Random!... panel sequences that is

As long as we're on the topic of comics that people clip out for me, here's another one that my advisor passed along. For some reason, he's rather partial to Zippy the Pinhead (I think because of the philosophy jokes), and this one caught his eye. Particularly this first panel over to the side.

Zippy it seems comes from the Non-sequitur school of panel transitions (if you're into that sort of thing).

What makes this fun for me is that my next experiment is actually going to use various scrambled strips to help illustrate the differences in processing between those and normal strips (plus some other more complex strip types).

Not much is out there about this sort of research, but one study did show that people's comprehension of sequential "picture stories" (Mercer Mayer stories) correlated with their comprehension for text. Skilled readers showed a drop in recollection for scrambled compared to regular sequences. However, unskilled readers showed no comprehension differences at all.

I'm a bit dubious that fluency in visual language is comparable to general comprehension skills (they used no measure for graphic fluency), but this study at least showed some support for a domain general capacity.