My comic life
When I was around 7 or 8, I used to get 50 pence pocket money every week. The local newsagent stocked a random selection of Marvel and DC comics which meant I could buy 5 every week. My first experience of the unfairness of inflation was when they went up to 12p and I could afford one less.
When I was a student, I was recklessly spending a sizeable proportion of my student loan buying up back issues of The Uncanny Xmen as well as discovering a whole bunch of new comics. This was a desperate time choosing between comics or food.
Now I have actual disposable income to spend, my reading habits have changed drastically. Most of my comic reading is digital, through my phone. Not the most ideal way to appreciate comics but at least I can regularly contribute to #paneloftheweek on instagram.
My favourite comic book panel
When I think of my earliest memories of reading comics this panel is the one that springs to mind. This is of course Wolverine, from when he was cool. Before he became a song and dance man. This is from The Dark Phoenix Saga, a classic story from one of the best ever creative teams in mainstream comics, Chris Claremont and John Byrne.
When I think about the reason this particular panel is so special, it’s because of it’s context with the story and the way in which it exemplifies the themes of the overall narrative - revenge, resurrection etc. It work like a mnemonic device in my mind that links the previous and next sequences of the story arc. Earlier in the issue where Wolverine was plunged into the sewer to an uncertain fate. The start of the next issue when we see him dripping onto an unsuspecting henchman.
What’s so special about comics?
I’ve been reading comics for over 35 years now and very few periods of my life have been sans comics. The funny thing is that it’s only in more recent years that I’ve started to actively think about the experience of comics. This has coincided with comics becoming a serious focus for academic study. The study of comics can be roughly divided into 3 parts I guess. The craft, the theory and the science. I’ll spend a little time introducing each.
The craft of comics
Will Eisner was an American cartoonist and one of the earliest pioneers of the comic book form. He is credited with inventing the term “graphic novel” after the publication of his book “A Contract with God”.
He taught the craft of sequential art at the school of visual arts in new york. His lectures were compiled into two influential books that inspired modern day comic writers and artists such as Neil Gaiman. He created this diagram to represent the complex plumbing of comics and and the different disciplines that an accomplished comic author needed to know about.
The theory of comics
Scott McCloud is a comic book artist and theorist. He’s been called the Aristotle of comics. He wrote a very influential book called Understanding Comics. Essentially a comic about comics, the book explores what comics are, where they came from and what make them special.
The book is perhaps best known for his ideas about “iconic” art. He suggests that simpler images inspire more emotional connection. This is a result of the subject’s need to fill in the missing information. He also builds on Eisner’s description of comics as sequential art to demonstrate how comics employ nonlinear narratives because they rely on the reader's choices and interactions.
The science of comic reading
Neil Cohn is a comic writer and cognitive scientist. Perhaps because of his more scientific approach to understanding the medium of comics he is less well known than Eisner and McCloud. Cohn’s research has shown that the cognitive processes used to create narrative structures in the brain, extend across domains and cultures.
Cohn suggests that the sequential art is processed as a form of language. Humans use three modalities to express concepts: creating sounds, moving bodies, and creating graphic representations. When any of these modalities take on a structured sequence governed by rules that constrain the output - i.e. a grammar - it yields a type of language. Thus structured sequential sounds become spoken languages of the world, structured sequential body motions become sign languages and structured sequential images literally become visual languages.
The King and the Godfather
In the introduction to his book, Neil Cohn quotes two of the greatest ever comic artists from the eastern and western hemisphere. Jack "King" Kirby is perhaps the most influential artist in mainstream American comics, inventor of The Fantastic Four, Hulk, Thor, Captain America and my own childhood favourites The X-men. Kirby once said: "I've been writing all along and I've been doing it in pictures”.
Osama Tezuka from Japan is the godfather of manga. He is most famous for creating Astroboy, a comic book and then television series that embodied the aesthetic that later became known as anime. He said: "I don't consider them pictures... In reality I'm not drawing. I'm writing a story with a unique type of symbol”
The comic book PHD
Nick Sousanis is another comics scholar and the first person to with a dissertation entirely in comic book form. Published as Unflattening: A Visual-Verbal Inquiry into Learning in Many Dimension, he also echoes McCloud’s idea that whilst comics are read sequentially, the entire composition is also viewed allatonce. The composition forms “a connected space”, one that is not dependant on linear sequence.
Seeing patterns
At this point it’s worth introducing the concept of Gestalt. The term gestalt comes from psychology and refers to groupings and our tendency to see patterns wherever possible. Gestalt psychologists sought to understand the organization of cognitive processes and the ability of our brain to generate whole forms.
Text and image, sequence and non-sequence, parts and whole. It’s this dual nature that makes comics special. Sousanis describes the experience of reading comics as “a multiplicative resonance - a dynamic cycle of read-look, look-read…”.
Escaping information flatland
The information theorist Edward Tufte describes the integration of words and pictures as being essential for "escaping flatlands" of information exchange. The best example of this in his opinion is Charles Joseph Minard's figurative map portraying the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812.
Visual languages also appear in other places as well, such as when sequential images appear in instruction manuals.. and various other contexts that are not labeled as "comics"
What links comics with IA?
Visual vocabulary
Will Eisner first used the term visual vocabulary in his lectures on sequential art. There is also of course a visual vocabulary in IA.
The visual vocabulary is a set of symbols for communicating information architecture and interaction design in diagrams. It was created by Jesse James Garrett. The visual vocabulary is the IA equivalent of that wolverine panel for me, something I fell in love with at the start of my career and that represents IA in my mind. I still use it today.
When I create a diagram to represent an intended flow or journey through a website or application, I'm creating both structure and sequence. This is something that comics do albeit in a very different way that is focussed on narrative goals rather than task/information goals.
Information architecture is typically a starting point for the design of an experience. It’s also possible to reverse engineer an experience in order to make clear the underlying structure. An early and influential examples of this comes from the writer Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse 5. He wrote his master’s thesis on the shapes of stories.
Graphesis
Both comics and diagrams are both examples of what the visual theorist Johanna Drucker calls Graphesis - visual forms of knowledge production. She suggests that most information visualisations are acts of interpretation masquerading as presentation... in actuality arguments made in graphical form.
The Elements of User Experience is one such example. In this visualisation, Garret summarises argues that fundamental duality of the web as an information space and as task supporting environment leads to confusion in design - rational organisation of content versus an intuitive way of using that content.
What can IA learn from comics?
Separating structure from semantics
Despite their apparent simplicity comics are actually very complex and yield many types of types of structure - graphic structure… navigational structure… conceptual structure… spatial structure… event structure… narrative structure - shown here.
Art Speigelman, the author of MAUS, calls pages “architectonic units” relating to, or according with the principles of architecture. Neil Cohn calls panels attention units since they graphically provide a "window" on parts of a mental environment.
Panel classification
More about Wally Wood
Panel classification:
Macro - depicts multiple active entities
Mono - depicts single active entities
Micro - depicts less than one active entity (as in a close up)
Amorphic - depicts no active entities (i.e. only inactive entities)
Transitions, grids and page geometry
Frank Santoro is comic artist and teacher who dedicates himself to breaking down the barriers between comics, fine arts and the classical tradition. Geometry, grids, transitions… also the digital comics reading experience.
Despite the obvious potential of the web, digital comics is still a relatively unexplored medium. Most web comics are still bound by the conventions of the printed medium, if not the distribution costs. Stu Campbell, an Australian illustrator, interactive designer and writer is one of the genuine innovators. His ground-breaking web comic series, The Nawlz, (still available but dependant on another type of old media, the flash plugin) used sound and animation to enhance the comic reading experience and create an immersive dystopian world.
He has also adapted traditional Australian Aboriginal stories into interactive iPad storybooks. This ties back to Neil Cohn’s research into visual languages has also looked at the practice of aboriginal sand painting. They use symbols but also space itself to tell stories to one another.
The flatness of possibility
In many ways, we have scarcely begun to look at the possibilities that come from understanding other cultures and the ways in which they exchange knowledge with one another.
Nick Sousanis call this flatness - not flatness as in flat design but a flatness of sight, a flattening of possibilities. He cites Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher who believed that technological society was repressive and that there was “a logic of domination of technological progress in consumer society”.
In seeking to design environments that maximise efficient accomplishment of tasks user experience has become “reductively mechanistic” according to Johanna Drucker. Humans are agents whose behaviours can be constrained in mechanical feedback loops. To return to Jesse James Garret’s diagram, we have gone too far towards the rational rather the intuitive. There is some irony in this, as much of the credit for popularising of the term user experience is his.
The interpretative nature of knowledge
It’s not about replacing one thing with another of course but creating balance. Information architecture should claim it’s place amongst the digital humanities as much as the sciences. We should pursue a humanistic worldview, that recognises the interpretative nature of knowledge. In the same way that the subjective reading experience of comics is one of continual feedback - read look, look read…
With that I’ll leave the last word to our friend Wolverine. I believe that it’s our turn as information architects to put goal seeking humans back at the centre of our design process and not simply rescue users from drowning.