Group items tagged

KG: Spiegelman said the same thing about Maus, actually, about three years ago when these sections in bookstores were starting to gear up and gain ground. And he said, they want to shelve Maus in the graphic novel section, but it’s not a novel. It’s nonfiction. But now a lot of the stuff in the graphic novel section is nonfiction. And that’s because they are treating it like a genre when it’s a medium.

That is, as the authors say, "Remarkably, emoticons convey emotions without cognition of faces."

This finding has very interesting consequences for understanding how brains process varying degrees of complexity in images. The implication here at least is that more simplified faces become tied more explicitly to a "symbolic" meaning as opposed to their iconic meaning of resembling what they look like. That is, more simplified images strip down the meaning to its core meaning disconnected to the iconic reference that they are framed within.

Comics were once tarred-and-feathered as sub-literate pablum, lacking any artistic or cultural merit, considered childish and lacking any merit. Communities once sponsored bonfires to rid them of the evil of comicbooks, less than a decade after the end of World War II.

In McCloud's Understanding Comics he proposed his theory of "cartoon identification" that cartoony* images are "identified" with better than realistic images. This study (pdf) tested McCloud's theory by using behavioral measures of a 7-point rating and EEG measures of the brain's electrical activity.

They take these results to be support for McCloud's theory of identification that indeed, cartoony images do invoke greater empathy from a reader than realistic images.

More interestingly, she claims that the "still-images of actions" are also indexical, because they only show a part of a broader temporal whole action.

First of all, in the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, indexicality is a means through which reference is garnered via causation or indication. For example, an index finger that points to something doesn't mean that thing, it indicates the thing has meaning. The finger is just saying "for the real meaning look over there." Also, if I saw a footprint in the sand, it indexes the person who once walked there, because of the causation stepping there created.

in How to Draw..., Lee and Buscema's advice is to use the maximally intense points of that sequence — the ends and beginnings of the action marked "best" or "not bad." These sections of the action seem more representative of the action than the medial parts. In semiotic terms, they would index the overall action better than the parts in the middle, which are less representative of the overall action.

Research seems to have borne out their intuition.

Sexuality is not a black-and-white matter; neither, therefore, is consent. There are infinite shades of gray between consent as defined in the Antioch Policy and the legal and medical definitions of sexual assault. Although we can agree on certain terms and definitions for sexual violence, those definitions are far from universal, and they’re thick with semantic subtleties and qualifiers.

That is, the audiovisual performance of “fandom” (however narrowly defined by Hollywood) in such venues is considerably more important to media corporations than anything real fans actually do. This gap between different expectations and perceptions is a critical juncture in contemporary popular culture as TPTB openly court fans, and is at the crux of my ongoing research.