While I’m plugging away on Chapter Four (you can see the finale to Chapter Three here, and the opening excerpt from the current chapter here), current discussions around war got me thinking about the page from “Possibilities,” my 2006 comic on games that takes up the subject. It’s not an attempt to offer answers, but perhaps a…
I’m in the midst of drawing Chapter Four – in which I deal specifically with perception and discussions around drawing as a form of discovery. If Chapter Three dealt with the distinction between text and image, and comics as a means of uniting modes, this puts it all into practice. For various reasons, I may…
A month or so back, I gave a talk at Microsoft Research to accompany the exhibition of excerpts from my dissertation. (I posted images from the show here.) They recorded the talk, as it was also being streamed to Microsoft employees not physically in attendance, and they’ve now kindly put the talk together with slides…
This week, I’m off to Milwaukee to give the opening keynote for the Visitors Studies Association annual conference “Where Innovation Meets Rigor.” I’ll be discussing my dissertation and comics as a means of presenting complex information and ideas with clarity and without reducing their complexity. Recently, Brett Terpstra interviewed me for his 5by5 systematic podcast.…
At long last, Chapter Three is complete! Although it’s overall structure/length stayed more or less the same from my initial notes, this chapter just kept growing on me in complexity as I got deeper into it. This second half of the chapter was all about how comics work – and in this metacommentary approach –…
Back from an amazing trip in Seattle and sharing a little update on all that went on in the exhibition and talk at Microsoft Research – Building 99. A huge thank you to Microsoft Research, the folks behind the Studio 99 space, and especially the beyond generous support, enthusiasm, and patronage from MSR’s Donald Brinkman.…
Ok, I haven’t quite finished the chapter when I’d hoped. This page on multimodality kept asking for more thinking, and then more… I finished last week, and was hopeful to finish the remaining two before posting all together, but because of travel (see below) I won’t quite finish them till next week, so posting this…
The slow but steady march to finish chapter three continues. Another new page, this time addressing how the unique ecosystem that is comics facilitates visual-verbal interaction – with mentions of the work of RC Harvey, David Lewis, and Edward Tufte. These and many other references I drew on to think through this page (including the…
Thrilled to finally be able to share this page, which represents the culmination of my thinking on this medium and along with the sequence leading up to it, really gets at the heart of my theorizing on why comics are cool! For some time, I’ve been working on comics as integrating the sequential and simultaneous…
Sharing just a single new page this week, along with process sketches that led to the recently released page on the sequential nature of comics. First up, this page on the simultaneity of the comics page is the only page that borrows an existing composition nearly note for note, specifically a page from my journal…