purporting to (the back cover describes the book as “An authoritative exploration of how the comics achieve meaning, form, and function.”).

Really, braiding and arthrology are a theory of compositional relationships. What Groensteen focuses on is not in any way a system of how the content of panels lends towards making meaning — it is primarily about the relationship of the visual composition within a panel to others on a page and other panels scattered throughout the broader work. In particular, his theory observes the recurrence of compositional or thematic similarities (such as motifs) across varying distances of space, be it a page or a whole work, and whether the position in layout of those panels has significance (such as in the first or last position of a page).

While these observations provide a very different perspective on comics pages, they do not even scratch the surface of the “holy grail” of questions about comic sequences that they appear to address: how do sequences of images create meaning? Indeed, Groensteen dismisses such aspects as merely about "storytelling."

Rather, arthrology, like the other aspects of Groensteen’s system, once again highlights a physical feature of comic pages in what is proposed as an abstract code of understanding. The theory treats the medium as an “art object” to be analyzed like a multi-canvas painting, as opposed to a communicative medium in the McCloudian sense. Indeed, such an approach would be akin in verbal language to recognizing that various patterns of sound appear throughout different words in a story — perhaps telling you something about phonetics, but nothing about meaning. All told, Groensteen’s system limits itself to only describing the surface aspects of the medium, without pushing towards any deeper constraining principles.

Despite the criticism of the workings of his system, Groensteen is nevertheless an astute observer of various components of the comics form, and his numerous insights on comic elements betray a deep commitment to dissecting the medium. The System of Comics does reveal gems of this intuition at times when discussing various components, though the overall theoretical architecture in which they are embedded is not commiserate with the value of their insight.

Scholarship and Paradigm Shifts

The most troubling thing I found about The System of Comics is the overall orientation to scholarship that this work represents. Throughout, Groensteen’s writing conveys an attitude as if the theories are entitled to be significant, echoed in the introduction where Beaty and Nguyen hail it for emerging from the rich semiotics tradition, as if that inherently legitimates its ideas. This is a direct knock to McCloud, who they note has “been criticized for…lack of theoretical sophistication” (1). Though, this criticism has only come from academics unfortunately perpetuating the stereotype of ivory tower snobbery, as if scholarship must be done in the academy. It is hypocritical at best for any scholar to deride McCloud for not engaging a broader literature while lauding a book with very similar ideas to McCloud’s without any citation or discussion of them. So much for the value of “engaging the literature.”

Truly, Groensteen is the anti-McCloud, keeping the keys to theory locked away in the ivory tower, reachable by only those willing to slog through the exposition to reach it. While McCloud’s work about comics is presented in its visual language, there is some irony that The System of Comics takes “iconic solidarity” of images as its crux, yet is almost devoid of graphic examples. Perhaps this is why McCloud is ridiculed so much by Groensteen-minded theorists: he willingly gives away the goods to the rabble without a fight.

If McCloud lies on one extreme of being too accessible (as if that’s a bad thing), Groensteen’s work is the inverse, reflecting the worst of academic jargon and inapplicability of “theoretical sophistication” — to the extent that the terminology obfuscates the actual theories (to academics and layfolk alike). Groensteen offers complicated names and lengthy descriptions to what are otherwise fairly facile observations about surface phenomena.

Moreover, numerous questions are left unanswered, for instance how this theory is useful or applicable to 1) describing how this medium of sequential images communicates, 2) contrasting various comics’ structure with each other, or 3) describing the relationship of the visual language in comics to other modes of human expression?

Groensteen’s “system” accomplishes none of these. These are all questions that are important to semiotics as a discipline, so why is Groensteen's approach unable to even broach them? It only states vague principles for nearly obvious observations, with fancy names and a semiotic tradition to validate its claims. It is scholarly hand-waving at its best, and a reflection of why the invocation of “semiotics” garners more eye-rolls than awe in many circles.

In Kuhn’s renowned discussion of paradigm shifts, he describes that prior to a major shift many similar theories will emerge in competition with each other, yet all pointing towards similar intuitions. In this case, Groensteen taps into the common intuition that the system found in comics is somehow similar to the system of language. Indeed, he begins with a strong statement about how comics are a language, yet his analysis paints a picture of the comic medium that is decidedly un-language-like.

While his stated focus is not on “minimal units” — thereby avoiding topics such as how the system is understood as a graphic domain and meaning-making for signs and symbols — he states nothing resembling a grammar for how the sequence creates meaning (though claiming that is his intent). If his aim is to describe a “code” that shows this is a language, one would think it would involve structures akin to language. All this leaves doubt as to whether Groensteen would actually know what being “a language” would entail in the first place (aside from metaphoric extension).

To this extant, Groensteen’s total work certainly marks a valiant attempt that can take its place next to other approaches that reflect the growing pains of a discipline, sharing the intuition that the comic form should be compared to language (including: Eisner 1985; McCloud 1993; Saraceni 2000; Cohn 2003, etc.). However, this piece and its theories are not the revolutionary new paradigm for comics that will sweep away all others, and will likely follow the path of the branch of semiotics from which it hails — being considered largely passé in the study of language.

References

Cohn, Neil. 2003. Early Writings on Visual Language. Carlsbad, CA: Emaki Productions.
Eisner, Will. 1985. Comics & Sequential Art. Florida: Poorhouse Press.
Halliday, M. A. K., and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York, NY: Harper Collins.
Saraceni, Mario. 2000. Language Beyond Language: Comics as Verbo-Visual Texts. Dissertation, Applied Linguistics, University of Nottingham.

Comics and the Brain... almost

Nagai, Masayoshi, Nobutaka Endo, and Kumada Takatsune. 2007. "Measuring Brain Activities Related to Understanding Using near-Infrared Spectroscopy (Nirs)." In Human Interface and the Management of Information. Methods, Techniques and Tools in Information Design, 884-93. Heidelberg: Springer Berlin

Looks like I was beat to the punch... I've found a study from last year that analyzes the activity in the brain while reading comics. However, it doesn't say much.

The authors use near-infrared spectroscopy to measure blood flow in the brain while reading comics. This technique uses infrared light to measure where blood flows in the brain, which can thus indicate the brain regions involved in various behaviors. They find that "the left prefrontal lobe region is activated when people actively try to understand the comic stories and to memorize their contents for reporting in the future."

However, there are extensive problems with this study. First, the number of stimuli they use is extremely small (only 6 strips) as is their population (13 people... which does not add up to counterbalancing). Comparatively, the study I'm planning will use 180 stimuli per trial (720 strips total) and use somewhere from 24 to 36 people.

Additionally, the increase in blood flow that they observe only occurs in "reported" conditions — where subjects are actively making a judgement about the stimuli, as opposed to scenarios when they are not. This seems more to reflect the well-reported cognitive activation for making judgements than anything about the structure of the comics themselves.

So... this really doesn't tell us much about comics and the brain, but its nice to see other people are at least taking stabs at it as well.

Comics as a Binary Language

Laraudogoitia, Jon Pérez. 2008. The Comic as a Binary Language: An Hypothesis on Comic Structure. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 15 (2):111-135.

This study examines the structure of comics by converting the contents of panels into binary code. Coding a broad number of Eurpoean comics, a panel holding the protagonist of a story ("lead character") is given a "+" while a panel without is given a "-". The author then uses a series of computations to examine the regularity of sequences where the protagonist does or does not appear, or if there is constancy to the amount that they appear througout a book.

The results show that there is a quasi-regularity to sequences that feature the protagonist or don't feature the protagonist. That is, there are "runs" of sequences with protagonists, then runs without.

While interesting for coming up with a positive result — and very creative for applying computational methods to comics (somehting I don't think has otherwise been done), I find numerous problems with this paper.

First, why should we assume that Protagonist vs. Non-protagonist is a meaningful binary juxtaposition? In some ways it reflects of my distinction between Active and Inactive (or Passive) entities in a panel (originally based on Natsume's distinction of "positive" vs. "negative" entities). However, my breakdown is superficially "things that move across panels" to "things that don't." Protagonists could fall into either one of those categories given the appropriate sequence.

But... what if there is more than one protagonist? What if a scene shift happens where a new character becomes the lead character — this would just be coded as a consistent "-"?

Mostly though, I am unsure of what is interesting about these results. The visual language in comics features consistent "runs" of protagonist or non-protagonist panels: so what?

The analysis throughout focuses only on linear sequences based largely on Markovian chains, but I think my work has strived to show that sequences of images cannot simply be considered linear sequences. They have hierarchic structures guiding them — which such a binary analysis of the surface elements would be unable to show.

This study is an interesting first attempt at using computational methods to analyze visual language structure — and I love that the research has now begun permeating such extants. Hopefully further studies will bring more interesting results.

Connectedness in comics

Weber, Heinz J. 1989. Elements of Text-Based and Image-Based Connectedness in Comic Stories, and Some Analogies to Cinema and Written Text. Paper read at Text and Connectedness: Proceedings of the Conference on Connexity and Coherence, July 16-21 1984, at Urbino, Italy.

Weber attempts to create a textual model of comic communication drawing on cinema studies and text research (similar to the intents of Saraceni and others).

He describes three sections: Graphic, cinematographic, and textual, as well as the intersections between them. He also postulates several degrees of “connectedness” ranging from conformity, sequential and integrated connexity, cohesion, and coherence.

Conformity deals with arrangement of panels – conventionalized formats, while connexity can either relate to the internal relationships of elements within panels, layout issues, divisional panels, metonymic panels, the shifting of a balloon's tail to different roots, etc. Cohesion depends on causality between the succession of panels (syntax/semantics). Finally, coherence deals with pragmatic relations between “text external” elements.

Like other papers of this ilk, it provides a broad scale analysis of aspects of comics' structure, yet doesn't delineate them carefully enough to detail the componential role they might play. Instead, it uses overarching "principles" to tie them all together to create a goolash of comic structure.

Trouble with categories in "Comics are not Literature"

Listening to the downloadable mp3 of the "Comics are not Literature" panel from Comic-Con is fascinating as a demonstration for how different people's categories are relating to the definitions of "comics," "literature," or even "reading" it seems. (all of the issues seem resolvable by accepting the notion of a visual language)

As I've been claiming for awhile, "comics" for these people seems to really be bound to the genre(s), so the notion of that as literature would indeed seem troubling. It also seems rather ridiculous in general for anyone to make a blanket statement about the notion that all comics are literature, as opposed to literature being something that individual comics can attain. Is this just a terminological straw man? Perhaps this is just a problem created by using "comics" as a singular noun?

Concerning the one person's notion that comics are not "read" just seems ridiculous. Calling the process that we do to decode comic sequences just "looking" is revealing as belonging to a paradigm of thinking holding images into a subjugated position. "Perceiving" or "looking" are passive processes compared to the active "reading." I'd argue, with empirical evidence, that "reading" is indeed the closer category.

I find it also very interesting that the panel has next to no one who is actually draws comics — i.e. no one with "visual language fluency." And, for a conversation that keeps going back to formal properties of the medium, perhaps they'd have done well with someone on the panel who actually knows about that stuff?

In general, it seems like most all of these issues that they struggle with are almost wholly resolved by accepting a paradigm that acknowledges that images in sequence are literally a visual language. No more struggling with whether someone is a "cartoonist" or "writer" or "artist" — they're a "visual author", or even better, just a "writer" who writes in pictures as opposed to words. I could go on and on (and, in fact, I have).

These were exactly the issues I was addressing in two of my older articles: The "Literature" issue is essentially encapsulated by the "Comics as Art"-debate, while the issues that they're struggling with in general are instances of the limitations of the network of concepts that "comics" encapsulates where these peoples' categories are running up against troubles.

Review: "Copying and Artistic Behaviors"

Smith, N. R. (1985). "Copying and Artistic Behaviors: Children and Comic Strips." Studies in Art Education 26(3): 147-156

Smith argues that the negative views on "copying" demonstrated by art educators since the 50s is misplaced in some contexts. She claims that some forms of copying are good, and the relative value of copying is based on three factors: need, model, and process. She examines varying fields through use of a corpus of comics produced by American children, noting that themes and genres are copied greatly. She didn't find that the children copied the drawing style as much.

My curiosity is whether this is due to lack of practice/exposure though. The examples given by a child with "unusual ability" seem hardly on par with Japanese drawings of children of the same age that copy manga en masse. This child did copy various elements of drawings, though not absolutely. For instance, when copying Charlie Brown, he imitated parts but altered/left out others. Another child drew the typical "lumpy" figure of Captain America to show his musculature. Smith conjectures that his intent was to draw someone "strong" as opposed to drawing a bicep in particular.

To this extant, these children's copying seems to be drawing characters/features to the point of recognition — not iconic match. In other words, they're trying to convey concepts visually, not create "realistic" pictures (or even "accurately" imitated images).

While interesting to see much support given to imitation, most of it is not structural, and still maintains an "Art" perspective. The "need" assigned to copying is largely social or emotional/psychological, not structural or cognitive. (For instance, it says imitation suits a child's need to "play out" conflict in fantasy, as opposed to saying that children copy because their brains are pattern seeking machines).

Social need is Language-like though, as it heralds conventionality. She also marks copying as important as a natural behavior in socialization, since "younger children initiate copying as a means of acquiring desired knowledge" while "older children want to master images representative of their culture" (147).

Also interesting was her statement why she wanted to look at comics in the first place: "Comic strips are of interest because children frequently and spontaneously initiate copying of them despite disapproval" (148). No citation is given to this statement, but are comics copied more than other forms of visual communcations in culture? (it wouldn't surprise me if the answer is "yes") And, if so, doesn't that say something about the structure of the stimuli in relation to the human mind — like maybe these signs are somehow attuned to acquisition and socialization?

Mannerism, Imitation, and Iconic Bias

Dirk (who kindly keeps linking to my posts) provides some thoughts on my last post about imitation by describing "Mannerism" (about halfway down the post).

He describes the Renaissance Mannerists (what I'll call abstractly as "cohort 2") copied the style of the first wave of Renaissance artists like Leonardo and Michaelangelo that came before them ("cohort 1"). Where cohort 1 actually studied the anatomy of real animals and people, cohort 2 simply copied cohort 1. As a result, cohort 2 is said by Dirk to have...

"the surface tics of the Rennaissance masters down pat, but his work displays none of the anatomical understanding by which they came to be able to create such accomplished illusions of form and light. Mannerism is an artistic game of Whisper, with details lost and distorted as they move further away from their point of origin."

Dirk goes on apply this same process to describe the work of Rob Liefeld and others (who I've oddly defended on this front before).

Now, this quote to me summarizes almost exactly the points I made last time that are inherent to the "Art" perspective. With Mannerism, it's not just about copying — it's that cohort 1 didn't copy at all, they drew from real life. This is what I've called Iconic Bias in past posts (parts one, two, three): The belief that the graphic modality of expression should resemble real life ("iconicity" in the semiotic sense). The "purity" of that first cohort is drawn from iconicity, and the lack of it in cohort 2 leads to their derision.

My response is that this isn't the way the human mind is primed (the "Language" perspective): the mind is primed for imitation, and any drawing "style" is a reflection of mental patterns that have become habituated within a drawer's long-term memory. Those patterns become set in this case through one of two ways: 1) copying other people's patterns, or 2) copying perception and siphoning that iconicity through one's mental structures.

The "Art" perspective says that only choice two should be acceptable, with minimal influence from choice one. Recall for instance, McCloud's Six Steps of learning from Understanding Comics: His first level is imitation, but then all subsequent steps require one to cast aside all other influences.

But, as I've pointed out in the past, rejecting the influence of any cohort before your own works against the establishment of conventional signs — which are what language is made up entirely of. The only reason there is a "graphic dialect" of a superhero style at all is because of imitation. Manga thrive on a style that was founded on imitation (Tezuka being largely considered cohort 1, but Walt Disney and others being cohort -1 for him).

Imitation hasn't hurt manga at all. In fact, I'd argue that it has probably helped them in numerous ways: 1) A consistent cultural style allows more focus to be placed on what that style is used to express story-wise than so much focus on the surface depictions. 2) A consistent style across numerous authors is more readily accessible to young readers, especially those who want imitate them. In America, when children want to "draw comics," they want to draw stories about stuff. But, when kids want to "draw manga" they want to draw stories in the style of manga because that's the visual vocabulary that they are now exposed to.

This is just like language: "Exposure + practice = fluency." With language, successive cohorts are always the manner by which it is transmitted. A great example of this is Nicaraguan Sign Language, where several deaf children who had created their own gesture systems combined their contributions to make cohort 1. Successive cohorts took what they did only to refine and alter it into further grammatical patterns. With the anti-imitation influence of Art, this process of conventionalization is largely lost (outside symbolic signs like word balloons and speed lines at least).

The Art pespective just wants to substitute the cognitive man-made exposure for that of real life, and with that, jettisoning an idea of fluency (proficiency in a system) for skill (accuracy at depicting real life): "Perception + practice = skill at representing perception."

While I won't go into it at length, I find it intriguing that in Dirk's same post, there is a damning attitude for Greg Land, who takes iconicity to the extreme by drawing wholly from photo reference — only that he picks and chooses parts of photos to combine thereby messing up the anatomy. So, here it seems to be the case of messing up iconicity through the most iconic method possible!


Final note, so my intentions aren't misunderstood: I should point out that this is not a post of advocacy; I'm not saying people should or shouldn't copy other people. I'm just trying to analyze the issues involved, and in some case, defend all strategies as being cognitively acceptable.

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Update 2/26: Dirk has a short reply to this post (halfway down). I don't have much in response to it except that it still maintains the "Iconic bias" underlying the last couple posts . Beyond that, he makes some interesting points.

Making Comics by Scott McCloud

For those who have been living in a cave the past summer, Making Comics is Scott McCloud's latest offering; a how-to book on the process of comic creation. I've had my copy for about a week, but wanting to give it a good thorough read-through before commenting (as well as juggling it with reading about statistics and developmental psychology), I'm only now finally posting some thoughts on it.

Perhaps returning to familiar ground is a good place to start. Not infrequently I've noticed, I have been wrongly anonymously-quoted as saying that Understanding Comics was a how-to book, and I think MC helps make a clearer distinction. UC is a book of theory, but like the start of any good field's theories (which it is, both good and a starting point) it begins with what is most accessible to people's intuitions. From this, you can go in two directions: theory and practice.

Take for instance nouns and verbs. One can use nouns and verbs to better understand how to be a good writer (like in English class), or you can use them to analyze the deeper structures of how language works (like in linguistics). Comparable is the idea of panel transitions. In UC, McCloud took a very theoretical approach to dissecting and analyzing them, while in MC he (kinda) uses them as a tool for praxis. Both are valid ways of using that theory.

And from the basis of UC these two paths should now be clearer. With MC, McCloud has gone the route of English class, essentially becoming a "visual language instructor." I've primarily gone the linguistics route, diving into theoretical waters and ultimately critiquing the initial theories that McCloud set the tone with (though, while maybe not always as immediately recognizable as McCloud's, even my theories have a practical application too).

As always, as an author McCloud is a treat to read. His drawings looked fantastic and polished, yet, part of me wished he returned to the greys he used in Reinventing Comics, which gave nicer tone difference to the black of the line art and would have been softer on the eyes than his faux-screentones.

The footnoting of every referenced image on every page was tedious and annoying (and better served by the then redundant end section). It made things seem awfully cluttered at times. I liked that he had endnotes and drawing activities, though I would have preferred the activities to be drawn (or have "worksheet style pages" rather than just a listing in text).

Though well executed, Chapters 1 and 2 I felt were a little long because of how dense they were. Each had many subsections (and subsections of subsections), and it would have benefited from broader "book sections" for each, then subdivided into chapters per sub-topic. This might have allowed McCloud to breathe a little more for each one and really go further in depth. Despite the great probing he does, you can tell he's just scratching the surface of his thinking.

I loved his "Choice of moment" discussion of events carried out by panels, represented by connecting the dots of an overarching event. Particularly interesting was how he seemed to equate different parts of the visual sequence explicitly to different words. It reminded me at least a little of how linguistic semantics uses one language to describe the meanings of another (the idea being that if something can be said in one, its equivalent can be found in the other, implying all the while that the two are equal in expressive power). It was very interesting to see how he changed his description of the sequence with each change in panels.

What was also particularly intriguing about this discussion was that it betrayed an internal conflict within McCloud's approach to sequential meaning. While McCloud does include his taxonomy of panel transitions from UC in MC, he uses them sparingly in scattered amounts throughout. Now, I've been a critic of transitions and closure (which surprisingly hardly appears at all in MC), but a simple difference in my theoretical approach to McCloud's is just one of scope. While transitions simply relate one panel to another, a broader look at sequences admits that they form a holistic sequence.

Unlike his panel transitions, this "dots" depiction implies this same sentiment of mine that a sequence composes a contiguous whole event based around an intended expressive idea. Things like his lengthy (and excellent) discussion of "establishing shots" actually damage the idea of transitions, as they also rely on a functional relation to the whole sequence, and would have trouble being placed in a transitional approach (especially when the establishing shot itself is broken up into several panels).

Another theme of the book (and talking to him in person) is how self-deprecating McCloud is about his own work. He consistently expresses that his own work isn't quite good enough, and that is why he's writing a how-to book: to teach himself. As I told him in person, I think this is pure baloney.

In the words of his own "Four Tribes." analysis, I feel that McCloud isn't fessing up to his own Formalist identity, and critiquing his own work from the perspective of an Animist or Classicist. Part of the benefit of this theory is in understanding the inherent subjectivity of how one perspective views another.

He interestingly footnotes that much of his instruction in the books is teaching how to be an Animist, and in reflection seems to be what McCloud wishes he was more of. In some ways I feel that this is a case of "outside type envy," believing that you should be that which you're not because the other might thereby seem better (and might be more prevalent and thus louder in expressing their distaste at things). On the one hand, it's good to respond to criticism and grow as a creator beyond where you already are. On the other, it's good to embrace what's good about yourself for who you are (and for McCloud, there's lots), and it's quite alright to tell people to fuck off and enjoy their own camp without being so prejudicial to that which is different from their preferences.

That said, I should say that any of my gripes about the theoretical underpinnings of the book are tangential to the practical aspects for which the book was intended. In fact, I was a bit surprised there wasn't more theory in it, given that many theoretical observations that have been in his live talks of late didn't make it into the book.

For what the book purports to do though – instruction – it excels at. While I was able to scrape together what I feel was pretty good tools for learning when I was younger, this is certainly a book I would have loved to have when I was first starting out as a comic author.

This also taps into the concerns some reviewers have expressed regarding the book's audience. It certainly doesn't seem to be for people who can't draw at all, but rather for those who already have at least a base understanding and ability. It isn't a "foreign language class" that teaches you from ground up.

Rather, it’s a "(visual) language arts" class that teaches you to hone the intuitions you already have. McCloud strives to take what you have and make you better. He certainly lives up to his side of this equation, and hopefully the rest of us readers can live up to ours.

Other reviews I found interesting:

TCJ Forum
Fleen
Stephen Frug

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.

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.

"Cartooning Symbolia"

Derik points to this comic, Cartooning Symbolia, by Dash Shaw that uses Mort Walkers terms from The Lexicon of Comicana for various symbolic elements of the graphic medium. It's an interesting experiment in formalism, and I especially appreciate the last twelve panels that introduce "new symbols," which well exemplifies the complete conventionality of symbols given that the reader has no idea what these things mean.

I read Walker's book for the first time last year, and here's what I wrote back then to the comixscholars list:

Its not a bad read. Its funny and lighthearted. One gag even got me to laugh out loud. He does point out an awful lot of graphic conventions used throughout many American comics – particularly strips – and makes a few interesting observations about them. Its by no means exhaustive, though it does have a surprising amount in it.

He also attaches a myriad of useless names to them, to the extant that you feel that his whole point for jargon is to be facetious (which it may well have been). You can tell that some of his terms have a logical origin to them, while others just seem made up because he wanted to give everything a name. I also have some discontent with his organization of these things, but for very specific structural reasons that I will bring up in some future writings of my own.

This organizational issue is related to my own attempts to compile a list of conventional signs in visual language. Many of the things he puts as separate signs I will include together in a larger category (like "smelly lines" and "sun rays" as both types of "path lines"). And while I'm at it... my list is ongoing, so please alert me to any more signs of this nature if you come across them. Perhaps someday I can compile them into more of a dictionary/wiki type project with examples and whatnot...

Shojo Manga

I went to an exhibit today on Shojo (girls') manga, hosted by Masami Toku, who does research on art education, especially concerning manga. I have corresponded with her for several years now, so it was nice to finally meet her in person.

The exhibit itself was fairly interesting, and had a nice cross-section of manga covers and pages spanning the past 50 years. There was a good sized crowd, and you could see the displays from outside on the street in downtown Chicago.

What particularly interested me was the underlying mentality of displaying manga pages on the wall like fine art. Putting them on the walls like this completely invalidates the Language perspective for these works, treating them solely as an Art bound work of aesthetic representation (albeit narrative). I'm also assuming that most people in attendance could not read Japanese, meaning that all semblance of multimodality was lost on them – reinforcing the images alone as aesthetic objects.

To this extant, it wholly removes them from the social context in which they usually appear. They did have some actual books on display, though they were kept under glass – meaning people couldn't flip through them at all.

Of all print-culture visual languages, manga in Japan seem quite the paradigm example of using a Language over Art context. Seeing them pulled from that context and put into a dominantly Art setting was an interesting clash of these underlying cultural forces.

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.

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.