The Patterns of Comics: Visual Languages of Comics from Asia, Europe, and North America

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Comics are a global phenomenon, and yet its 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 Wattersons 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.

Author Bio

Neil Cohn is an award-winning cognitive scientist known for pioneering research on language, graphics, multimodality, and cognition, and Associate Professor at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. His books The Visual Language of Comics (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the 2021 Eisner-nominated Who Understands Comics (Bloomsbury, 2020), establish the linguistic and cognitive study of graphic communication.