Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand ...

STIC 1 (1) pp. 53–70 Intellect Limited 2010

Studies in Comics Volume 1 Number 1 © 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.53/1

STUART MEDLEY Edith Cowan University

Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics Keywords

Abstract

less-real-than-real silhouettes perceptual constancy visual closure visual system realism abstraction

Scott McCloud (1993) has used a ‘realism continuum’ to classify comics characters between the points of realism and iconic abstraction. Before him, other theorists (Gropper 1963; Knowlton 1966; Dwyer 1972; Wileman 1993) have used this continuum as a means to judge the communicative and instructional potential of pictures as they become more distant from the realistic. At the same time, all comic artists employ at least some level of distillation or abstraction, some removal of realistic detail. This approach can allow for other design aspects to be emphasized in or imposed upon the comics’ panels: such as line, shape, colour, orientation and composition. These attributes in turn accentuate connections or relationships that are less apparent in realistic images. But what are the psychological mechanisms by which we understand images abstracted away from realism, and how might knowledge of these help to build an understanding of comics’ formal properties and

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contribute to the theory of comics? This article explores some important faculties of the human visual system, labelled by psychologists as perceptual constancies. Examples from comics are used to illustrate these faculties put to work by visually literate artists. The mechanics of caricature are also explained in terms of their importance to how the mind remembers images. Caricature, and not realism, is a mechanism for visual memory. There is a difference in the way images communicate depending on their realism quotient and this difference is key to the way that comics communicate, whether their artists are aware of this fact or not. Distillation and exaggeration can actually communicate more powerfully to the psyche than ‘the real thing’. This article explains why this knowledge should be central to an understanding of comics.

Introduction Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things. Georgia O’Keeffe (cited in Stremmel 2006: 98) Comics criticism might reasonably be expected to address combinations of words and pictures. In fact, since a comic may consist of a sequence of pictures only, but not a sequence of words only, the expected primary focus of comics theory might easily be pictures. Instead, as comics author, artist and critic Dylan Horrocks has observed, it tends to ‘focus on such elements as plot, characterization, narrative structure, the use of language, and so on’ (Horrocks 2004). Perhaps we should not be surprised that its theory has focused on words and storytelling. Pictures are difficult. In her Visual Literacy White Paper, Bamford (2003) says we should abandon any notion of classifying imagery precisely because it is not as quantifiable as text. Difficulty with images is noted elsewhere. Goldsmith, for example, in her Research into Illustration, seems to despair of finding a way to evaluate pictures: Every illustration produced is different in an infinite number of ways from every other illustration […] Terms most commonly used to describe the grosser aspects of pictures, such as ‘line drawing’ or ‘colour photograph’ may give some idea of the cost of reproduction, but say nothing about their likely communication value. (Goldsmith 1984: 123) Exacerbating the problem of this textual focus is the academic location of comics studies. The push to have comics recognized as a medium worthy of academic discourse has inevitably led to

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Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics

the application of metrics which allow its comparison with literature. Accordingly, an adjustment to existing analytical methods has been suggested as a way forward. Gene Kannenberg Jnr for example, says: ‘interpretive strategies for text/image relationships already in use by the academy can be augmented and refined by a willingness to examine, critically, the medium of comics’ (Kannenberg 2003). For him comics worthy of analysis are those that develop ‘complex narratives through the strategic juxtaposition of text and image in sequential form’ (Kannenberg 2003). The work of such critics is vital in an understanding of comics, since the relationship between text and image is central to most work in the field. However, comics such as Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, the wordless winner of the Angoulême 2008 ‘comic of the year’ award, would not fit such analytical criteria. What is needed to balance out these literary approaches is a theory that can easily emphasize the role of image. I aim to show here that the way things are represented, how realistically or otherwise they are depicted, affects how we read images, and therefore the meaning we gain from them. Clues to this implication can be found in art history; for example that, ‘the first prejudice teachers of art appreciation usually try to combat is the belief that artistic excellence is identical with photographic accuracy’ (Gombrich 2002: 4). In this article, I use this sense of realism – photographic accuracy – as a yardstick against which to measure pictures. A more promising route ahead then, for those interested in how images communicate, is to suspend discussion of narrative. Some theorists have done similar in order to look at alternative ways of appreciating what is unique in comics. Kochalka (1999) sees the role of the comic creator as providing an environment rather than a plot. Horrocks has developed this concept and named it ‘worldbuilding’ (2004); he asks, what if the author’s primary task is not to build a story; but a world – a kind of elaborate experiment which will foment when replete with its own particular settings and peopled with characters. How might we measure what images do in setting up this world? If the ‘look’ is important, how might we assess this ‘look’? Scott McCloud (1993) has used a ‘realism continuum’ to classify comics characters between the points of realism and iconic abstraction. Before him, other theorists (Gropper 1963; Knowlton 1966; Dwyer 1972; Wileman 1993) have used this continuum – with photographs at one end and abstracted or distilled images at the other – as a means to judge the communicative and instructional potential of pictures as they become more distant from the realistic. Indeed, in experiments intended to determine what kinds of images allow for easy identification of objects, the most realistic image has been persistently demonstrated not to be the most communicative. Line drawings perform better in this regard than photographs of the same things (Fussel and Haaland 1978). This is surprising. If the human visual system has evolved among the real visual world, it should stand to reason that any means that can replicate that world accurately is the best means to communicate visual information to the reading or viewing audience. Yet we can see and understand

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the typical visual styles of comics: reduced detail, outlines drawn around objects, flat colours, caricature, and so on. This raises the issue of learned versus innate visual understandings, which there is not the space to explore here. Suffice to say, some abstract visual understanding seems to pre-exist any acculturation: even babies shown a couple of dots and a line in the configuration of a face, tend to spend more time viewing such an image than they would a ‘non-face’ configuration of the same marks, suggesting that such an image is understood as a face (Fantz 1961; Morton and Johnson 1991). I will explain some mechanisms of the human visual system (the eyes and brain) that are at work to enable identification of less realistic images than those found away from the page in the real world. Further, I will try to demonstrate that these mechanisms allow that the visual system prefers less-than-realistic images.

The distant image One reason we can see and understand the less-real-than-real pictures in comics’ panels might be that we have evolved having to deal with images presented to us at a distance. Such images are reduced in detail from the ideal required for recognition. An image is focused on to the retina, and converted into a language the brain can read – chains of electrical impulses (Gregory 1977). This retinal mosaic, however, is a finite number of components arranged across a finite area. The limited resolution that the retina provides means that only limited detail can ever be supplied to the brain. We look at different visual stimuli in different ways and, importantly, at different distances from them. The image presented to us from long distance is less than the ideal needed for recognition: some of the details that would be apparent close-up are literally missing because of this limited capacity. In a sense the image of the person at this distance is less representational than when they are within six metres of us: the ideal viewing limit for human stereopsis (Eden 1978: 205). The possibilities regarding who we are looking at become greater at a distance. In such a circumstance, we must call on other visual criteria for recognition. We can best judge the identity of this person now, not on the recognition of their face but upon their actions; in other words, by what they do. We are behaving differently because of the level of representation of the image; the image now means something different. Interestingly, Hergé never once drew more than a medium close-up of Tintin. We judge Tintin by what he says and what he does, not on his looks, which, apart from the famous quiff, are an assemblage of anti-caricature features. Tintin’s travelling companions, Captain Haddock, Professor Calculus and company are, by contrast, strong caricatures which may be judged by their appearance as much as their deeds. Tintin displays his traits – loyalty, bravery and intelligence – through action and speech. The distance the artist kept from his creation in each panel and the distilled drawing of this character are ideal to present these attributes.

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The silhouette Another aspect of the visible world allows that the visual system might have evolved to understand less-real-than-real images: the silhouette. Depending on conditions of ambient light, the naturally occurring image of some person, creature or aspect of the landscape may appear as a more graphic shape than it would under conditions of, say, midday sunlight. Not only will this lighting diminish recognition of the specific person or thing, information regarding its three-dimensional shape will be lost to the eyes and must be made up where possible, presumably from memory. With regard to a hypothesis about a silhouetted person, this may not be too difficult. Stance, gait, profile, relative size of head to body and so on should give good clues as to age and sex and build, if not specific identity. The silhouette of an unfamiliar object will result in a greater range of hypotheses, and lengthen the odds of one of these being the correct one. A silhouette may indicate then what kind of object we are looking at but not easily allow us to solve what psychologists call the homogeneity problem, or which particular object we are looking at. Typically, pictures drawn as silhouettes can be seen in instructional graphics for tasks ranging from assembling furniture to self-defence messages: these often comprise comics that are largely image-driven, as they need to work across linguistic barriers. Generally speaking, such comics depict accurately scaled figures and aspects of the appropriate environment in outline, but disregard most of the interior detail of these. This approach, exemplified at figure 1, achieves a number of objectives. As Rick Poynor suggests of this style of graphic in his essay ‘Blank Look’: If it has an aesthetic character it is one that has arisen from the modest aim of giving only as much visual information as is needed to convey the basic facts. Anything more elaborate would slow down a potentially urgent message. (Poynor 2001: 78) The absence of accurate colour and the uniformity of outline in the human figures might also defuse any heightened emotion that would be attached to such situations in reality. In the example given, issues such as ethnicity can be sidestepped in a way that would be difficult to achieve through photographic means. At the same time the realistic proportions suggest a serious and matter-of-fact directness for the message.

Simplest is best So, even in nature there seem to be some images available to the eyes that communicate information without being typically ‘realistic’. Things viewed from a distance and things viewed in silhouette provide a less-real-than-real version of what they would stand for at an ideal viewing distance in ideal

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Figure 1: Medley, after Juan Calle. Instructional design can present anonymity of character through distilled detail. This, in turn, allows pertinent aspects of the information to be easily highlighted, in this instance through the use of colour.

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light. However, this is a satisfactory explanation of how we link the abstraction to its realistic other only if the viewer knows what kinds of things s/he is looking at. Otherwise these ‘less real’ looking things would potentially be regarded as novel to the viewer, presenting, as they do, differently on the retina than would a closer and more ideally lit version of those same things. Thanks to a group of faculties of the visual system, under the name of ‘perceptual constancies’, the brain knows what the eye does not. These mental faculties override the purely visual sensation, and prevent us from mistaking novel presentations on the retina as novel objects because these faculties are unconcerned with specific information. These mechanisms are not present to acknowledge reality but rather to help us avoid being fooled by it. Which is to say that the visual system, even when abroad in the real world, is not merely accepting of what is presented on the retina, but in fact is measuring that presentation against what the brain knows of objects in the world. Gombrich uses a perfectly simple but surprising example to explain, It is a fascinating exercise in illusionist representation to trace one’s own head on the surface of [a steamed-up bathroom] mirror and to clear the area enclosed by the outline. For only when we have actually done this do we realize how small the image is which gives us the illusion of seeing ourselves ‘face to face’. To be exact it must be precisely half the size of our head […] since the mirror will always appear to be halfway between me and my reflection, the size on its surface will always be one half of the apparent size. (Gombrich 2002: 5) The image on the retina is not taken at face value: it is mediated and interpreted by the brain. How then, does the brain, or visual perception, decide that when the eyes present it with something it has never seen before, it may have seen that thing before but from another angle or at a different distance? Gombrich says: to probe the visible world we use the assumption that things are simple until they prove to be otherwise […] A world in which all our expectations were constantly belied would be a lethal world. Now in looking for regularities, for a framework or schema on which we can at least provisionally rely (though we may have to modify it for ever), the only strategy is to proceed from simple assumptions. (Gombrich 2002: 222) Similarly, Popper (1959) maintains that the mind is likely to select the simple proposition not because it is most likely to be right but because it is the easiest to refute and therefore to modify.

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Figure 2: Medley after Glaser. The flat colour typical of most comics plays to the perceptual faculty of colour constancy. Colour constancy allows that subtleties of shading are unimportant for recognition.

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Psychologists place these mechanisms under the heading of ‘perceptual constancy’. Shape, size and colour constancies are aspects of this mental faculty (Walsh and Kulikowski 1998: 492). Size constancy means that a given object is perceived as having the same size regardless of its distance from us. In other words, our knowledge of its size will override its presentation on the retina (as per Gombrich’s face in the mirror experiment above). Shape constancy means that an object is seen to have the same shape regardless of orientation. Thus we see things ‘as they really are’ and are not taken in by variations in the information presented to the retina. Colour constancy means that an object is perceived as having the same colour in spite of changes in lighting conditions. This connection between the two visual versions of the same thing is what allows us to see the less realistic as having a relationship to the more realistic. Or rather, the less detailed can stand for the more detailed but perhaps in a more general way: the detailed version may be someone we recognize, a singular, specific person; the less detailed, distant version we may simply regard as ‘a person’. The same would apply for the ideally lit figure and the silhouetted figure respectively. These faculties tell us that the real visual presentation of an object upon our retinas must be matched against existing information about these, or similar, objects in our memory in order for us to identify them. Implicit in this is that the knowledge already gained of the world exists in some kind of visual form. This form does not precisely match any ‘real’ visual version of such an object since the memory will contain a range of information from different viewpoints and under different lighting conditions. Comics artists, knowingly or otherwise, help solve these visual problems on behalf of their readers. In the world of comics, colour, for example, is less likely to change due to ambient lighting conditions than it might in the real world. This may be a result of the artist simply being consistent with ink colours from frame to frame, but it is a colour consistency that is rare in nature and helps the reader establish, among other things, character identity. It is not a realistic use of colour but it communicates more directly than a realistic application of colour.

Visual closure Perceptual constancy, as a set of psychological faculties, is enough to allow that the visual system understands less visible versions of things as being the same as ideally visible versions of those things. Along with ‘closure’ (Rauschenberger and Yantis 2001), the gestalt ability to group things, to assume patterns and finish in the mind objects half-glimpsed by the eyes, this understanding of abstracted images becomes an even more compelling argument. Closure is, Kepes tells us, ‘Certain latent interconnections of points, lines, shapes, colours and values [which are] closed psychologically into bidimensional or tri-dimensional wholes’ (Kepes 1944: 51), where the viewer will ‘fill in the gaps’ (figure 3). The faculty of closure does not have to reside in an ability to complete objects in the mind

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Figure 3: George Hardie’s two-panel cat comic draws attention to visual closure. The second panel is designed to show that the closure provoked in the first is the wrong conclusion.

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only when they are occluded. It also manifests itself in an ability to complete objects whose detail is only partly drawn, as if occluded but by some invisible artefact that merely removes some details from the object being viewed. This would seem to allow that the ‘invisible occlusion’, which may exist in a drawing where detail is absent, be written off by the visual system as something not being focused upon. It is the object of attention that is important in order that the object constancy problem may be solved. Together, these faculties of perceptual constancy and closure show that we can communicate visually with images that are less realistic than the real aspects of the visual world. However, they do not prove that distillation – the act of reducing realism – is a more effective means by which to communicate or that humans may have a preference for the distilled image. Two fairly recent findings of the psychology of vision need to be examined to allow that the visual system might prefer less realism and less detail. The first of these will show that less realism is what the eye sees and the second will show that less realism is, rather perversely, what the brain prefers.

Seizing and exciting the eye Certain brain cells are stimulated by certain patterns and by certain orientations of line, while others are stimulated by different orientations (Hubel and Wiesel 1962: 106). More recent research (Roska and Werblin 2001) suggests the eye only gives basic information to the brain, which then fills in the detail. Some of the electrical messages sent to the brain by the retina are given only when the edge of an object is detected. Others are sent only when something is moving, and so on. What the eye sends to the brain, according to this research, are mere outlines of the visual world, sketchy impressions that make our vivid visual experience all the more amazing. Another study (Geisler and Diehl 2002) found that the visual system ‘is more sensitive to vertical and horizontal contours than to diagonal contours, perhaps reflecting the natural distribution of contour orientations’ (Geisler and Diehl 2002: 421). Any picture which plays to these bigger, hard-wired visual themes is perhaps more likely to ‘score a hit’ on the visual system. Pictures designed as distilled images might better fit this model than the real world, giving the eye and brain, in effect, a higher-impact version of the visual world. On the one hand pursuing illustrations that remove some of the visual details found in the real world might better allow closure, and on the other create scenes that can powerfully seize the attention of the eye and literally excite it. Comics appear in a vast range of visual styles but nearly all have in common that they reduce the detail of the visible world in terms of texture and colour, and they typically employ outlines to describe objects. Each of these techniques would seem to play to the predilections of the eye and brain, and explain at least some of the appeal of comics’ visual environments.

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Figure 4: Medley, Floraphobe. Outlines, though non-existent in nature, are typical in comics and drawing in general. The appeal of these outlines demonstrates that edge-detection of objects is a basic function of the eye.

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Caricature, evolutionary psychology, and the visual system None of these hypotheses however, explains a more bizarre faculty of the visual system: its ability to recognize people from a picture, not necessarily reduced in detail, but a picture whose important details have been exaggerated. This kind of image, best known as the province of the political cartoonist, is the caricature. Brennan defines caricature as: a graphical coding of facial features that seeks paradoxically to be more like a face than the face itself. It […] amplifies perceptually significant information while reducing less relevant details. The resulting distortion satisfies the beholder’s mental model of what is unique about a particular face. (Brennan 1985: 170) To recognize an object, for example to distinguish a chair from a table, we must be able to map a potentially infinite set of images onto a single object representation: that is, we must solve what psychologists know as the ‘object constancy problem’. However, to delineate one type of chair from another, or, more importantly, to delineate one face from another is a different problem for the visual system. Psychologist and face-recognition expert Gillian Rhodes explains how the visual system, in concert with cognitive apparatus in the mind, allows the brain to map new visual input against stored ‘norms’ (Rhodes 1996: 2–3). These norms exist for whole ranges of visual information and are expanded upon with further experience of the visual world. Where the new visual information differs from the norm, the mind appears to store these differences in a form exaggerated beyond their actual appearance. For example, if a person appears different from the norm because their eyes are closer together than is normal (‘normal’ being defined by the different visual experience of each viewer) the brain will exaggerate this difference further still by pushing the eyes closer together in the stored memory of that person. In addition to this mental exaggeration of ‘trends away from the norm’, Rhodes explains that the visual system and the ‘psychological landscape’ to which it is linked are actually predisposed towards and on the lookout for extreme visual signals. She argues that: Stimuli that exaggerate some critical property of the natural stimulus, such as its size, contrast or number, often produce an enhanced response [...] This preference for extremes seems to be a fundamental feature of recognition systems, and one that imposes important constraints on the design of signals. (Rhodes 1996: 10) Here Rhodes means ‘design’ in the sense of natural selection but the same might hold true for the human activity of drawing: exaggerated signals (those that do not naturally occur and are therefore

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Figure 5: Olivier Kugler, Palermo detail. Any object may be caricatured if the artist can conceive of a norm for such an object. The differences between the object and its norm are then exaggerated away from the norm.

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not easily reproducible through photography) might actually communicate more immediately to a visual system predisposed to look for them: ‘If drawings can be interpreted as externalizations of mental representations, then […] those representations might themselves be caricatured. If so, then caricatures would be effective because they match the memory representations better than undistorted images!’ (Rhodes 1996: 11). Annibale Carracci, the sixteenth-century artist, believed that, ‘A good caricature, like every work of art, is more true to life than reality itself’ (Geipel 1972: 56). As Gibson has said, a caricature: may be faithful to those features of the man that distinguish him from all other men and thus may truly represent him in a higher sense of the term. It may correspond to him in the sense of being uniquely specific to him – more so than a projected drawing or photographic portrait would be. (Gibson 1971: 29) Rhodes and Gibson both suggest that specialist visual expertise can extend to recognition of any objects that may be discriminated by difference from a norm; that, in theory, any object can be caricatured. The criterion seems to be that such a group of objects has a norm – real or imagined. To each of us these norms will be different. For those of us that work in specialist areas it might be easier than for others to conceive of a norm for, say, nuts and bolts, dresses, cars, buildings or landscapes. At figure 5 is an example where the setting and the vehicle are caricatured: where these differ from a ‘normal’ urban landscape (walls less straight than the typical rectilinearity of the illustrator’s home environs) and a ‘normal’ car (the wheels of a Fiat 500 are smaller than average): these aspects have been exaggerated by the illustrator.

Coincidental conclusions How does this information help the comics creator or critic? I do not argue that this kind of visual appreciation is completely innate. Certainly our experience and acculturation in the world will determine substantial visual understandings, but certain innate abilities allow us to make sense of the new things we see, including drawings and comics. It is clear through even this brief application of cognitive theories to comics that there is a rich vein of discussion to be had outside of the bounds of literary analysis about how comics communicate. There is a growing appreciation of the visual in comics that centres on this notion of realism and its drawn alternatives. There is a sense among some comics critics, and many creators, that, as Gombrich conjectured, realism is not the pictorial ideal. Chris Ware has said: ‘ “Fundamentally you’re better off using ideograms rather than realistic drawings,” […] Ware kept his pictolinguistic strips simple because his goal was not to depict emotion, but to create

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it’ (Raeburn 2004: 19). A focus on the psychology of seeing can be one way of explaining the effectiveness of abstracted images. Beyond plot, narrative structure, and the use of language, lies the visual realm of world creation. The degree of distillation or abstraction, the removal of realistic detail that all comics artists must address, is important to the way comics are perceived. It may explain the unique appeal of the visuality of comics. It may border on coldly scientific to invoke psychophysics in a discussion of the oftenplayful realm of comics, however, at least part of comics’ appeal must be visceral and immediately visual. The coincidences between the way the visual system apprehends the world and the way that most comics artists tend to draw and ink their worlds – some degree of abstraction away from realism, clear outlines, flat colours, reliance on closure, a tendency towards caricature – seem too numerous and precise to be merely accidental. Images that build upon the simple propositions that the mind prefers seem to populate the worlds of most comics. The analysis presented here suggests that an understanding of these psychological mechanisms should be at least as important to the comics artist and theorist as an understanding of the roles of written language. It is seeing, while reading, that makes comics a unique experience for the reader. An understanding of the special ways of seeing applied by readers is a necessary starting point for a theory of comics’ formal properties. For the comic creator, the removal of realistic detail allows for other aspects to be emphasized or imposed upon the images, such as line, shape, colour, orientation and composition. These attributes in turn accentuate connections or relationships that are less apparent in realistic images. An understanding of this allows the comics creator to bring visual harmony or deliberate chaos to the world so created, and to visually echo or refute any accompanying text. An important next step will be to determine how levels of pictorial realism within a comic’s world impact upon the way narratives are perceived by the reader. Studying comics in such a way might also spread its academic uptake into other disciplines such as design, itself a newcomer to the academy but a place where text/image relationships are central to practice and theory.

References Bamford, A. (2003), The Visual Literacy White Paper, Sydney: Adobe Systems. Barker, M. (1989), Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brennan, S. E. (1985), The caricature generator, Leonardo, 18:3, pp. 170–178. Dwyer, F. M. (1972), A Guide for Improving Visualized Instruction, Pennsylvania: Learning Services, State College, PA. Eden, J. (1978), The Eye Book, Middlesex: Penguin. Fantz, R. (1961), ‘The origin of form perception’, Scientific American, 1961, 204, pp. 66–72.

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Fussel, D. and Haaland, A. (1978), ‘Communicating with pictures in Nepal: results of practical study used in visual education’, Educational Broadcasting International, 11:1, pp. 25–31. Geipel, J. (1972), The Cartoon: A Short History of Graphic Comedy and Satire, Newton Abbot: David and Charles. Geisler, W. S. and Diehl, R. L. (2002), ‘Bayesian natural selection and the evolution of perceptual systems’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences, 357: 1420, pp. 419–448. Gibson, J. J. (1971), ‘The information available in pictures’, Viewpoints, 47: 4, pp. 73–95. Goldsmith, E. (1984), Research into Illustration: an Approach and a Review, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gombrich, E. (1982), The Image and the Eye, Oxford: Phaidon. Gombrich, E. (2002), Art and Illusion, Oxford: Phaidon. Gregory, R. L. (1970), The Intelligent Eye, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Gregory, R. L. (1977), Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing, New York: McGraw-Hill. Gropper, G. L. (1963), ‘Why is a picture worth a thousand words?’ AV Communication Review, 11, pp. 75–79. Hochberg, J. and Brooks, V. (1962), ‘Pictorial recognition as an unlearned ability’, American Journal of Psychology, vol. 75, pp. 624–628. Horrocks, D. (2004), The Perfect Planet: Comics, Games and World-Building, http://www.hicksville. co.nz/PerfectPlanet.htm. Accessed 14 October 2009. Hubel, D. and Wiesel, T. N. (1962), ‘Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat’s visual cortex’, Journal of Physiology, vol. 160, no. 1, pp. 106–154. Kannenberg, G. Jnr (2003), Form, Function, Fiction: Text and Image in the Comics Narratives of Winsor McCay, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, http://gator.dt.uh.edu/~kannenbg/fff.html. Accessed 10 December 2009. Kepes, G. (1944), Language of Vision, Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company. Knowlton, J. (1966), ‘On the definition of a picture’, AV Communication Review, vol. 14, pp. 147–183. Kochalka, J. (1999), The Horrible Truth About Comics, Gainsville, Florida: Alternative Comics. McCloud, S. (1993), Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperCollins. Morton, J. and Johnson, M. H. (1991), ‘CONSPEC and CONLEARN: A two-process theory of infant face recognition’, Psychology Review, vol. 98, pp. 164–181. Popper, K. R. (1959), The Logic of Scientific Discovery, New York: Basic Books. Poynor, R. (2001), Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World, London: August Media Ltd. Raeburn, D. (2004), Chris Ware: Monographics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rhodes, G. (1996), Superportraits: Caricatures and Recognition, East Sussex: Psychology Press. Roska, B. and Werblin, F. (2001), ‘Vertical interactions across ten parallel, stacked representations in the mammalian retina’, Nature, vol. 410, pp. 583–587.

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Rauschenberger, R. and Yantis, S. (2001), ‘Masking unveils pre-amodal completion representation in visual search’, Nature, vol. 410, pp. 369–372. Stremmel, K. (2006), Realism. Köln: Taschen. Walsh, V. and Kulikowski, J. (eds) (1998), Perceptual Constancy: Why Things Look as They Do, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wileman, R. E. (1993), Visual Communication, New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications.

Suggested citation Medley, S. (2010), ‘Discerning pictures: how we look at and understand images in comics’, Studies in Comics 1: 1, pp. 53–70, doi: 10.1386/stic.1.1.53/1

Contributor details Stuart Medley’s comics have been published in Deanne Cheuk’s Mu and Neomu magazines. In addition, Medley was the editor of SiC BAG comics, now in the Michael Hill Collection at the Australian National Library. He currently lectures in graphic design in Australia and New Zealand. He has spoken at various conferences including TypoGraphic2005, Lebanon, and the NewViews2 2008 conference at the LCC in London. His writing about design has been published by the Australasian Medical Journal. Medley’s work on information design was selected as research excellence by the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools, 2009. He is the designer for Hidden Shoal Recordings, a critically acclaimed record label with a roster of international artists. He has a Ph.D based on the paradox that less realism allows more accurate communication. His examiners included Professor George Hardie, who described the research as bringing image into the fold of graphic-design theory. Contact: Stuart Medley, School of Communications & Arts, Edith Cowan University, Bradford Street, Mt Lawley WA 6050, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]

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