Visual-Verbal Intermingle

The slow but steady march to finish chapter three continues. Another new page, this time addressing how the unique ecosystem that is comics facilitates visual-verbal interaction - with mentions of the work of RC Harvey, David Lewis, and Edward Tufte. These and many other references I drew on to think through this page (including the excellent MLA session and subsequent special journal issue Charles Hatfield organized on comics and picture books) will all be listed in some sort of end note/commentary track in the completed dissertation. This page, as well as the last several and next three to come are all intended to demonstrate the thing they're talking about - not merely illustrate me talking about it. Thus, finding a form that achieves that has been an ongoing challenge to say the least! (I posted the entire sequence establishing my thinking and defining of comics immediately before this page here.) Even after I figured out the form on this one - tying back into the amphibious theme that opened the chapter, I still had to do things like draw "Imagetext" a few thousand times to make the water surface. (I did at some point take a short cut and copy a section of the text - though i think it added time because then i had to make all the lines coming to it align, which meant a lot of redrawing. Probably broke even in the end.) The reference to refraction also hearkens back to the opening sequence of the chapter and Descartes. I'm building on and re-weaving ideas together introduced earlier as I go forward, so while these can be read as stand alone pages, the payoff should be in the accumulation of all that's come before. (You can also compare this page to how I addressed similar ideas back in the journal article "The Shape of Our Thoughts.)

As always, this is a much lower res version than what I work at, and as a result some of the tiny detail in this page may not be visible. Thanks for following along - next post will be the finale of chapter three. Really. - Nick