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

Cohn, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1350381640 ISBN 13: 9781350381643

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

Synopsis

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 more than 350 comics from Asia, Europe, and the United States. 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.

About this title

About the Author

Neil Cohn is Associate Professor of Communication and Cognition at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He is the author of The Visual Language of Comics (2013), Who Understands Comics? (2020), and editor of The Visual Narrative Reader (2016).

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350381640
• ISBN 13: 9781350381643
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304