Blog

  • Spider-Man’s naughty adventures within or between panels

    A friend of mine recently pointed me to an unusual debate that’s raging about a recent Spider-Man comic where Peter Parker apparently is within the mind of Dr. Octopus and […]

  • Basic structures of visual language

    One of the important basic tasks of doing research on the visual language used in comics is to identify the foundational components that go into our comprehension of sequential images. […]

  • Blog-iversary and updates

    So, today marks 7 years that my blog has now been online, and 10.5 years for the website. How time flies! I’ve received a lot of great feedback from people […]

  • Discover Magazine article

    I’m proud to say that I’m featured in an article in this month’s Discover Magazine! The article was written by the excellent Carl Zimmer, who good-naturedly let me run him […]

  • Sequence vs. Singles in “visual language”

    In my last post, I addressed the basic idea for a “visual language” as being a sequence of meaningful images guided by a system of constraints (i.e., a grammar). In […]

  • Revisiting “visual language”

    I’ve now had this website for over 10 years, and have been blogging for almost 6 years, so it may be worth revisiting the fundamental ideas of my research over […]

  • New Article: Explaining “I can’t draw”

    I’m happy to say that I have a new article published in the journal Human Development that argues that learning how to draw is similar to learning how to speak. […]

  • The Graphic Canon Vol. 2

    On the non-theory front, I’m happy to announce that I have a piece in the recently released second volume of The Graphic Canon edited by Russ Kick. It’s a collection of […]

  • Review: How fast can you comprehend comic panels?

    In this study, the authors wanted to know how much time it would take to comprehend each image of a sequence of images, both for how long each panel stayed […]

  • New article: Framing attention in Japanese and American comics

    I’m pleased to say that I now have a new article out about the cross-cultural differences between American comics—both Mainstream and Indy comics—and Japanese manga: “Framing attention in Japanese and […]