Neil Cohn sends news of a Korean neuroscience study testing the iconic identification theory from Understanding Comics Chapter Two. (Does everyone get emails like this or is it just me?). Peculiar but interesting reading.

Meanwhile, a bit closer to my old stomping grounds in Medford, Massachusetts, Neil himself has been hard at work with theories, essays, and studies of his own for some time, all of which can be found at his extensive site. He’s even posted a reaction to the Korean study here.

Courtesy of the New York Times this week, Maira Kalman’s And the Pursuit of Happiness is an enjoyable meditation on laws and those who preside over them.

And since Kalman’s comic is presented in one big scroll, it gives me a hook to also link to Dash Shaw’s gargantuan scrolling Bodyworld webcomic (completed earlier this year) which I’ve been meaning to blog about for awhile.

In principle, I always liked the idea of putting comics all together on one page; the idea being that readers could just hit a button or touch their scroll wheel and just use that one method to move all the way from beginning to end. I used the format myself a lot in my early webcomics.

It saddens me, though, to note that the big drawback of scrolling in the early days still hasn’t gone away after all these years. Most browsers still update images every few pixels while scrolling so that the entire page flickers and jitters all the way down until it stops. Dude, it’s 2009! Why does scrolling still hurt my eyes?

Ah, well. Still holding out for multi-touch laptops that scroll like iPhones. We’ll see…

The online presentation tool Prezi goes into public beta this week. It’s a zooming interface designed for presentations which caught the eye of a few of us in the lunatic fringe as having potential applications for you know what.

Neal Von Flue posted an in-depth look at the comics implications of this new tool on his Facebook page when a few of us got advanced notice of the private beta in February. Unpack the comments thread for input from Krisztián Kristóf, a cartoonist and developer on the Prezi team who is also considering these issues.

Together with developments like Microsoft’s embryonic Infinite Canvas Alpha and the likelihood of multi-touch netbooks in the near future, Prezi may be part of a general trend toward continuous-space navigation in communication and the arts. If that’s the case, I hope comics will be a part of that trend.

Big image here.

Context here and here.