Material culture: Deduction

The primary sensory engagement with comics is visual. Although, just as for books, there is a kind of background sense of smell, whether of fresh ink, or old dampness. There is a series of visual conventions for invoking other senses, with particular attention to speech and sound. Words for noises often differ by language -- an American gun says "bang", a French gun says "pan".

Intellectually, there is a wholly internal and mental activity required to couple the visual and literary cues on the page with a parallel sensory world of mood, imagination, emotion, nostalgia, and so on. To read a comic is to be totally immersed for a brief period of time, in a place that words alone, no matter how poetic, cannot reach. The portrayal of space and setting in comics is often very cinematic, but the portrayal of time in comics is unique, and perhaps more under the control of the reader than the creator. Comic time is neither literary nor cinematic. Comic time may be in some ways most like theatrical space, in that the gaze of the audience in a theatre is allowed to wander about in space as a performance progresses, while the comic-reader's sense of time is allowed to wander about between the frames.

Emotionally, comics as a genre has a small base of enthusiasts, readers, and collectors in relation to a very large population that pays hardly any attention at all. Within the field of comics, individual fans may like or loathe individual titles or creators, and readers may form social networks based on these tastes. But for the most part, emotional engagement is a private matter, as it is for readers of literary or popular fiction. There are regular comic conventions or "comicons" where fans can share their enthusiasms or peeves. But the broad popularity of comics in the so-called "Golden Age" between the 1930s and 1950s is long gone. Only a few newspaper strips, including the almost graphic-less Dilbert, provide material for coffee-break chatting.

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		Ephemeral landscapes: material culture: an analytical model Deduction

`back to the beginning of "MIND IN MATTER"`		The primary sensory engagement with comics is visual. Although, just as for books, there is a kind of background sense of smell, whether of fresh ink, or old dampness. There is a series of visual conventions for invoking other senses, with particular attention to speech and sound. Words for noises often differ by language -- an American gun says "bang", a French gun says "pan". Intellectually, there is a wholly internal and mental activity required to couple the visual and literary cues on the page with a parallel sensory world of mood, imagination, emotion, nostalgia, and so on. To read a comic is to be totally immersed for a brief period of time, in a place that words alone, no matter how poetic, cannot reach. The portrayal of space and setting in comics is often very cinematic, but the portrayal of time in comics is unique, and perhaps more under the control of the reader than the creator. Comic time is neither literary nor cinematic. Comic time may be in some ways most like theatrical space, in that the gaze of the audience in a theatre is allowed to wander about in space as a performance progresses, while the comic-reader's sense of time is allowed to wander about between the frames. Emotionally, comics as a genre has a small base of enthusiasts, readers, and collectors in relation to a very large population that pays hardly any attention at all. Within the field of comics, individual fans may like or loathe individual titles or creators, and readers may form social networks based on these tastes. But for the most part, emotional engagement is a private matter, as it is for readers of literary or popular fiction. There are regular comic conventions or "comicons" where fans can share their enthusiasms or peeves. But the broad popularity of comics in the so-called "Golden Age" between the 1930s and 1950s is long gone. Only a few newspaper strips, including the almost graphic-less Dilbert, provide material for coffee-break chatting. DESCRIPTION SPECULATION
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