The Patterns of Comics

Name: The Patterns of Comics
Brand: Allen & Unwin
SKU: 9781350381643
Price: 60.99 NZD
Availability: InStock

Visual Languages of Comics from Asia, Europe, and North America

By Dr Neil Cohn

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Summary

The Patterns of Comics explores the diverse visual languages of comics from Asia, Europe, and the United States, analysing over 36,000 panels from 350+ comics to reveal cross-cultural differences in symbology, layout, and storytelling across 80 years. It offers a data-driven study comparing American comics, Japanese manga, and more, including an in-depth look at Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, highlighting how comics' visual languages reflect universal linguistic principles.
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Format: Paperback / softback

$60⁹⁹

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The Patterns of Comics

$60⁹⁹

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book is ideal for scholars, students, and enthusiasts of comics, visual narrative, linguistics, and cultural studies seeking an in-depth, analytical approach to the structure and evolution of comics worldwide.

Description

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 organising principles of all languages.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Dan I. Slobin, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at UC Berkeley, praises this book as a magisterial, carefully constructed handbook that provides essential tools for ongoing research into the visual language of comics across cultures.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781350381643

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 28 December 2023

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic

Illustration: 80 bw illus

Audience: Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 16.0mm

Width: 154.0mm

Height: 232.0mm

Weight: 460g

Pages: 296

Collections

Dr Neil Cohn Education & Reference Graphic Novels Manga Non-Fiction Science & Nature

About the Author

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.

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