græfIk Semiosis!In our own context, the main media of expression matches that of a print culture—pens and paper or computers. Most interactive graphic use in our culture comes in restricted forms, such as drawings by teachers on classroom blackboards, or in the game Pictionary. These instances remain lacking the syntactic qualities found in VL syntax though. While there have been some attempts to bring visual language into everyday use through technology (such as Microsoft's Comic Chat and the experimental Japanese ComicDiary) the results have yet to develop a system where the full allowance of creative expression and grammaticality is paired with real-time interactivity.
Call Me What You Want's List: Drawing (Comics)
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Hero History: Bouncing Boy
--by Matthew PetersonOr - “How To Really Make An Impact As A Legionnaire…”
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the early days of the Legion of Super-Heroes are a continuity cop’s nightmare, with strange developments galore as the team cameoed their way across the Superman universe, rolling through the accumulated lore of their parent title on their way to building an empire. On the way, the varying writers made for some really inconsistent storytelling, such as the fact that all Legionnaires were supposed to have one UNIQUE super-power even though Kryptonian powerhouse Tom Welling and his identically powered cousin Laura Vandervoort were allowed to be concurrent members, or even the varying characterizations of Saturn Girl. But of all the odd choices made in those days, you have to question the decision-making of a team that rejected the relatively-powerful Polar Boy, Night Girl, and Fire Lad, but inducted Matter-Eater Lad, Shrinking Violet, and today’s Historical subject.
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NEW Navigating Comics • Spring 2008
Most people believe that the reading of comic pages moves along the same order as text: the "z-path" of left-to-rigth and down. However, what happens when layouts are more complicated than simple grids? This paper reports the findings of a psychology experiment which found that readers follow a far more complex process of page layout navigation than the z-path. (30 pages, 1.6MB) Blog Thread -
Japanese Visual Language • Fall 2007
Over the past two decades, manga has exploded in readership beyond Japan, and its style has captured the interest of young artists all over. But, what exactly are the properties of this "style" beyond the surface of big-eyes and "backward" reading? This paper explores the structural properties of the visual language underlying the "manga style," how it works, and how it differs from the visual languages in comics from other parts of the world. (21 pages, 1.4MB) Blog Thread
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Apr 28, 08
An article discussing the possible difference between how Japanese and Americans view their comics
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Via the TCJ message board, Nathan has pointed to an article in the Boston Globe that discusses the differences in brain activation between "Eastern and Western" perceptual processing. The study claims that "Westerners tend to focus on central objects more than on their surroundings" while Easterners "tend to focus more on the context as well as the object." From the article:
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To use a camera analogy, "the Americans are more zoom and the East Asians are more panoramic," said Dr. Denise Park of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas in Dallas. "The Easterner probably sees more, and the Westerner probably sees less, but in more detail."
"Literally, our data suggest that people see different elements of pictures," Park said. "If you're looking at an elephant in the jungle, the Westerner will focus on the elephant and the Easterner is going to be more thinking about the jungle scene that has the elephant in it."
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Comics without text are unusual enough that they have their own name: "silent comics" (like silent film) or "wordless comics" (in France they use "muette").
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Sometimes, when people hear my proposal that the "comics medium" is literally a visual language (VL), I receive a response of disbelief stating something like, "What, do you expect people to carry around little pads of paper so they can 'talk' in comic form?" Statements like this bring up an important aspect of language that is essential to address in visual language studies: the social and interactive role of language.
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As humans' primary means of communication, language serves as an important connection between people. Given that most language is produced dynamically in real-time, while drawings usually are not, it is no wonder that the prospect of a visual language might seem perplexing in light of language's social aspects. However, such concerns can be answered by considering where our modern VL finds most of its exposure: comics, a recognizable print culture. In print, VL faces the same restrictions as written language, separating the "encoder" from the "decoder" across both space and time.
This was not always the case. Some early comic authors actually performed their works. In the early 1900's, many well-known cartoonists had vaudeville acts where they would speedily draw pictures on a sketch-pad, canvas, or blackboard, often while performing voices and commentary. These "chalk talks" or "lightning sketches" emerged from Victorian parlor acts in the late nineteenth century, and quickly produced several celebrity performers both in America and Europe.
In fact, it was the connections to these sorts of real-time performances that inspired Winsor McCay (1869-1934) to create his famous cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur, which opened the door for animated features in movie theatres. While performance is not entirely the same as the interactive use of language, it does provide a middle ground between static print and interactive exchange. Moreover, this mixing of verbal and visual expression in real-time reflects a common practice of storytelling that has pervaded human history across cultural boundaries.
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Apr 24, 08
Visual Flash-based comic by Scott McCloud. Notable for the way it presented the plot as well as both the artwork and the story of the plot though as a whole it does come off like a cliche.
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Baker employs an invisible grid to hang his panels on and puts all the dialogue under the panels and more importantly under the person who is talking. It's a signature device that Baker really made his own in Why I Hate Saturn and here he uses it effortlessly to great effect. By placing the dialogue below the panels he opens up the drawings themselves to function as film stills and encourages the reader to "read" the expressions, to really take time with them somehow.
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As a comics fan and occasional artist who absorbed what little drawing skill I have by copying and tracing comics when I was a teenager, I found the juxtaposition in Wood's piece telling. Here was a working artist distilling his craft into 22 panels that could be used to teleport across the occasional creative wasteland, yet each example was dashed off with effortless skill. I live by very few maxims, but there's at least one I've found useful: Fake it 'til you make it. In Wood's piece I could see an artist who had clearly made it but hadn't forgotten the practicality of the occasional shortcut.
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Ask any working comic book artist who has been in the business for more than ten years about "Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work", and they know of it like it was the bible. Google "Wally Wood" and "22 panels", and you get over 150 hits. It is with great pleasure that GothamCityArt.com brings this historic piece to market. Once shrouded in secrecy, Wally Wood would selectively give assistants and those close to him three 8x10 photocopies of comic panels that bore the absolute essence of drawing comic book panels. 22 images in total, they held the secret to a comic book illustrator's success, and those who learned from them benefited from the master's wisdom. The panels were gold, but were not packaged in such a way that was easily disseminated.
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there's books on every other side of the comic publishing industry, but none specifically on editing come to mind
if one was so inclined, where could one read what and how Françoise Mouly, Kim Thompson, Stan Lee, Sammy Harkham, Joe Quesada, Dan Nadel, etc... do what they do? -
I think there are no books specifically about editing comics because there are no comic book editing skills I can think of that are startlingly unique. In short, if one is qualified to edit Linn’s Stamp News, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, or The Oklahoma Gazette, then, theoretically, one could edit a comic book.
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Separating art from business is the only way that comic book creators and publishers will improve the sales of their books and increase their customer base. At The Comic Book Bin, we do not believe that creators make good sales people and no creator should ever be responsible for selling their own comic books, unless they have the uncanny ability of selling fridges to the Inuit.
The model of self publishing and owner-owned comic book material should be revisited in light of the fact that creators are not ideal sales persons and that they should concentrate on doing what they do best, which is creating comic books and let others add the value and build the networks that are required to get books widely distributed. -
Be Your Own Boss Baby
Although there had been precedents before, when Image Comics’ founders, Todd McFarlane, Jim Valentino, Jim Lee, Erik Larsen, Rob Liefeld, and Mark Silvestri founded their self publishing imprint, they created a new model that at the time was seen as a viable alternative for creators who wanted to publish their own books and retain ownership over their creations.
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Where I put all the bookmarks that helps improve my image storytelling abilities.
Updated on Nov 12, 08
Created on Apr 24, 08
Category: Entertainment & Arts
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