The intricate language of a visual art: Tufts graduate student pioneers research in the linguistics

    Not all teenage passions transition into lifelong vocations. Sports make few professional athletes out of high school players; garage bands rarely produce superstar musicians. Similarly, only a handful of comic artists emerge from the industry's vast following. Tufts psychology graduate student Neil Cohn falls into the rare category of those who have stuck with their adolescent passions.
    At age 14, Cohn was given a stack of Japanese manga comics direct from Japan through a friend who lived there. In one night, he devoured three of the 200-page volumes — without knowing a word of their Japanese script.
    "I was forced to understand fully through images," Cohn recalled. "I was engaging solely with the visual language."
    He explained that studies have shown that when people are limited to just one mode of communication — sound, movement, pictures — their use of this mode intensifies. Experiences with comics, Cohn continued, have attuned him to the particular modality of images.
    Cohn's exposure to comics in the Japanese context was instrumental in the formation of his ideas. A martial arts practitioner from a young age, Cohn was always keenly interested in Asian philosophy. This led him to pursue Asian studies in college and to spend a year as an exchange student in Japan, where he witnessed the ubiquity of manga in Japanese society. This exposure opened his mind to the broader applicability of comics' form. Over two-thirds of Japanese children imitate manga in everyday settings — evidence, Cohn argues, of a language-like use of images.
    Cohn is a pioneering theorist of "visual language," the language in which comics are written. In comics, images are used in a discrete sequential fashion sufficient to constitute a language, according to Cohn. The grammar of this language — the structure of these image sequences, how these sequences take on meaning — is the main focus of his current research.
    "Understanding [visual language] can help those who use it to have a way to analyze their own work," Cohn said.
    He suggests that acknowledging the visual language equips users with editing capabilities to enhance their work, much like in English and other written languages. "It means having a way to talk about [their work], a critical language."
    Cohn hopes that by recognizing the visual language, society may begin to expand its usage beyond comics. At present, he sees the visual language as being largely relegated to storytelling.
    "What you find in bookstores now is that you have the comics section, and then you have everything else," Cohn said. "The idea is that if visual language becomes pervasive, we would be getting more and more diverse types of visual language use, and it would emerge out of the sub-culture [of comics]." He envisions a world where publications would not be shelved by the language of their narration, but by their pages' content. "There would be no segmentation in bookstores by form ... you would find comics amongst other books that deal with the same subject matter, [such as] in the politics section."
    Cohn is working to reconfigure certain aspects of the culture of contemporary society, which views images as privileged objects exclusively created by the gifted. Language, on the other hand, is universal — everyone has the capacity for it. In demystifying images, he hopes to make the study of visual language something that anyone can appreciate and not leave its analysis limited to the artistically minded.
    Responses to Cohn's conception of the visual language have been varied, especially within the comics industry. Some have found it fulfilling and validating of their work, while others assert that his deconstruction of the art form takes away its mystery.
    "[People need to realize that] analyzing something doesn't degrade it at all," Cohn said. To the contrary, Cohn has received feedback expressing greater appreciation for comics because of insight gained from his research. "It depends on who you talk to."
    But from his standpoint, the divergent responses only serve to affirm his position.
    "The comics community is the language community of the visual language," he said. "It follows that they are wrapped up in the sense of identity intrinsic to the language."
    Cohn's Web site, emaki.net, is well-stocked with original illustrations and ruminations from his research. He also shares his ideas with undergraduates through the class Visual Linguistics of Comics, which is offered by the psychology department.
    In spite of all this, Cohn expressed a persisting sense of wonderment at the apparent appeal of his work. "I'm still fascinated that other people think it's a great idea."
    He hopes that the use of the visual language will become pervasive and his ideas will continue, even when he is no longer researching them.
    "It's great to do something you love, [something you are] passionate about," Cohn said. "I'm fortunate that what I chose is wide open — there's nothing but possibilities behind it. There's nothing to hold you back — you can do whatever you want. The fact that there's no precedent — that alone makes the research fun."