ComicCon 2015 postscript

As always, I had a great time at ComicCon this year! I thought my panel on "The scientific study of the visual language of comics" went great, and I greatly enjoyed talking with everyone who came by the booth to chat with me and check out my book. I am also quite thankful to Reading with Pictures for kindly hosting me at their booth!

In my panel, I gave an overview of how to do "scientific studies" of comics, taking the hard line that this is the only way we can truly get ahold of how the visual language used in comics are structure and comprehended. Much of it echoed the argument from my "Building a better comic theory" paper, along with hints from my introduction to my upcoming book, The Visual Narrative Reader. 

After this, three of my students each presented their own projects, including an experiment about hierarchy in page layout (Barak Tzori), and coding studies examining how American superhero comics have changed from the 1940s to the present with regards to page layout (Kaitlin Pederson) and text-image interactions (Ryan Taylor).

They totally crushed it! One way I could tell that their presentations were well-received was that most of the questions were directed at them, not me. I was super proud of them, and may try to make this a regular thing at ComicCon.

We attempted to record the presentation, so I'm looking into ways to put that online for all to see parts if not the whole thing. More to come!