Neil Cohn rethinks visual literacy and underscores the unexplored dynamics of comic books

Neil Cohn is an American cognitive scientist and comics theorist (http://www.visuallanguagelab.com/) who works at Tilburg University (https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/staff/n-cohn). In this interview, he works through how his research on the acquisition of visual languages in comics literacy relates to the broader acquisition of all the cognitive structures that allow us to make sense of the world. I gravitated to Cohn’s newest book Who Understands Comics? (https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/who-understands-comics-9781350156043/) to some extent because of the acclaim it had received, but mostly because I am a devotee of the medium. (Although, we talk about whether it should even be regarded as a discrete medium.) Who Understands Comics is, in Cohn’s words, his “psychology” book. He explains that the questions he wanted to ask about the ways that we comprehend comics dictated that he use more quantitative methods. That said, his work is still deeply interdisciplinary; and he talks about how working across different fields of thought provides a way to avoid the issue of running into disciplinary constraints in your research that can sometimes shut down conversations, collaborations and critiques before they occur. He also relates how the hybrid approach he was using to understand how comics work, when he was a graduate researcher, meant that “nobody knew what to do with him.” These moments of blockage forced him to find new routes for doing justice to the power of graphic storytelling. To devise a way to conduct experiments that would then inform theory, and theoretical frameworks that could be shaped and revised on the basis of experimentation. While acknowledging the comforts of familiarity, Cohn says he’s committed to creating space for contesting key heuristic assumptions about how readers of graphic texts do the work of supposedly “filling in the gaps” within and between the panels. That particular assumption--that readers are responsible for manufacturing “missing information” that the cartoonist doesn’t provide and that readers just somehow automatically know how to supply--just doesn’t stand up to empirical research, he says. Especially if we do that research across multiple different cultural contexts and traditions. Cohn stresses that there’s just not enough awareness of the importance of cultural differences in comics theory. But these are crucial for thinking through the evolution of distinct systems of visual language. So, we may have a cursory sense of the differences between the libraries of comic storytelling in Japan, France, the U.S. and Canada, but a cursory understanding tends to move us into totalizing about all comics, as though all comic storytellers follow the same patterns when they write, which they don’t.