Visual Language

I've been thinking a lot about visual language, specifically the visual language of comic books. Now, the modern bible on this is Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. Add to that Eisner's Comics and Sequential Arts and Graphic Storytelling. I would comment on the latter two, but as I have not read them yet (oh but I will), I can only talk about Understanding Comics. Now, I like Understanding Comics, I like it a lot, but I always felt it was lacking a bit. It talks about a bunch of the basic theory, but not the upper theory and mechanics. Perhaps that is why Emaki, which I most likely got from the most excellent blog Mae Mai. Emaki makes a promise that there will be more discussion, and as soon as I order and get the book, we will find out.

Well, as I was saying, I have been thinking a lot about visual language. I hope that over the next while, I can start to analyze visual language and how different people read it. Because I do not think that being able to read a comic book is as natural as many people (and by people I mean comic book readers) think it is. Among the various bars of entry to comic books (among them cost, perception, and a dearth of subject matter) is that people simply don't know how to read comic books. Not that people are stupid, or that they cannot figure it out, but that as comics become more and more detailed, the nuances of the comics form becomes lost on many people.

A lot of this may not make sense until I get to it though. In other news, I read something like ten million books thanks to the magic of RSS, and I decided I need to winnow down the number.