The Visual Language of Comics

Who Understands Comics?

Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension

Neil Cohn

**Nominated for the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work** Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally are they understood? Combining recent advances from linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical psychology, this book argues that visual narratives involve greater complexity and require a lot more decoding than widely thought. Although increasingly used beyond the sphere of entertainment as materials in humanitarian, educational, and experimental contexts, Neil Cohn demonstrates that their universal comprehension cannot be assumed. Instead, understanding a visual language requires a fluency that is contingent on exposure and practice with a graphic system. Bringing together a rich but scattered literature on how people comprehend, and learn to comprehend, a sequence of images, this book coalesces research from a diverse range of fields into a broader interdisciplinary view of visual narrative to ask: Who Understands Comics?

The Visual Language of Comics

Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images.

Neil Cohn

Drawings and sequential images are an integral part of human expression dating back at least as far as cave paintings, and in contemporary society appear most prominently in comics. Despite this fundamental part of human identity, little work has explored the comprehension and cognitive underpinnings of visual narratives-until now. This work presents a provocative theory: that drawings and sequential images are structured the same as language. Building on contemporary theories from linguistics and cognitive psychology, it argues that comics are written in a visual language of sequential images that combines with text. Like spoken and signed languages, visual narratives use a lexicon of systematic patterns stored in memory, strategies for combining these patterns into meaningful units, and a hierarchic grammar governing the combination of sequential images into coherent expressions. Filled with examples and illustrations, this book details each of these levels of structure, explains how cross-cultural differences arise in diverse visual languages of the world, and describes what the newest neuroscience research reveals about the brain's comprehension of visual narratives. From this emerges the foundation for a new line of research within the linguistic and cognitive sciences, raising intriguing questions about the connections between language and the diversity of humans' expressive behaviours in the mind and brain.

Speaking in Pictures

A Vision of Language

Neil Cohn

Pictures are a fundamental aspect of how we express ourselves, and cave paintings are among our oldest records of intelligence. Yet, despite their importance, why don't most people feel they can draw, and why are pictures often considered less important than language? For over 20 years, Neil Cohn has pioneered research around these questions within the fields of linguistics and cognitive neuroscience, and this book is the result, heralding a new paradigm of language, drawing, and communication, all accessibly presented as a non-fiction graphic novel. This work challenges the conventional understandings of how pictures communicate, how people learn to draw, and the nature of language itself. With humor and a clear, friendly, and accessible tone, Speaking in Pictures introduces ground-breaking research by doing what it discusses: intertwining pictures and words into a single message as a non-fiction graphic novel, taking the reader on an inspiring journey through the study of communication and the mind.

The Patterns of Comics

Visual Languages of Comics from Asia, Europe, and North America

Neil Cohn

Comics are a global phenomenon, and yet it's easy to distinguish the visual styles of comics from Asia, Europe, or the United States. But, do the structures of these visual narratives differ in more subtle ways? Might these comics actually be drawn in different visual languages that vary in their structures across cultures? To address these questions, The Patterns of Comics seeks evidence through a sustained analysis of an annotated corpus of over 36,000 panels from more than 350 comics from Asia, Europe, and the United States. This data-driven approach reveals the cross-cultural variation in symbology, layout, and storytelling between various visual languages, and shows how comics have changed across 80 years. It compares, for example, the subtypes within American comics and Japanese manga, and analyzes the formal properties of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes across its entire 10-year run. Throughout, it not only uncovers the patterns in and across the panels of comics, but shows how these regularities in the visual languages of comics connect to the organizing principles of all languages.

A Multimodal Language Faculty

A Cognitive Framework for Human Communication

Neil Cohn, Joost Schilperoord

Natural human communication is multimodal. We pair speech with gestures, and combine writing with pictures from online messaging to comics to advertising. This richness of human communication remains unaddressed in linguistic and cognitive theories which maintain traditional amodal assumptions about language. What is needed is a new, multimodal paradigm. This book posits a bold reorganization of the structures of language, and heralds a reconsideration of its guiding assumptions. Human expressive behaviors like speaking, signing, and drawing may seem distinct, but they decompose into similar cognitive building blocks which coalesce in emergent states from a singular multimodal communicative architecture. This cognitive model accounts for unimodal and multimodal expression across all of our modalities, providing a “grand unified theory” that incorporates insights from formal linguistics, cognitive semantics, metaphor theory, Peircean semiotics, sign language, gesture, visual language, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. Such a perspective reconfigures how we understand linguistic structure, diversity, universals, innateness, relativity, and evolution. A Multimodal Language Faculty directly confronts centuries-old notions of language and offers a compelling reimagination of what language is and how it works.

Early Writings on Visual Language

Neil Cohn

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Yukon Ho!

Bill Watterson

A collection of comic strips following the adventures of Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes.

The Comics

Coulton Waugh

Insights into the aesthetics of one of popular culture's favorite art forms

Brave New World

Sam Arthur, Alex Spiro

"Nobrow's bold, expansive formula dissolves the borders supposedly demarcating illustration and comics. Their fluidity and hybridity infuse each miniature in this expertly crafted, alluringly colored feast for the eyes, mind, and heart."—Paul Gravett, author of 1001 Comic Books You Must Read Before You Die "You want a cool book showing the latest and the best comics design out there, Nobrow will more than double your fun."—Warren Bernard, executive director, Small Press Expo Taking inspiration from Aldous Huxley's seminal 1931 novel of the same name, Nobrow 7 invites forty-five creative visionaries to re-interpret the theme of a "Brave New World." Is this our brave new world? This is just one of the questions posed in a stunning large-format, 128-page presentation that features cutting-edge work from the world's most exciting cartoonists and illustrators. Comprised of fifteen cartoonists and thirty illustrators, the latest edition of Nobrow's flagship anthology continues to showcase the very best talent in the world of visual and narrative arts. Maintaining the acclaimed flip-cover format of Nobrow 6, Nobrow 7 is, in fact, two titles rolled into one: one side dedicated to comics, the other dedicated entirely to illustration. Featuring: Jillian Tamaki (Indoor Voice, Drawn & Quarterly), Luke Pearson (Hilda and the Midnight Giant, Nobrow Press), Joost Swarte (Is That All There Is? Fantagraphics Books), Tom Gauld (Goliath, Drawn & Quarterly), Anders Nilsen (Big Questions, Drawn & Quarterly), Joseph Lambert (winner of Ignatz Outstanding Artist award for I Will Bite You), and many more.

The Silver Age of Comic Book Art

Arlen Schumer

Carmine Infantino. Steve Ditko. Jack Kirby. Gil Kane. Joe Kubert. Gene Colan. Jim Steranko. Neal Adams. Some of the greatest comic book artists of their generation, who created some of their greatest work during The Silver Age of Comics (circa1956-1970). They not only drew definitive versions of the medium’s greatest characters including The Flash, Batman, Captain America, Superman, Thor, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, Green Arrow and more— but set trends in the art of comic book storytelling. Now this popular and influential body of work, along with each artist’s thoughts, ideas and commentary, is presented in The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, a coffee table comic book art history book written and designed in a daringly different format by comic book historian and illustrator Arlen Schumer, and published in hardcover and digital/e-book editions by Archway Publishing (from Simon & Schuster). Dynamic spreads of the actual printed comic art, graphically enlarged, are integrated with comic-styled text, often by the artists themselves, that replaces the original comic book copy with more personalized prose that places the art firmly in the period it was created: the turbulent 1960s. By creating a comic book history book that reads like a comic book, Schumer succeeds spectacularly in making you see, as if for the first time, the comics you’ve been reading your whole life. “Arlen Schumer documents an important period in comic book history, told with an explosive format and stunning design. It reflects the kinetic rhythm of the era.” — Will Eisner (1917-2005), creator of The Spirit and the graphic novel A Contract with God "Through the years, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing many books that pay tribute to the art of comics, but Arlen Schumer has created an entirely new format in presenting the art and words of the artists. It's the most comprehensive and personal way a fan or colleague can learn what lies beneath the art. Arlen has found the perfect way to inform and entertain. It’s simply awesome —and the best representation of my work ever!” —Gene Colan (1926-2011), legendary comic book artist “A lovingly crafted tribute to the superhero comic of the 1960s, The Silver Age of Comic Book Art recaptures the four-color visionary surge of the era, its jet-age psychedelic rush of imagination and the titanic, luminous figures, both real and imaginary, that glittered in its firmament. For a brief moment in the late 20th century, it seemed as if the spirit of the age wore a vivid leotard, a chest emblem, and traveled in a strobing blur of speed lines. For anyone with any interest in or affection for that moment, this beautiful volume is indispensible.” — Alan Moore, author of Swamp Thing and Watchmen For more on The Silver Age of Comic Book Book Art, join Arlen’s Facebook group of the same name, and visit Arlen’s website: www.arlenschumer.com

Night and Day by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Katharine Hilbery is beautiful and privileged, but uncertain of her future. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William Rodney, and her dangerous attraction to the passionate Ralph Denham. As she struggles to decide, the lives of two other women women's rights activist Mary Datchet and Katharine's mother, Margaret, struggling to weave together the documents, events and memories of her own father's life into a biography impinge on hers with unexpected and intriguing consequences. Virginia Woolf's delicate second novel is both a love story and a social comedy, yet it also subtly undermines these traditions, questioning a woman's role and the very nature of experience.

The Blacker the Ink

Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art

Frances Gateward, John Jennings

When many think of comic books the first thing that comes to mind are caped crusaders and spandex-wearing super-heroes. Perhaps, inevitably, these images are of white men (and more rarely, women). It was not until the 1970s that African American superheroes such as Luke Cage, Blade, and others emerged. But as this exciting new collection reveals, these superhero comics are only one small component in a wealth of representations of black characters within comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels over the past century. The Blacker the Ink is the first book to explore not only the diverse range of black characters in comics, but also the multitude of ways that black artists, writers, and publishers have made a mark on the industry. Organized thematically into “panels” in tribute to sequential art published in the funny pages of newspapers, the fifteen original essays take us on a journey that reaches from the African American newspaper comics of the 1930s to the Francophone graphic novels of the 2000s. Even as it demonstrates the wide spectrum of images of African Americans in comics and sequential art, the collection also identifies common character types and themes running through everything from the strip The Boondocks to the graphic novel Nat Turner. Though it does not shy away from examining the legacy of racial stereotypes in comics and racial biases in the industry, The Blacker the Ink also offers inspiring stories of trailblazing African American artists and writers. Whether you are a diehard comic book fan or a casual reader of the funny pages, these essays will give you a new appreciation for how black characters and creators have brought a vibrant splash of color to the world of comics.

The Visual Language of Comics

Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images.

Neil Cohn

Drawings and sequential images are an integral part of human expression dating back at least as far as cave paintings, and in contemporary society appear most prominently in comics. Despite this fundamental part of human identity, little work has explored the comprehension and cognitive underpinnings of visual narratives-until now. This work presents a provocative theory: that drawings and sequential images are structured the same as language. Building on contemporary theories from linguistics and cognitive psychology, it argues that comics are written in a visual language of sequential images that combines with text. Like spoken and signed languages, visual narratives use a lexicon of systematic patterns stored in memory, strategies for combining these patterns into meaningful units, and a hierarchic grammar governing the combination of sequential images into coherent expressions. Filled with examples and illustrations, this book details each of these levels of structure, explains how cross-cultural differences arise in diverse visual languages of the world, and describes what the newest neuroscience research reveals about the brain's comprehension of visual narratives. From this emerges the foundation for a new line of research within the linguistic and cognitive sciences, raising intriguing questions about the connections between language and the diversity of humans' expressive behaviours in the mind and brain.

The Early Reader in Children’s Literature and Culture

Theorizing Books for Beginning Readers

Jennifer Miskec, Annette Wannamaker

This is the first volume to consider the popular literary category of Early Readers – books written and designed for children who are just beginning to read independently. It argues that Early Readers deserve more scholarly attention and careful thought because they are, for many younger readers, their first opportunity to engage with a work of literature on their own, to feel a sense of mastery over a text, and to experience pleasure from the act of reading independently. Using interdisciplinary approaches that draw upon and synthesize research being done in education, child psychology, sociology, cultural studies, and children’s literature, the volume visits Early Readers from a variety of angles: as teaching tools; as cultural artifacts that shape cultural and individual subjectivity; as mass produced products sold to a niche market of parents, educators, and young children; and as aesthetic objects, works of literature and art with specific conventions. Examining the reasons such books are so popular with young readers, as well as the reasons that some adults challenge and censor them, the volume considers the ways Early Readers contribute to the construction of younger children as readers, thinkers, consumers, and as gendered, raced, classed subjects. It also addresses children’s texts that have been translated and sold around the globe, examining them as part of an increasingly transnational children’s media culture that may add to or supplant regional, ethnic, and national children’s literatures and cultures. While this collection focuses mostly on books written in English and often aimed at children living in the US, it is important to acknowledge that these Early Readers are a major US cultural export, influencing the reading habits and development of children across the globe.

Reading Comics Through The Body

Embodiment and Materiality in the Making and Reading of Comics

Gareth Brookes

This book is about what happens to comics theory when we privilege the relationship between materiality and the body in the analysis of comics. Focusing on how these factors relate to making, technological reproduction and the experience of reading comics, it aims to establish a new theoretical model for comics studies. Through a close consideration of how technologies of reproduction translate material and embodied traces into the surface of comics, the book argues that tactile and haptic encounters with these surfaces can organise the narrative structure of comics and affect the experience of reading them. The book aims to establish that comics can be thought of as networked sites of embodied encounter in which embodied responses become a register of meaning.

Empirical Comics Research

Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods

Alexander Dunst, Jochen Laubrock, Janina Wildfeuer

This edited volume brings together work in the field of empirical comics research. Drawing on computer and cognitive science, psychology and art history, linguistics and literary studies, each chapter presents innovative methods and establishes the practical and theoretical motivations for the quantitative study of comics, manga, and graphic novels. Individual chapters focus on corpus studies, the potential of crowdsourcing for comics research, annotation and narrative analysis, cognitive processing and reception studies. This volume opens up new perspectives for the study of visual narrative, making it a key reference for anyone interested in the scientific study of art and literature as well as the digital humanities.

The Visual Narrative Reader

Neil Cohn

Sequential images are as natural at conveying narratives as verbal language, and have appeared throughout human history, from cave paintings and tapestries right through to modern comics. Contemporary research on this visual language of sequential images has been scattered across several fields: linguistics, psychology, anthropology, art education, comics studies, and others. Only recently has this disparate research begun to be incorporated into a coherent understanding. In The Visual Narrative Reader, Neil Cohn collects chapters that cross these disciplinary divides from many of the foremost international researchers who explore fundamental questions about visual narratives. How does the style of images impact their understanding? How are metaphors and complex meanings conveyed by images? How is meaning understood across sequential images? How do children produce and comprehend sequential images? Are visual narratives beneficial for education and literacy? Do visual narrative systems differ across cultures and historical time periods? This book provides a foundation of research for readers to engage in these fundamental questions and explore the most vital thinking about visual narrative. It collects important papers and introduces review chapters summarizing the literature on specific approaches to understanding visual narratives. The result is a comprehensive “reader” that can be used as a coursebook, a researcher resource and a broad overview of fascinating topics suitable for anyone interested in the growing field of the visual language of comics and visual narratives.

The Benefits of Teaching Through Graphic Novels. Using Maus in the EFL Classroom

Jessica Büscher

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,6, University of Paderborn, language: English, abstract: In this paper, I will argue that the usage of the graphic novel "The Complete Maus" by Art Spiegelman is beneficial in the EFL classroom and will improve students' communicative competencies in learning English as a foreign language. "Graphic novels let you take risks that just wouldn't fly in the conventional book form". This quote by the American professor Karin Slaughter proves that the genre of graphic novels is special and therefore needs more attention. Still, many people have prejudices and think of graphic novels as an embellished term for comics which shows that it is a controversial topic. However, graphic novels are way more than just picture books as they deal with complicated topics and storylines, developing characters and detailed drawings. Reading a graphic novel can be more difficult and challenging as a "usual" book as readers need to engage with the writing and the drawings and connect both in order to create meaning. The curriculum for the subject of English does not clearly state or suggest the usage of comics or graphic novels in the EFL classroom which is probably why the medium finds little to no space in the classroom. However, it's potential in the current competence-oriented curriculum is big as it can nurture the reading and writing competencies, the intercultural and lexical competencies as well as the training of a visual literacy which has never been so important as we are living in a visual world. That is why I will research how using graphic novels in general but also how using the specific graphic novel The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman in the EFL classroom can improve student's communicative competencies. I picked this book as it is one of the most popular and powerful graphic novels. Spiegelman even received the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir of the Holocaust. In the first part of this work I will focus on the theoretical background of graphic novels and their characteristics as this builds the foundation of this paper. Next, I will continue with the second part of the theoretical background by looking at the competencies of visual literacy and intercultural communicative competence as . In the next and main part of this paper, I will shortly analyze Maus and set my teaching goals before creating a concept for the EFL classroom. The concept will contain specific lesson plans with its material.