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The Visual Narrative Reader
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.
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.
- GenresNonfictionComics
376 pages, Hardcover
First published January 28, 2016
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 20, 2024
If you feel like learning things you never knew before about how people use drawings to communicate, this is the book for you.
I thought that I was fairly informed on the topic. I mean, I've read lots of books on the theory of comics, on the theory of manga, and way too many comic books, graphic novels, and tankobon. But, well, I picked this up and realized that I have but dipped my toe into the wider world of pictorial narratives.
All of a sudden, I want to go study hieroglyphics, even though they weren't mentioned in this book at all. All of a sudden, I want to go read up on the cognition of vision and on the links between gestures and art. All of a sudden, I want to go read up on the Aborigines of Australia because I know nothing about them other than what I read in this book and what I read was pretty fascinating. I want to know if they still tell each other stories in the sand and how the kids who are raised in both the cultural communities and in the western education system are continuing to blend two different ways of representing the world together.
The parts of the books that talked about children's drawings was, to me, the most fascinating part of the whole book. It's not something that I want to study, but I certainly enjoyed reading the conclusions and discussions of others who made it their field of study. I have heard that kids all draw the same things at different levels of development, that if told to draw a church, they all draw the same kind of building with a steeple and a cross on it, even though most churches no longer have them. That if told to draw a house, then they draw a house with a chimney, even though most houses no longer have chimneys. But this book made an excellent point, is it that they are drawing what they see in real life? Or is it that they are drawing what they have seen drawn? Are they mimicking real life, or are they mimicking each other?
What an excellent question. Why should drawing be any different than any other human behavior? When a child is sitting with adults, and one adult gets angry, the child looks up to their caregiver to see how they are reacting and then reacts similarly, they mimic. They learn how to behave by observation. Why should drawing be any different? The first way that a western child draws a human face is often with a giant face and teeny weeny arms and legs and no body. The first way that an Aborigine childe draws a person is as a U. One is not lesser or better than the other, they are representing different things and different values and different symbols of different cultures and it's completely fascinating.
At one point in the book, Dr. Wilson, one of the contributors was talking about how Egyptian children with little exposure to the outside world wouldn't draw sequential narratives. When prompted to draw a story with 4 empty boxes, they would draw four different scenes that had nothing to do with each other, representing 4 different stories. He made the point that we have to learn how to draw images in sequence, that it's not something that comes naturally. That made sense to me, because I taught a young adult literature course at my last university and I gave my students a manga to read. I didn't give them any special instruction because I didn't think anyone would need it, you just...read it. Well. I forgot. You have to be taught how to read manga. Half of the students read it backwards (from left to right) and it took a lot of them a long time to figure out how to read the panels in order. It's not 'natural' it's not 'easy'. It's something that is learned, and it's something that is actually quite complex.
I always knew it was complex, but I didn't know how complex. It's basically three orders of abstraction. You take a metaphor that we use for anger, 'boiling over' or 'blow his top' or something like that. It's already an abstraction. We don't actually boil over or blow our heads off, we would die if we did. But we have this idea that anger is hot, so we create these word metaphors around things that are hot, then we somehow have to represent that in drawing. I suppose we could draw a pot over our heads with water boiling over, but instead someone came up with the brilliant idea of drawing steam coming off of someone's head, and somehow we all understood that it means anger.
That's actually astonishing. We don't have a saying like 'steam coming off of his head'. It isn't an exact representation of a word metaphor, it's an abstraction of an abstraction...and it's understandable. You don't need to read my short explanation here, or the pages long explanation in the book, to understand that this set of images means this thing, you just understand it by looking at it and yet it has all of these connections and abstractions going on underneath. It was really cool and made me realize I need to read Lakoff's book about metaphors, I added it to my never ending to-read list. Who knows when I will get to it.
Although this book wasn't actually all that helpful to me personally and what I want to research, it did give me a bit of confidence to know that there is a whole lot out there that is available to be researched about comics and it was fascinating to see them from a whole different angle than what I've considered before.
I have been left with one niggling little thought, though. Apparently Mayan vases have a lot of art on them, and as you turn the vase, more scenes are revealed and you get sequential images that tell parts of a story or that illustrate an event such as a dance or a ball game. It was interesting to see, and although nobody really knows much about the provenance of these vases the article said that they were probably found in tombs and that they belonged to rich people as a sign of social cachet. Basically, high art, expensive, ritualistic items.
And yet...when I looked at them...I wondered if the researchers had got it all wrong. There are vases where there are two scenes, that are extremely similar, and the researchers say that it is showing one moment and the next moment of a ritual, showing the different positions of arms and legs in this ritual dance. They are probably right, they've looked into it far more than I have, but I just had this evil little thought...What if those vases are just the Mayan version of 'spot the difference' and are actually children's toys? Wouldn't that be hilarious?
I thought that I was fairly informed on the topic. I mean, I've read lots of books on the theory of comics, on the theory of manga, and way too many comic books, graphic novels, and tankobon. But, well, I picked this up and realized that I have but dipped my toe into the wider world of pictorial narratives.
All of a sudden, I want to go study hieroglyphics, even though they weren't mentioned in this book at all. All of a sudden, I want to go read up on the cognition of vision and on the links between gestures and art. All of a sudden, I want to go read up on the Aborigines of Australia because I know nothing about them other than what I read in this book and what I read was pretty fascinating. I want to know if they still tell each other stories in the sand and how the kids who are raised in both the cultural communities and in the western education system are continuing to blend two different ways of representing the world together.
The parts of the books that talked about children's drawings was, to me, the most fascinating part of the whole book. It's not something that I want to study, but I certainly enjoyed reading the conclusions and discussions of others who made it their field of study. I have heard that kids all draw the same things at different levels of development, that if told to draw a church, they all draw the same kind of building with a steeple and a cross on it, even though most churches no longer have them. That if told to draw a house, then they draw a house with a chimney, even though most houses no longer have chimneys. But this book made an excellent point, is it that they are drawing what they see in real life? Or is it that they are drawing what they have seen drawn? Are they mimicking real life, or are they mimicking each other?
What an excellent question. Why should drawing be any different than any other human behavior? When a child is sitting with adults, and one adult gets angry, the child looks up to their caregiver to see how they are reacting and then reacts similarly, they mimic. They learn how to behave by observation. Why should drawing be any different? The first way that a western child draws a human face is often with a giant face and teeny weeny arms and legs and no body. The first way that an Aborigine childe draws a person is as a U. One is not lesser or better than the other, they are representing different things and different values and different symbols of different cultures and it's completely fascinating.
At one point in the book, Dr. Wilson, one of the contributors was talking about how Egyptian children with little exposure to the outside world wouldn't draw sequential narratives. When prompted to draw a story with 4 empty boxes, they would draw four different scenes that had nothing to do with each other, representing 4 different stories. He made the point that we have to learn how to draw images in sequence, that it's not something that comes naturally. That made sense to me, because I taught a young adult literature course at my last university and I gave my students a manga to read. I didn't give them any special instruction because I didn't think anyone would need it, you just...read it. Well. I forgot. You have to be taught how to read manga. Half of the students read it backwards (from left to right) and it took a lot of them a long time to figure out how to read the panels in order. It's not 'natural' it's not 'easy'. It's something that is learned, and it's something that is actually quite complex.
I always knew it was complex, but I didn't know how complex. It's basically three orders of abstraction. You take a metaphor that we use for anger, 'boiling over' or 'blow his top' or something like that. It's already an abstraction. We don't actually boil over or blow our heads off, we would die if we did. But we have this idea that anger is hot, so we create these word metaphors around things that are hot, then we somehow have to represent that in drawing. I suppose we could draw a pot over our heads with water boiling over, but instead someone came up with the brilliant idea of drawing steam coming off of someone's head, and somehow we all understood that it means anger.
That's actually astonishing. We don't have a saying like 'steam coming off of his head'. It isn't an exact representation of a word metaphor, it's an abstraction of an abstraction...and it's understandable. You don't need to read my short explanation here, or the pages long explanation in the book, to understand that this set of images means this thing, you just understand it by looking at it and yet it has all of these connections and abstractions going on underneath. It was really cool and made me realize I need to read Lakoff's book about metaphors, I added it to my never ending to-read list. Who knows when I will get to it.
Although this book wasn't actually all that helpful to me personally and what I want to research, it did give me a bit of confidence to know that there is a whole lot out there that is available to be researched about comics and it was fascinating to see them from a whole different angle than what I've considered before.
I have been left with one niggling little thought, though. Apparently Mayan vases have a lot of art on them, and as you turn the vase, more scenes are revealed and you get sequential images that tell parts of a story or that illustrate an event such as a dance or a ball game. It was interesting to see, and although nobody really knows much about the provenance of these vases the article said that they were probably found in tombs and that they belonged to rich people as a sign of social cachet. Basically, high art, expensive, ritualistic items.
And yet...when I looked at them...I wondered if the researchers had got it all wrong. There are vases where there are two scenes, that are extremely similar, and the researchers say that it is showing one moment and the next moment of a ritual, showing the different positions of arms and legs in this ritual dance. They are probably right, they've looked into it far more than I have, but I just had this evil little thought...What if those vases are just the Mayan version of 'spot the difference' and are actually children's toys? Wouldn't that be hilarious?
Displaying 1 of 1 review