Neil Cohn Books

Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally are they understood?Combining recent advances from linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical psychology, this book argues that visual narratives involve greater complexity and require a lot more decoding than widely thought. Although increasingly used beyond the sphere of entertainment as materials in humanitarian, educational, and experimental contexts, Neil Cohn demonstrates that their universal comprehension cannot be assumed. Instead, understanding a visual language requires a fluency that is contingent on exposure and practice with a graphic system. Bringing together a rich but scattered literature on how people comprehend, and learn to comprehend, a sequence of images, this book coalesces research from a diverse range of fields into a broader interdisciplinary view of visual narrative to Who Understands Comics ?

Comics are a global phenomenon, and yet it's easy to distinguish the visual styles of comics from Asia, Europe, or the United States. But, do the structures of these visual narratives differ in more subtle ways? Might these comics actually be drawn in different visual languages that vary in their structures across cultures? To address these questions, The Patterns of Comics seeks evidence through a sustained analysis of an annotated corpus of over 36,000 panels from 350+ comics from Asia, Europe, and North America. This data-driven approach reveals the cross-cultural variation in symbology, layout, and storytelling between various visual languages, and shows how comics have changed across 80 years. It compares, for example, the subtypes within American comics and Japanese manga, and analyzes the formal properties of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes across its entire 10-year run. Throughout, it not only uncovers the patterns in and across the panels of comics, but shows how these regularities in the visual languages of comics connect to the organizing principles of all languages.