Download or read book The Visual Language of Comics written by Neil Cohn and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Who Understands Comics written by Neil Cohn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **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?
Download or read book The Visual Narrative Reader written by Neil Cohn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Language of Comics written by Mario Saraceni and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Language of Comics provides a history of comics from the end of the nineteenth century to the present and explores the 'semiotics of comics'.
Download or read book This Book Contains Graphic Language written by Rocco Versaci and published by Continuum. This book was released on 2007-12-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Marketing Blurb
Download or read book Super Graphic written by Tim Leong and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The comic book universe is adventurous, mystifying, and filled with heroes, villains, and cosplaying Comic-Con attendees. This book by one of Wired magazine's art directors traverses the graphic world through a collection of pie charts, bar graphs, timelines, scatter plots, and more. Super Graphic offers readers a unique look at the intricate and sometimes contradictory storylines that weave their way through comic books, and shares advice for navigating the pages of some of the most popular, longest-running, and best-loved comics and graphic novels out there. From a colorful breakdown of the DC Comics reader demographic to a witty Venn diagram of superhero comic tropes and a Chris Ware sadness scale, this book charts the most arbitrary and monumental characters, moments, and equipment of the wide world of comics. Plus, this is the fixed format version, which includes high-resolution images.
Download or read book A User s Guide to Thought and Meaning written by Ray Jackendoff and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning presents a profound and arresting integration of the faculties of the mind - of how we think, speak, and see the world. Ray Jackendoff starts out by looking at languages and what the meanings of words and sentences actually do. He shows that meanings are more adaptive and complicated than they're commonly given credit for, and he is led to some basic questions: How do we perceive and act in the world? How do we talk about it? And how can the collection of neurons in the brain give rise to conscious experience? As it turns out, the organization of language, thought, and perception does not look much like the way we experience things, and only a small part of what the brain does is conscious. Jackendoff concludes that thought and meaning must be almost completely unconscious. What we experience as rational conscious thought - which we prize as setting us apart from the animals - in fact rides on a foundation of unconscious intuition. Rationality amounts to intuition enhanced by language. Written with an informality that belies both the originality of its insights and the radical nature of its conclusions, A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning is the author's most important book since the groundbreaking Foundations of Language in 2002.
Download or read book Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist written by Will Eisner and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-08-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final volume of Will Eisner’s celebrated instructional trilogy explores the critical principle of body grammar in comics storytelling. Designed and outlined by Will Eisner before his death in 2005, this posthumous masterwork, the third and final book in the Will Eisner Instructional Series, finally reveals the secrets of Eisner’s own techniques and theories of movement, body mechanics, facial expressions, and posture: the key components of graphic storytelling. From his earliest comics, including the celebrated Spirit, to his pioneering graphic novels, Eisner understood that the proper use of anatomy is crucial to effective storytelling. His control over the mechanical and intuitive skills necessary for its application set him apart among comics artists, and his principles of body grammar have proven invaluable to legions of students in overcoming what is perhaps the most challenging aspect of creating comics. Buttressed by dozens of illustrations, which display Eisner’s mastery of expression, both subtle and overt, Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative will benefit comics fans, students, and teachers and is destined to become the essential primer on the craft.
Download or read book Unflattening written by Nick Sousanis and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.
Download or read book Marvel by Design written by Robert Klanten and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one of the most recognizable brands in the world, Marvel has spent the last 80-plus years inspiring generations of creatives through its approach to visual storytelling. Marvel's comic books, in particular, established a distinct graphic language that has found its way into mainstream culture, including 1960s Pop Art, and present-day digital culture, gaming, advertising, and more. Marvel By Design will celebrate the company's visual language with an in-depth exploration of the design process behind the brand's most recognizable graphical elements including logos, covers, lettering, layout, and color palettes. Readers will learn how the renowned Marvel Method established a unique approach to the creative process and how that process can serve as a template for creatives working beyond comics. Throughout the book, Marvel By Design will connect the dots between comic culture and its undeniable influence in every creative field including the evolution of graphic design, editorial design, movies, and visual culture at large.
Download or read book The System of Comics written by Thierry Groensteen and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition of Thierry Groensteen's The System of Comics makes available in English a groundbreaking work on comics by one of the medium's foremost scholars. In this book, originally published in France in 1999, Groensteen explains clearly the subtle, complex workings of the medium and its unique way of combining visual, verbal, spatial, and chronological expressions. The author explores the nineteenth-century pioneer Rodolphe Topffer, contemporary Japanese creators, George Herriman's Krazy Kat, and modern American autobiographical comics. The System of Comics uses examples from a wide variety of countries including the United States, England, Japan, France, and Argentina. It describes and analyzes the properties and functions of speech and thought balloons, panels, strips, and pages to examine methodically and insightfully the medium's fundamental processes. From this, Groensteen develops his own coherent, overarching theory of comics, a "system" that both builds on existing studies of the "word and image" paradigm and adds innovative approaches of his own. Examining both meaning and appreciation, the book provides a wealth of ideas that will challenge the way scholars approach the study of comics. By emphasizing not simply "storytelling techniques" but also the qualities of the printed page and the reader's engagement, the book's approach is broadly applicable to all forms of interpreting this evolving art.
Download or read book Mind in Motion written by Barbara Tversky and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.
Download or read book Comics and Language written by Hannah Miodrag and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2013-07-29 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has become an axiom in comic studies that "comics is a language, not a genre." But what exactly does that mean, and how is discourse on the form both aided and hindered by thinking of it in linguistic terms? In Comics and Language, Hannah Miodrag challenges many of the key assumptions about the "grammar" and formal characteristics of comics, and offers a more nuanced, theoretical framework that she argues will better serve the field by offering a consistent means for communicating critical theory in the scholarship. Through engaging close readings and an accessible use of theory, this book exposes the problems embedded in the ways critics have used ideas of language, literature, structuralism, and semiotics, and sets out a new and more theoretically sound way of understanding how comics communicate. Comics and Language argues against the critical tendency to flatten the distinctions between language and images and to discuss literature purely in terms of story content. It closely examines the original critical theories that such arguments purport to draw on and shows how they in fact point away from the conclusions they are commonly used to prove. The book improves the use the field makes of existing scholarly disciplines and furthers the ongoing sophistication of the field. It provides animated and insightful analyses of a range of different texts and takes an interdisciplinary approach. Comics and Language will appeal to the general comics reader and will prove crucial for specialized scholars in the fields of comics, literature, cultural studies, art history, and visual studies. It also provides a valuable summary of the current state of formalist criticism within comics studies and so presents the ideal text for those interested in exploring this growing area of research
Download or read book Visual Language Theory written by Kim Marriott and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A broad-ranging survey of our current understanding of visual languages and their theoretical foundations. Its main focus is the definition, specification, and structural analysis of visual languages by grammars, logic, and algebraic methods and the use of these techniques in visual language implementation. Researchers in formal language theory, HCI, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics will all find this an invaluable guide to the current state of research in the field.
Download or read book The Language of Comics written by Robin Varnum and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A diverse study of how words and pictures interact in comics to make messages
Download or read book Early Writings on Visual Language written by Neil Cohn and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Comics Sequential Art written by Will Eisner and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author discusses his ideas and theories and provides instructions on the art of graphic storytelling.
