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.

Mayan Visual Language?

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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.

Kinder Reflections on Understanding Comics

So, in my “Problems with Closure” posts (parts 1, 2, 3, 4), I was in my "bloodthirsty academic" mode. I aught to add that Understanding Comics should be commended for "closure" in some ways too.

Though it does provide explanations for the way things work, in many ways, the most important contribution of UC is the questions it raises. More than anything, McCloud excellently points out that we should be thinking about certain things. Why is it that we can understand sequences of images? Do we have receptive differences when engaging cartoony versus realistic drawings? Not many people were thinking about these issues at that time (including the Europeans, though they might claim otherwise).

Quite astutely, McCloud does acknowledge that the understanding for most of these things happens in the mind, though he doesn’t fully probe what that means. More than anything, he’s raising the questions and pointing to a place for the answer.

Rather than my harsh critique calling Closure essentially a rhetorical trick of a faux cognitive process, instead, it might be considered a placeholder for a more developed theory. Yes, McCloud doesn’t really identify what the mind does to connect panels, but he does recognize that the mind needs to do something in order for understanding to take place. So, we can call “closure” might more positively be framed as “details to be named later.”

As much as I may pound away at the theories in Understanding Comics, the only reason I can do so is because I obsessed over it when I was younger. And, when you pour over something that much, you're views might change as you start applying and pondering it more. It really is a great foundation. Though foundations are meant to be built on... or sometimes bulldozed in order to build something better...

Addendum on Intentionality

After that long post, I should note that there is nothing inherently wrong with an "interpretive" analysis for its own sake. I have no problems with artistic readings of things and discussions of what a given work "means." To be clear, what I'm arguing against is the conflation of analyses of interpretation and those of understanding (re: cognition). When one starts mistaking one for the other is where things get problematic.

Problems with Closure, part 1

I’ve been reading Mike Meginnis’ blog lately, which has stirred up some observations I have about the issues of closure. As astute readers of my work know, I don’t buy into the ideas of closure anymore. I did once — developing more panel transitions even — but not since four years ago when I realized that it couldn’t possibly work for fairly straightforward empirical reasons.

Closure as a psychological notion from the Gestalts is largely about “image constancy,” which means that you can have a single image with pieces missing and still understand the whole. In daily perception, we experience this anytime one object covers up parts of another one. Despite that part is covered up, we still understand that there is a whole object beneath it.

McCloud extends closure to do this unification across two separate images. It is a compelling entailment to believe that across two panels we merely are “filling in the blanks” for events rather than objects. Or, even, extending this into some philosophical sense that we “fill in the blanks” all the time in daily life for everything. It is, however, wrong. And it’s founded on some basic underlying assumptions that I will articulate over the next several posts.

I will say, though, that I think linear transitions are the intuitive place to start an analysis of sequential images, and McCloud gave a gift to us all by inaugurating this field. But as much as I love the guy and appreciate his contributions, I have to tear into the ideas…

On the surface, closure provides what every body wants out of a theory. It’s a simple, catch –all that imbues the “reader” with individualistic power of contribution to the piece. However, human biology and cognition are rarely simple – nor should they be — given the millions of years of evolution and development they have undergone to reach the point they’re at.

Also, because of how simple McCloud leaves it, he opens the door for it to be applied to various purposes:

1) Is this “filling in the gaps” about unconscious understanding?

2) Is it about conscious interpretation of an “artistic” intent?

These distinctions are very important, and they are just what Meginnis struggles with. On one hand, we’re talking about mental processes that underlie understanding in a very basic sense. The other position is talking consciously interpreting "meaning" beyond that fundamental level of understanding.

Here’s the difference in an analogy to spoken grammar: No matter how much literary theory can explain what the "meaning" of a sentence is, it still doesn’t go into any part of real understanding. While it may debate the senses of words, the author’s intentions, and how well they achieve them, etc., it never actually broaches how the words themselves are strung together in a meaningful whole structurally.

You can debate all you want about what the "meaning" of the last sentence was interpretively, but none of that can go to explaing just why your mind can directly connect the word "debate" to each of the groupings of words "senses of words," "the author's intentions," and "how well they acheive them" (or how those groupings of words are connected to each other). Those understandings certainly aren't linear, which is how you just experienced them consciously in reading.

Such structural concerns are left to linguists, and are largely irrelevant to these “interpretive” questions because they are at a level above the structural investigations of cognition. The same is true for sequences of images.

In the next several posts, I’ll be going more in depth on the problems with closure. These will all be based on underlying problems with the theory, not delving into the empirical examples found in data which invalidate linear analyses (of which there are many).

Problems with Closure: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Kid's sequential drawings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gestures in comics

A doubleshot of reviews:

Fein, Ofer, and Kasher, Asa. 1996. How to do Things with Words and Gestures in Comics. Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 26.6. Dec. 1996. Pp. 793-808

This study looked at the role of gestures in comics (specifically, those in the European comic Asterix). The study had people interpret the meanings of both panels from the comics, and of photos where people took on similar poses. The backgrounds of the panels were erased, so there was no context for the gestures. In one part, they were asked to write possible dialogue for the gestures, and in another task they were given potential meanings and asked to assign them.

It concludes that gestures in comics are interpreted the same as ‘real life’ gestures, and that the meaning imbued in them comes from the ingesticular force (i.e. the intent of the expression) rather than the propositional content of the accompanying speech (in word balloons). One interesting tidbit noted that some people said the photos were actually harder to interpret than the comics panels (though the stats disputed this). If this were true, then it would support McCloud's insinuation that cartoony images are more "base" than realistic ones. I'd like to know the VL fluency of the subjects and whether people with more "comics" experience rated higher or lower in this regard.

Raecke Jochen. 1999. Using Comics as Data for Research into the Connection between Pointing Gestures and Deictics. In E. André, M. Poesio, and H. Rieser (eds). Proceedings of the Workshop on Deixis, Demonstration, and Deictic Belief at ESSLLI XI.

Uses comics to analyze the relationship between deictics and gestures in Serbo-Croation. His method codes a corpus of comics comparing the relations of the images' gestures to the conent of the speech balloons. He finds that pointing gestures by far dominate the gestures, and pointing gestures alone do not fulfill the meaning of the representations (i.e. multimodality is necessary). This isn't surprising, since pointing gestures are indexical, which means that they only indicate meaing in something else (the same way a pronoun refers to a different element for meaning).

Subjectivity and a rant on Comics Scholarship

So, this is a review of a paper that is listed in my bibliography. If you'd like to see more of these, let me know...

Driest, Joris. 2005. Subjective Narration in Comics. Masters Thesis. Utrecht University.

This piece covers a broad overview of the ways in which “subjectivity” is represented in the “comics medium.” Of particular note is its analysis of word/thought balloons. The piece is largely influenced by film theory, and its relationship to comics and writing, however, it does not include citations to John Barber or other relevant works along those lines.

However, the piece didn’t seem to have a directed and focused hypothesis of sorts that it was out to prove. It hovered at the level of “these things are there” without probing that topic deeper. This isn’t necessarily terrible, considering that no other studies really cover this topic previously, except maybe in Saraceni 2000 & 2003 (which also weren’t cited).

It also seemed to comment upon a number of phenomena that occur in the “comics medium,” but didn’t seem relevant to the thesis (such as conventional graphic symbols). This is a trend I’ve noticed a lot in papers about VL & comics. Since they don't have an established a cannon of scholarship (or an recognized field to study them), people often feel the need to insert every interesting thought they have about it regardless of how pertinent it might be to what they’re actually writing about.

Relatedly, most essays on anything comics-related feel the need to define what a comic is in the paper – whether or not the paper is about how “comics” are defined. To me, this just seems to cry out an underlying complex that “nobody knows what comics are, so I need to define it.”

Guess what: whether they actively read comics or not, most everyone in our culture knows what a “comic” or “graphic novel” is to the extant that most scholars write about. People don't need to define what a novel or a film is every time they write about them, nor should they need to be told what a comic is. (Similarly, linguistics papers don’t define “language” in every paper – they just get to the meat of the issue).

At least from my perspective, the less exceptional we treat visual language and comics, the more they can be considered as equal with other forms of communication/literature. To invoke the metaphor: "Separate but equal" does not work, because it’s NOT equal. You need to have complete non-discrimination. By continually defining it where its not needed, “comics” (the social objects, and thereby the visual language associated with it) is implicitly placed into a “minority” position in the realm of criticism and scholarship.

Bibliography

Amongst my exuberance to update about the blog and the new essay, I almost forgot that I've put some new entries in my Reference Bibliography. I don't know if people really use it or not, but I intend for it to be a resource for people looking for information related to this field.

I actually quite enjoy finding new material, and I read and own just about everything listed there. Suggestions for more are always welcomed!