The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images.

by 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 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.

Genres: Comics, Nonfiction, Linguistics, School, Graphic Novels, Art, Education

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Derek Royal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating quantitative study of comics, although Cohn argues that this is about visual language in a broader sense, not just a focus on comics. (Still, "comics" does stand prominently in its title.) This is part of Bloomsbury's "Advances in Semiotics" series, and the text adopts a clear linguistics approach. However, one of the strengths of Cohn's analysis is its cognitive perspective, and in this way, he provides a more anchored study -- at least in terms of primary research -- than does Karen Kukkonen's Contemporary Comics Storytelling from last year. Cohen is at his best when he is articulating a system or a narrative grammar in comics, although his analysis of three cultural visual languages (which makes up the second and final section) is persuasive, as well. There are places were Cohen's categorization seems too generalized (e.g., in his breakdown of American "dialects" into Kirbyan, Barksian, and Independent styles), but for the most part, he is discerning in the way he organizes his analyses. Another strong point of this book -- and something you rarely, if ever, find in comics studies -- is a utilization of the author's own primary research (in the form of quantitative studies) and his own illustrations...which are quite good.

[Khari · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books where I feel I need a caveat. The three stars in no way means that this was a mediocre book, in this case, it means my reaction to it was mediocre.

There were some chapters that I felt had already been adequately covered in one of his earlier books that I've read, especially the chapter on sand drawings, I didn't really learn much in that chapter that I hadn't already learned by reading the two chapters in his other book.

There were other chapters that I disagreed with the premise, or didn't understand the premise and never really got into the rest of the chapter after the initial premise. The greatest example I can think of was how he was talking about how Japanese Visual Language and American Visual Language differ in their use of macros and micros, which basically seems to mean depictions of whole entities and depictions of partial entities.

I don't think he's right there, or at least, only partially right, because I don't think that each category of Japanese manga uses macros and micros to the same extent. Even if they do use them at the same numbers, which I doubt, they don't use them in the same way. If you take shounen, which is targeted at young males, then micros are often used to add tension by focusing on cutting up a moment of action, or looking at an action from various different angels. You have a punch by Luffy, and you'll have a panel of his fist, a panel of his stretched arm, and a panel of his body twisting. They all depict the same instant and the same action from different perspectives to add tension.

You won't see that nearly as often in a shoujo manga, targeting young females. Instead you will see a close up of one character's eye. Instead of cutting up and focusing on particular parts of an instant, these micros extend an instant. They provide space for the reader to fill in all of the subjective feelings that the character must be experiencing. These are accomplishing very different things, even if they use the same technique, and because they accomplish different things, they are used at different rates. So, I think in this case, it's odd to conflate all Japanese manga together when genre has such a big effect.

The other good example is the splitting up of pictures into different kinds of functions, like Initials, Peaks, Establishers, etc. I just do not understand how panels can be classified into these functions so cleanly. They basically coincide with Introduction, Rising Action, Climax, Denouement, the classic divisions of literature. I've taught literature classes, it's actually quite difficult to exactly parse a novel, or a short story even, into its constituent parts. You'll get broad agreement about the climax, usually, most of the time, but the other parts usually have passionate defenses of very different divisions. Then you get to the point where it's quite easy to do this on a very short three sentence story, but what is the major climax of something epic, like the Wheel of Time? If we are applying it to comics, goodness, what's the peak of peaks in One Piece? The series is 107 volumes long and counting.

So, I had some problems with some of the theory in this book.

On the other hand, there were parts that made me have an aha moment. For my own coding, I have to say who is saying what, and sometimes that is remarkably difficult to figure out, he made me aware of one reason why. Sometimes characters are 'aware' that they are saying something, and sometimes they are not, and sometimes the listener is 'aware' that they are listening and sometimes they are not. This is one reason it's difficult to figure out who is saying what in comics. The interesting thing is that sometimes in manga, there are cases where language is not being produced by anyone, and it's not being perceived by anyone. It exists as a backdrop. Just kind of there to show a setting. So, this makes it even harder to figure out who is saying what and for these things I usually just say 'general audience'. A good example of this is you have a large crowd of students walking to school, a common occurrence in Japan, in a manga, you will have floating above this crowd little pieces of text of [ohayo], meaning 'good morning'. But there are no lines down to anyone. No one specific person is saying it. It's something that is said by many people, it could be all of them saying it, it could be just a few of them saying it, there's no way to know the aural weight/amount of what is being said. It would be interesting to see how he would treat that, and interesting to see if it occurs anywhere besides Japanese manga.

There was one part that blew my mind, which is why I keep on reading books like this, even if they don't have a direct relationship to the research I want to do, they give me a better understanding of the medium itself and how stinking cool it is. The part that blew my mind is that the space of a story in a comic is bigger than the space that is presented in the pictures. This is obvious in a way, the pictures are 2 inches by 3 inches, but in your mind they don't stay that size, you immediately imagine real life characters in full three dimensions, which is cool enough as it is that we can intuitively make that jump. But that's not the only thing we do, we expand the space in our heads, the comic shows the dog jumping off the ground, then it shows the dog catching the frisbee, but in our mind we have the job jumping, travelling through the air, landing on the ground and catching the frisbee. We just create that space in our head, even though we aren't shown it, and I think it is pretty awe-inspiring that we just do that. Without thought. Without being taught. Without ever pausing to wonder at how we know how to do that. It just shows how amazing the human mind is.

So. It had interesting parts, it had boring parts. It had parts that blew my mind, and parts that made me go 'huh?' It was just difficult to wade through some times and I didn't enjoy the process of reading it as much as I did the second book of his I read. To be fair, I enjoyed it more than I did the first, so...there's that.

[Diz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book presents an interesting approach to comics--viewing comics as language rather than as art. The author takes a linguistics approach to examine the grammar and components of visual language, or language with pictures. It's a very interesting idea, and I'm looking forward to reading more about this. Perhaps the one weak point in this for me was the inclusion of a chapter about aboriginal sand drawings. It seemed a little bit out of place since every other chapter was about comics. It was a very interesting chapter though.

[Cyrus Daruwala · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't come up with a duller way to delve into the language of comics. A promising title proved to be deceptive. I gave it the extra star for the attempt, and for introducing me to a couple of new topics and comic artists.

[Tim O'neill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have an inconsistent response to this book, which, as a linguist and comic lover (someöne who wrote a linguistics dissertation and QP, but also an undergrad thesis comparing American and French comics!) was not the goal. I was expecting, perhaps, a prose, linguistically informed Understanding Comics that would tie together everything, but it didn’t quite. I think Cohn can be as charming as McCloud, but he also has to be academically rigorous. I sometimes felt as if I were tryïng to keep up with Cohn’s rigor in an academic presentation one moment and hanging out with him at the pub after the conference the next. So for my needs, I’d’ve preferred if this book were a more general audiënce presentation, not quite in the The Mother Tongue way, but as I’ve enjoyed in other pop ling works like Wordslut or Because Internet. Or on the other side, well-cited by accessible works like How Babies Talk or Baboon Metaphysics. Tonally, I never knew if I was supposed to be reading this at a desk, checking on the references and taking notes or sitting on the couch. To be transparent, I read it in the latter manner, and that may’ve been to the book’s detriment. To be further transparent, the text is only 200 pages with lots of full-page illustrations, and I took over a year to read it, which is certainly not ideal for a book you could polish off in a dedicated weekend.

There is, of course, a lot of love here, and especially the early chapters were really inspiring my mutuäl love of comics and linguistics. Once it got into the response to McCloud’s panel transitions, tho, while I do love story structure, I found myself getting lost in the terminology. Obviöusly this could be my fault (especially with the two aforementioned stipulations about my reading strategy!), but I did want to understand it and didn’t always. In fact, one of the main reasons I’d be happy to read more Cohn (aside from feelng like I really connected with his personality as expressed in the endnotes) is because I’d love t’understand more.

[Nastia Stebleva · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's objectively a very interesting work to read, and it's great to see a book that decentrifies narrative analyses when discussing comics.

That said, sometimes what Cohn suggests feels speculative at best and, at worst, like a distortion of reality to fit the theory. Cohn's analysis approach seems to occasionally cherry-pick certain attributes of comics to fit the general picture he tries to paint.

I enjoyed reading it nonetheless, and it surely has lots of interesting thoughts and observations, however, somebody interested in comics studies would probably benefit more from reading something like "Comics as Communication" instead.

[Rich Carr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Communication is an amazing thing to understand, and Cohn's work here focuses on one of the three modalities of communication in the form of sequential images. Fascinating & scholarly, I could go on and on about the nuggets I've pulled from this for my work (instructional design), but let me state that if you communicate visually, and need to be effective, then this yarn is for you.

[Quinn]

Very interesting hard to read but for a full educated person it shouldn't be difficult to read.

[Wim Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boeiende deconstructie van van striptekeningen met een pleidooi voor verder onderzoek naar visuele taal.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

If one has a knowledge of linguistics, this is a fascinating exploration of the linguistics of visual narrative and how brains in several cultures comprehend graphic narrative.

[Jon Christensen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Text book.

This is written as a text book and is very dry without accompanying material. Writer seemed to be knowledgeable but I just couldn't stick with it.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent resource.