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.

Blogging has been slow lately for me what with the oncoming start of school next week. I've mainly been devoting my time to the set-up of my latest experiment, which, after a few behavioral studies, will finally start looking at people's brainwaves reading comic strips. To give an idea of the scope of experiment preparation: I have to create 200 novel Peanuts strips using panels from existing

In claiming that the graphic form (especially in sequence) is structured as a language, it might help to parse out how to make the analogy reasonably. It's not as if no one has ever noted the similarities between the forms — in fact, it's fairly common. However, mistakes are often made in my opinion. First, I assume that there is "Equivalence" between the different modalities, which can be

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

This interesting and quite fun essay/post reviews the book Reading Comics and ponders the definition of "comics" and some other terminological issues. Its biggest query is 'what is the word for the act of making a comic... the producing of sequential images bit?' (paraphrased). I agree there's somewhat of a gap in vocabulary, but think that its partially symptomatic of a larger issue: not

A friend of mine sent along a link to this lecture by Andy Clarke about how comics can inform webdesign. Most of the talk is a regurgitation of McCloud's theories, but he has some interesting parallels and ideas. (There's an mp3 of the talk that you can flip through the slides with). Also, while I don't necessarily agree with the ideas, Gary Sullivan ruminates a bit on Closure. Finally...I was

I've been remiss in my reminders this year, but I have a few talks coming up if anyone is around San Diego. The first is another appearance at the Visual and Iconic Languages Conference on July 21-22, which I believe is closed to the public (more's the pity), though my talk will be on a general overview of visual language theory. Hopefully, as with last year, they'll put the talk online. A few

While preparing the Peanut strips for my next project, I came across a fantastic integration of text subtly hidden in this panel: If you look carefully, at the center of the starry smack mark where the ball hit the bat, there is text reading ".315", which I assume is a reference to Pig-Pen's batting average (pretty good). This is particularly interesting to me since it's a descriptive use of

In Understanding Comics, McCloud made the claim that manga supposedly uses more circuitous because of the formats of their books.

In my paper on Japanese VL, I dismiss this on the grounds that nothing about longer formats gives people the drive to make slower paced narrative. Just because you have ample space doesn't mean you're going to use it to let the story linger more. You could use that space to fill in even more "compressed" storytelling.

Apparently we're upon the 30th anniversary of Jim Davis' Garfield strip. As a ten year old I was pretty obsessed with the Garfield books, and can probably mark meeting Jim Davis at the ABA as a highlight of my fourth grade life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've gotten about seven emails from people linking to the Garfield Minus Garfield strips, which I first saw a few years ago even. I was always