With Neil Cohn, Author of Speaking In Pictures

Jimmy: Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. This is Unpacking Peanuts. I'll be your host for the proceeding. My name is Jimmy Gownley. I'm also a cartoonist. I did things like Amelia Rules, 7 Good reasons not to Grow up, the Dumbest Idea Ever. And and my new Eisner nominated series in the Real Dark Night can be found over there at Gville Comics on Substack.

 Joining me as always, are my pals, co hosts and fellow cartoonists. He's a playwright and a composer, both for the band Complicated People as well as for this very podcast. He's the co creator of the original comic book price guide, the original editor for Amelia Rules, and the creator of such great strips as Strange Attractors, A Gathering of Spells and Tangled River. It's Michael Cohen, 

Michael: say hey. 

Jimmy: And he's the executive producer and writer of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a former vice president of Archie Comics, and the creator of the Instagram sensation Sweetest Beasts is Harold Buchholz.

Harold: Hello.

Jimmy: And keeping everything running smoothly and making sure we stay out of trouble, it's our producer and editor, Liz Sumner.

Liz: Howdy.

Jimmy: We have a really special episode for you today. Neil Cohn is here. Neil Cohn is an Eisner nominated cognitive scientist best known for his pioneering research on the cognition of comics. Having originally started in the US Comic industry as a teenager, he is now an associate professor at the department of Cognition and communication at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and has published over 100 academic papers and five academic books on how comics are structured and comprehended in the brain, including his recent graphic novel, Speaking in Pictures, which is what we're going to talk about today. So please welcome to Unpacking Peanuts Neil Cohn.

Neil Cohn: thank you for having me.

Jimmy: So your new book, Speaking in Pictures, tell us a little bit about it and, if you can tell us the genesis of, how you started working on it and how it came to fruition.

Neil Cohn: Yeah. My new book summarizes essentially 25 years of my research on how people understand comics and the cognition of comics, the structure of graphic communication in general. I've been working on this since I was in college. I went on to do graduate school and I'm now a professor in this topic. And I've basically been working on this work for, like I said, 20 plus years, mostly with academic sort of writing. And I wanted to have a more accessible work that could be understood by more people. And I also of course am talking about graphics and talking about comics. And so I of course wanted to draw a book that would reflect the content as well.

And I started out very young drawing comics and in the comic industry in the United States. So it just was always a passion project of something I wanted to do with this research. So I was kind of delaying it for many, many years. But I had plans for, you know, 20 years to draw this book and I finally felt that I was in the place to do it. So I finally went ahead and did it.

Jimmy: Oh, that's fantastic. It's a massive amount of work to, it's one thing to write all this and think all this, which is, it's wonderful, well presented, but to draw it on top of it, that's a heck of a lot of work. Was there any point in the process of actually drawing the pages where you're like, you know.

Neil Cohn: No, no, I love doing the drawing. I will confess my inclination has always been more-- I don't conceive of myself so much as an artist as I think of myself as a visual writer or a writer who writes in pictures is the way I used to phrase it when I was younger. And so I did many, many, many rounds of drafting and roughs and the finishes I finished, I actually, so I had the whole rough book in development for many, many years and I did the finishes on it in about a year. So it didn't take me that long to draw the whole thing. But it took me a long time to hammer down and refine the writing of it all.

Liz: And do you use it in your teaching?

Neil Cohn: I do in fact. So part of the book came about because of the classes that I taught in the first place. So you know, the gimmick of the book is it's me teaching a class and there are absolutely jokes that I tell to the class in the book that I have told in real life. It's like you practice the jokes on real people before you put them into a book. But I, I, I have a syllabus that I have planned for many years that would use this book as its a textbook. I actually on my website provide a for people who do want to teach classes using this book. I have a syllabus available in suggestions for like homework assignments and things that they can use to teach this.

Jimmy: Now do you have suggestions for the kids for excuses why they didn't do the homework?

Neil Cohn: No, I don't have the excuses for them. But that'd be extra credit of preparation for classes.

Jimmy: take us back to you as a kid, where did your interest in comics come about? And since this is a Peanuts podcast, at what point were you interested in the work of Charles Schulz? And did any of that influence this book?

Neil Cohn: Great question. So I got really interested in comics very young. I was drawing like my entire life. I was, you know, by the time I was, you know, kids, I was obsessed with like, Disney and other things and was like, drawing all sorts of every character I could figure out how to draw. You know, by the time I was, I think, eight, I was teaching my class how to draw Disney characters. And then, you know, on and on it went. I had my own comic company when I was 11.

Harold: Oh, that's good.

Jimmy: Do you remember the name?

Neil Cohn: Oh, of course. It was Fred Company. And then. And then we rebranded as Fred Studios.

Jimmy: Was there like a scandal? You had to distance yourself?

Neil Cohn: No, no, no. Well, so I was very serious about it. So I. It was kind of modeled after Garfield comics, which I was into at the time. So I invented my character. My main character was Fred. He was a car dealer and he had a family. The dog was the funniest character, of course. And I did comic strips, that I drew. And my parents were book publishers, so I had a copy machine in the garage. I had access to kind of knowledge about publishing. So I would print up all these books of comics and I'd also make sculptures and stuff. And my parents had a mail order catalog, so I said, I need to have a mail order catalog. So I drew like, you know, by hand with a ruler and stuff, drew out a catalog with the, ordering information. And then I sent out mailings to family members and family friends and said, you know, do you want to order my books?

Jimmy: And so that is amazing.

Neil Cohn: And they, they did. Many people ordered it. And so I was fulfilling orders and sending people stuff. And, I had a little. I had a business and I was very serious about it. I was the president until I got a promotion to become the chairman of the board. And, all my friends held positions on the board. So all my friends had, you know, ranking within the company. Of course, nobody cared about it except for me and my one, friend. My one friend Aaron, who also was really into comics, and he drew comics too. So we were the ones who were really into it. But everybody else was like this, why are we playing business? This is, this is dumb. And I was like, we're not playing. This is real. 

So, you know, I've been into comics since I was a very young kid. And then in. Because my parents were book publishers, I was going to book conferences with my parents. And at one of these, in the early 90s, Image Comics had just been created. It was, you know, the hot new thing. And I found them at this book conference and started talking to them. And I ended up getting tours of, like, Image Studios and various studios around. And then I started working for them at comic conventions. Just I volunteered as an assistant. And then eventually they paid me when I got to be an older teenager. But I essentially started working for them when I was 14. and that gave me access more than anything to the inside. So suddenly all these professionals knew who I was because they hung out with me every summer. oh, wow. And that they would give me advice on my craft. And it was like, suddenly I was on the inside. But I was a kid, and I kind of liken it to the movie Almost Famous, where the kid is following around the band, and suddenly he's on the inside. It felt like that very much as a kid. So I was always kind of on the inside of the comics field since I was a young child. 

And then I went to college and started noticing connections between stuff that I saw happening in linguistics and cognitive science and stuff that I understood about comics. And I was like, wait a minute. There's a whole nother way to think about this. And then it just went on from there. 

And with regard to Peanuts specifically, I mean, I read some Peanuts, when I was growing up, obviously in the newspaper and stuff. And I always enjoyed it. But really, in fact, where Peanuts came into prominence for me was when I was doing research on this stuff. And, in fact, I had this, like, quite old Peanuts, book I think I have. It's on my shelf somewhere now. And when I started in graduate school with my mentor, he was like, bring some comics and let's just analyze them together. And I'd already done a substantial amount of work before I even made it to graduate school to do my PhD. But he was like, just forget all that. Let's start from square one. So I was. He was like, we should look at some comics together. So I said, okay, I'll bring this Peanuts book just because I thought it would be fun as a good way to start. So we randomly opened it up, picked a strip, and then we just started analyzing it together. And it turned out there was all sorts of really complex stuff going on that you just don't realize is happening. And for the later part of the show we'll go into the original strip that we looked at that first day of grad school. 

Jimmy: Excellent. 

Neil: So that was a very formative experience to realize, oh, there's all sorts of really interesting stuff happening, even in this four panel strip. And then when I was starting into actually doing experimental research, because that's what my degree was in is psychology. I have a PhD in psychology, particularly brain science. I had to think of ways to test this stuff. And when you create like brain studies, you need a really a lot of stimuli. So you need like, like 400 stimuli or something. It's like a hundred different types of, let's say strips of which there's maybe four manipulations of each of those strips to test the thing that you're testing. So people have to see like a hundred different strips of different types and, or sentences or whatever it is that you're testing. So I knew that I was gonna have to like, create a lot of stimuli and I didn't wanna draw it all myself because that felt like a lot to think about. So I was like, well, what can I do to optimally create these stimuli that I need to be testing with? And I thought, well, you know, Peanuts are really perfect because they have this very systematized size of panels. There's a ton of them out there. I wanted to be doing stuff with wordless comics. Cause I didn't want, the words to be confounding things. And Schulz has a ton of wordless comics as well. 

And so what I ended up doing was I actually contacted Fantagraphics, who donated. They knew me already. They donated the complete works of Peanuts to me. And I contacted people from Peanuts before it became the new, the current owners. But there was like a, you know, a thing there. And I essentially, they said, yeah, go ahead and use Peanuts for your experiments. So I ended up creating scanning in like, I think it's something like 5,000 panels or 6,000 Peanuts panels. And we sometimes we use the actual original strips, but most of the times we actually use the panels to rearrange them to create our own new Peanuts strips.

Jimmy: Oh yeah.

Neil Cohn: And so we, I, I would never. So I have a very strict rule about never releasing these out to the world. Because I don't want to anybody to be confused what we've done for our experiments with actual Peanuts stuff. And this was of course before say generative AI, which is now just a, whole nother issue. But we create. So we've created lots of new Peanuts strips and sometimes we Then take those base strips to manipulate them even more for the specific things that we're testing in our experiments. But that's our primary stimuli that we use in our experiments. And because of that, I can say I have done the most research on the cognition of comics than anybody else at this point. And, you know, way more brain science on this, in addition to behavioral science, measuring reaction times and other stuff. And the vast majority of this research is done with Peanuts.

Jimmy: That's amazing.

Neil Cohn: So in fact, most of what we know about comics and the brain is from using Peanuts strips.

Jimmy: That's so great. That's so great.

Neil Cohn: So if you ever think of any, you know, all the research that I've done and anybody who talks about anything that actually knows the literature on comics in the brain, the foundation of it is using Peanuts strips. And we even do, you know, kind of quirky things, like through other sorts of methods, we've been able to measure, like, what patterns of sequencing, of storytelling are used, like in different types of comics around the world. Say manga versus superhero comics versus comic strips. And you know, so we have then created patterns that are used primarily in manga, but we then create those patterns with Peanuts strips. 

Jimmy: Oh, interesting. 

Neil: And what you actually find is that people's brains are modulated. Their brain response to these strips is modulated by the amount of manga that they read.

Neil Cohn: So the pattern comes from manga, but they're not reading manga, they're reading Peanuts. They have a manga type pattern, but their brain responds to it as if based on their experience with manga. So even stuff like that is using Peanuts. But it's, you know, revealing really fundamental ways about the, how the brain works and how comics are understood in the brain. But yeah, Peanuts are the foundation of all of that. So I'm very grateful for being able to, to do that and using Peanuts, which is, which is really great. 

And the other thing I'll say about that is that along the way I end up reading really a lot of Peanuts, because I, we've, you know, me and people who work with me have had to make these things. And through that process, you, you learn so much about what's going on in comics and the structure of comics because I've had to engage with the source material for so long and I've learned so much, and my theories have developed so much from engaging with Peanuts at a very deep level in the process of this sort of research. so Peanuts is really fundamental to the way that we understand how comics are comprehended.

Jimmy: Well, that's Incredible. That's really, really interesting.

Liz: And how did you go from such a business orientation to linguistics? What was that like?

Neil Cohn: Oh, yeah, that's a. Oh. so I actually didn't plan on going to college. I was just gonna draw comics, and I was already working in the comic industry, and I kind of was convinced to go to college to, like, not miss out on it.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Neil Cohn: And, And so what? Because I was gonna go to college, not really caring about, you know, career, future career or something, I basically just studied what I wanted to study, which was at the time, and Asian studies, which I studied Japan and Buddhism primarily. But I had a roommate who was doing this new thing called cognitive science. And as part of it, he had to take a linguistics class. And I thought, oh, that sounds cool. You know, comics have language in them, too, and I know everything about the images, so I should just, you know, learn more about the language part. So I took this linguistics class with him because it seemed kind of fun. And then I was like, oh, wow, language is really complicated. And then I realized there's also some stuff happening here in language that really connects with what I-- the way I have learned about how the structure of comics works and the image part. And then I started realizing, oh, but some of the ways that people think about how, say, sequences of images are understood, like, some things here don't work. 

Jimmy: Right, Right. 

Neil: And I can use the tools from linguistics to solve some of those problems. And then I just kept obsessing about it, and I couldn't stop, you know, thinking about it. And even though I was a comic creator, I'd always had kind of a theory, theoretical mindset, a, formalistic sort of way of thinking about my process. So it wasn't that far removed. And then it just became like I. I was obsessing over how comics worked even more than I was thinking about the comics that I was actively drawing at the time.

Jimmy: Well, you know, it's so interesting because, like, if you want to be a musician, you can pick up a guitar, play a piano, and figure your way around it. And that's one way. But you could also learn music theory. Yeah, right. And there's comic theory. Is so sparse a field, you know, I mean, you got your Scott McCloud's, you got your Will Eisner books. You're kind of marching into a field that really. I think you have a lot of territory to explore. Because I think for a young artist, you know, coming up now, when there's hundreds of thousands of comics behind us, you know, I mean, even Just like, since we were kids. Right. But it's all vast. It's changed so much. It's a worldwide art form, like you're saying, with manga being constructed completely differently. So I think it's really cool and, interesting and that this is what you're doing. What's your hope? For someone who is, you know, let's say they're just starting their career in comics, or they're just, you know, thinking about becoming a cartoonist and they come across your book, what do you think? What would you say to them about it?

Neil Cohn: I would say that if you want to learn kind of under the hood for what's happening, you know, in the building blocks of how comics are structured and how comic graphics are structured, this book will tell you how things are built and how the brain is comprehending things. It's not going to tell you, like, how to draw comics per se. It'll give you an understanding of, like, how people's brains might actually understand things. And hopefully I'm also going to reveal sort of fundamental things about just the overall mindset of how we think about graphics in general and, like, the learning process. So, you know, there's a part of the book where I talk about, how there's an overarching mentality about graphics that presumes that, well, graphics are a reflection of the way people see and that you shouldn't copy other people's drawings and things like that. But really, if you look at the research, that actually cuts you off from the most important sources of inspiration and development, which is modeling after other people. Now, that's not to say you don't want to draw exactly like other people. Yeah, but it's more like you imitate with the intent to. To acquire rather than with the intent to imitate.

Harold: Right.

Neil Cohn: So it's like, if I say copy how Schulz draws, it's not because I want to draw like Schulz. It's because I want to pull in some things that he does into the way that I want to do it in the end. and that's just the way that language works, too. So you, you know, children. I have two very small children, one of whom talks. And, you know, he's a sponge. He sucks up. You know, anything that I say, I have to be risky because he's probably going to repeat it back. And that's the. Also the way people learn to draw. But we don't conceive of it that way. And so you instead think about people kind of being on their own and just having to figure out all drawing themselves, but really everybody's copying other people. And you are again copying with the intent to acquire and make it your own, not with the intent to be just like somebody else per se.

Harold: I wanted to ask you a question regarding that. One of the most fascinated things in this book to me was that you were saying, you know, we're being held back, we're holding ourselves back and losing a ton of people of using the language of the visual language that they would draw because they're told not to copy.

Neil Cohn: Yeah.

Harold: And that stunts people, particularly in the West. And I think you mentioned that copying is maybe more okay in Japan in that culture. And I just wanted to ask you. So if that's true is part of manga's appeal because it provides a more uniform set of visual elements that people have learned. And it's acceptable to use a set of elements that have been learned from everyone else, which creates a really rich context, of that specific language that's used in mangas. So that you're encouraged to learn the language both to draw and to read. Because there is a language with a ton of content inside of that language or because of that language. Is that. Am I making any sense with that?

Neil Cohn: You are making. You are making exact sense and I think you are.

Jimmy: There's a first time for everything.

Neil Cohn: I think that is exactly correct. So I think everything you just said is a great way to think about it. Is that. So I think in Japan there is not this prohibition on imitation. And children generally draw manga while growing up and imitate. And even Japanese people who say, oh, I can't draw. And then you ask them to draw. They draw like manga and they do it quite well because it's just part of their cultural upbringing is to. To engage with the visual language used in manga. And I do think that manga end up having a lot more systematic structure because of that. Because they are sharing and conventionalizing things. I can mention. 

We actually had just finished a very large five year project. It actually lasted longer than five years, but the money came in for five years, for the grant project. And in it we, annotated the properties of 1,030 comics from 144 different countries. And we have over a million annotations. So we have lots and lots and lots of data now about the properties of comics from all over the world. And manga are always from no matter where they come from. They come from not just Japan, from global manga. They have a very systematic structure that's fairly consistent no matter where in the world it comes from. And among them even you even have say like templated whole panels that like there's like a composition of a whole panel that is repeated across comics and you have that in all types of comics. But in manga the proportions are even higher. And so it's, it's very systematized. And I think you're exactly right that having that highly systematized graphic, you know, visual language allows a learner to more easily acquire it than if you have a learner who is either exposed to a system that is less systematic or if you have a learner who you have told they should not be imitating in the first place because then they're not going to be acquiring these patterns. So in the case of manga, I think it's more systematic and people who really want to engage in it, they do end up copying it and acquiring these things. And it both means that they become proficient in that visual language and they also socially become part of that visual language group. So they can then be people who are manga people. Right? They are, that's part of their social identity at that point. And for the system that they use and engage with.

Harold: I'm really fascinated by that. That idea that you essentially seem to be giving us permission to not be afraid of using elements of the language. Because when I think of beyond manga, let's say there's such a variety of different styles in the west and that's kind of encouraged. Right?

Neil Cohn: Yeah.

Harold: You're not supposed to copy.

Neil Cohn: Exactly. So the result is this diversity. Yeah, yeah.

Harold: Now Peanuts is, is something that came out of the United States obviously that found its way around the world. And that's fascinating to me in terms of Peanuts because it seems like that's one of the most universalized Western experiences of comics that the world has experienced and has in common just because of one man's creation of a language.

Neil Cohn: Yeah, I think that's true. And so I think, yeah, I agree in the case of the spread of manga is I think very much facilitated by the types of patterns that are used in it and the way people are able to engage with it. That's not to say that other systems like say superhero styled comics don't have that systematicity too. But I think that comes with it. More people who maybe are have prohibitions against imitating that style or when you do that. I think also the style used in superhero comics is a bit more complex than the style like in its substance than in the style used in manga. So there's a higher bar for proficiency

Harold: to reach, and I'm guessing it's there also because of, again, the kind of internal rules that we've set for ourselves. There are more people trying to not just use the established language that we have in common, but to try to do something different to add to that language, which makes it more complex and maybe harder to, for a new person to come in and integrate all those things.

Neil Cohn: Absolutely. And in the context. So I think all of that is true. And in the context of strips, part of the economics and whatnot of strips is people have to have a very clear identity for their strip. So Schulz has a very clear style to him, to Peanuts. And you wouldn't be successful if you had strips that looked like Peanuts, because then everybody would go, oh, that's the same as Peanuts. Come back with your own style because of the anti imitation notions in, you know, the Western, world of considering graphics. So, you know, comic strips all have to look different. Some of them may have overlap given who influences who, but they have to be really distinctive. And so you're not going to have, you know, a full visual language that looks all like Peanuts. You might have something that has the same patterns that are used, but the graphic representations end up having to be very different. And I think, you know, different people have different ranges of proficiency. So the, the, the, the strips that we've used in research and really looked at the most are Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, which are highly distinctive but also fairly rich in their structure compared to other creators who might not be as exploring as rich creative structural things, is the way I'll put it politely.

Jimmy: Well, this has been great so far. I cannot wait to get into more details as we discuss these strips. How about we take a break right now and then come back with more Neil Cohn? Sound good?

Neil Cohn: Yes, great. Thank you very much.

Jimmy: I'll be right back.

BREAK

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Jimmy: All right, so we are back. Now listen, guys, this conversation kept going during the break. All I wanted to do was get a drink of water and, and then they're already in this deep conversation. And I said, hey, how about we record this? So guys, what were you talking about?

Harold: Yeah, well, I was just asking Neil when, you read this book. And I encourage anybody who's serious about comics and how comics are structured and why they are the way they are. Neil is the guy who's pulled things together from multiple academic fields. I mean, this is super rare that we have someone who has done this. And in knowing all these different fields that most people don't know from a academic level, you're m pulling things in. There's like, we now know this about this aspect of visual language. There are all these misnomers. And so I have to pull from what's been proven in this field and this field and this field and this field to get, to get rid of some of the placeholders we've had that are not quite perfect in describing things so that we can get this unified theory of what this visual language needs. Using comics is all about how do you deal with that and how has an academic community accepted you and what's your process been like to get the word out about what you're sharing?

Neil Cohn: Yeah, so, I mean, it hasn't been easy, I can say. I had to apply for graduate schools for many years unsuccessfully, before I could even get into graduate school. Took me also quite a long time to get a job as a professor as well. So the path has never been easy. And you know, my mentor always said, you know, you don't want everybody to think you're only doing dessert with no main course. so part of the whole task is making people realize what is relevant, ah, that this is all relevant for them. So say cognitive scientists or cognitive neuroscientists or linguists, why should they care about comics? And you have to say, well, actually you're going to reveal all these things about the nature of language and the brain by studying comics. And actually it tells you all sorts of really fascinating things that you didn't know about because you were only looking in your constrained, viewpoint. And the same is true of comics. So if all you're engaging with is comics and you're not actually looking at the bigger, wider way in which information is processed and all that stuff, you'll, you end up with a very limited viewpoint.

Harold: Well, if, if, if you could pull just a couple of things that you say. I wish this field knew this from what I've, what I've pulled together, and I wish I knew what this field would know. This it would be Just so helpful if they could integrate that into their understanding. Are there a couple of things you could bring up as examples?

Neil Cohn: Yeah, I mean, I, think part of, say, comic studies, you know, they. There's a focus on, say, particularly because in comic studies, people think about the literary side, and the literary side often thinks about what is distinctive or interesting about a particular author or something like that. But also there is so much systematization that's happening and systematic, regularized things that people simply ignore. That is there. That is really important. So I mentioned, for example, there's a whole inventory of panel level templates or panel level vocabulary items, so to speak. You know, people deny frequently that comics have that sort of regularization. like people say, oh, there can't be. Comics can't be like language. There's no vocabulary of panels. And then, you know, you do the research and go, actually, there is a vocabulary of panels. And in fact, if you look at language studies, it says there's a whole range of things that can be either systematic or kind of novelly produced. And this is part of language also. Not everything is a systematized vocabulary. So that sort of thing. really could, I think, enlighten people about, you know, what's happening. And, it's okay to have things be patterns. Patterns are not the enemy because I think ultimately what you do with those patterns as an author is more interesting than the patterns themselves. Oftentimes. and. And I can illustrate this with Schulz as well. If you go through Schulz's strips, he uses the same patterns over and over and over again, but he often tweaks them or plays with them in fun ways that end up being really interesting. But it's not that he doesn't have that systematization. It's all there. It's just that you don't realize it because he's doing such creative things.

Liz: Funny you should mention that because, Jimmy found some of those patterns. You want to tell that story, Jimmy?

Jimmy: Yeah, so I, Years ago, I guess like 2007 or 8, I did, I was doing my comic book series, Amelia Rules, and I was approached by the Washington Post Writers Guild to see if they would. If I would want to do an Amelia Daily strip, which it didn't end up happening because of my publishing situation. But anyway, I was like, I don't even know if I can do it. Like, how would one do that? And I'm like, I need to figure out a way that I could instantly generate a comic strip, like, without inspiration. So I pulled out the 1968 Fantagraphics book of Peanuts and I. Because they're all four panel strips.

Neil Cohn: Yep.

Jimmy: And I figured out. All right. How many different formats did he use? All right, there's one, the. The punch lines in the last panel, there's the punchline’s in the second panel, there's a silent. You know, I figured out there was, I think, 13 different, you know, joke formats within those four panels that he had just done in that year. And then I put together, we don't need to get into all that, but. Yeah, but. But that was the way I approached it.

Neil Cohn: Well, you're speaking my language here. This is the thing that we do all the time. I have spread sheets and, you know, all sorts of stuff.

Jimmy: Oh, I figured out all the system, all the things I could write about, all the themes, all the characters, all the various situations, and basically then you could roll up a strip and only have to come up with the joke, you know.

Neil Cohn: Right, right.

Michael: Yeah.

Liz: And we did it with. With our Patreon, supporters and, and had a blast. We came up with some really, really good Peanuts strips.

Neil Cohn: Nice.

Jimmy: I think a lot of times, you know, an artist, I think, where they get stuck. You know, when you're a kid and you're. You're coming up and you're like, I want to be a cartoonist, and you're influenced by the. The surface style, but what does flummox you and what. What there is, like I was saying earlier, there's so little thought of is. Is what is under the hood. And it's what I. I think there's going to be a certain type of kid and more kid, meaning someone up to, you know, 50. Yeah.

Neil Cohn: At least. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah.

Jimmy: Well, yeah, I'm 54. A certain type of person who would. Who is really going, this is going to be one of those books that turns a switch and makes, them see things differently and think about their own.

Neil Cohn: Yeah, I certainly hope so, because for me, Understanding Comics was that for me. I read it when I was 16 and I. It blew my mind and I was just obsessed with it. And then, and I met. I. I've known Scott since I was 18, actually, and he's been very kind to me, and I really love him. And. But I was always hoping that, you know, doing this work for so long, I always intended to do my own drawn book. It just. I had to do other things before I could do that. And part of the reason why I waited is because I wanted to, within academic circles, legitimize the sort of work that I was doing so that people couldn't just say, well, oh, that's the comics guy, and here's this drawn book. And we don't take that seriously. Instead, I've kind of established a foundation where people within at least my academic field can look and go, well, he's done really a lot of fundamental research. So it's not just he's making stuff up. All of it has grounding in, you know, empirical studies and all. You know, I have. I've done a lot. A lot of papers and books previous to this that were very academic-y. So I wanted to make sure that I had my bases covered before I did something that would then be more understandable for a wide audience.

Harold: That's amazing, Neil, and thank you for sharing that. It's. I do what we're having you here. This may not be a popular question to ask within our little group, but I have to ask you because I'm so fascinated by what you're saying about learning the language and learning common language to communicate with other people visually. In the world of AI, it seems to be predicting art using averages of all these different things and, things that we're not aware of, but you're saying we can be aware of. I was just wondering, what's your take on how is there a way for people to use AI in a positive way? What do you think is the negative of having that in the mix?

Neil Cohn: Yeah, so I think it's a complicated issue. So I think on the one hand, AI to some degree validates all the things I've been saying, because I've been saying that graphics are basically cobble together systematic parts in, you know, novel ways or sometimes not novel ways. They just cobble together from the averages of these parts. So a lot of times what you get from AI is essentially telling you what the average visual language is of a particular system. So if you say, make this like Manga, it's not making it like a particular creator. It gives you the average, which is what, you know, that's what a visual language is. So English, for example, all of us have a slightly different English in our minds, but the average of all of us people who have enough shared patterns is what we end up calling English. And there might be wide variance between, you know, people who speak English in England versus, you know, United States versus, you know, South Africa, whatever. There's lots of Englishes. And the same is true of, say, the visual languages that are used in Manga. But there still is a sense of an averaged out visual language there. And that's what AI ends up giving you, is that averaged out representation. 

Now, what's funny is the AI, so AI doesn't actually know anything. It has no knowledge. and that's where, you know, hallucinations come, because it doesn't know anything. So where you get weird images sometimes is it's using these things in a predictive way for placing what I would call a schema in the place that it thinks it should be, but it doesn't know that. So, like, you get images where the top half of the character and the bottom half of the character facing opposite directions. It's like the feet are walking one way and the upper body's walking another way. And that happens because it doesn't know that legs have, there's a direction of motion. It just knows. Add the leg schema underneath the upper body schema schema. And that's the way I've argued the way all of graphics work, except when you are drawing as a human, you know which ways bodies are facing.

Jimmy: Right.

Neil Cohn: So you don't make those sorts of weird errors. Right. But the AI doesn't know things. It just knows, okay, predictively, these things go under these things. But it doesn't know anything about direction or anything like that. It just. It has no knowledge. So I think to some degree, AI is validating a lot of the things that I have argued about. At the same time, it is built on the back of other people's labor. And so if you are generating stuff built on the backs of other people's labor, there is an ethical issue, I think, that is incredibly important. If it's the case that you build an AI from your own drawings alone, maybe that's more ethical to use it in that way.

Jimmy: Right.

Neil Cohn: Maybe that would be a valid case to do. If you're a comic artist who's drawn a ton of stuff and you feed all of your own stuff into your own AI and then generate your own work from that. I think there's. I wouldn't have, as much of an ethical problem with that because it's all you doing your own thing.

Jimmy: Yeah, I was an example. I thought. I've been looking at a lot of old Star Wars comics, the Al Williamson stuff, and I thought, boy, if he only had to draw the Millennium Falcon like once or twice, and then could generate it in every possible angle, even if he then traced over it. Because, you know, so much photorealism is traced over photos anyway.

Neil Cohn: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure.

Jimmy: What would the difference be? You know, he didn't have it, so it didn't come up.

Neil Cohn: But yeah, I find that less problematic if you're doing it for your own set of stuff. If it's more like, you know, you are using this AI, you don't know where it's been sourced, so to speak, and then you are producing it and saying, well, this is my new work. And then it's actually essentially just recreating the image. Exactly. Of somebody else's.

Harold: And you have no way of knowing it.

Jimmy: Right.

Neil Cohn: Yeah, you have no way of knowing. That's kind of either stolen valor, stolen labor, essentially. And that's more problematic.

Harold: The weird thing for me, like you were mentioning superheroes, it's like, so the Marvel universe owned by a giant corporation, you know, right now they're putting all of that into their own in house AI that does is built off of all the work for hire that everyone over the past 80, 90 years. But it's so strange because now there's going to be a corporate entity that has ingested, which it's already playing off of. Every, every artist now is building off of whatever else artist is. But now you've got a computer doing it and having artists integrate with it and engage with it. I don't, I don't know where that's going to go in a corporate perspective. It's just going to be really wild.

Neil Cohn: I can see, you know, there's two parts to that, I think, with the corporate side, like, you can imagine Marvel just like, feeds all of its, you know, you know, everything into an AI and then just decides, you know, we don't need to hire artists anymore. We're just going to generate everything based on what we have. And then you have the average Marvel visual language dialect. That's the average of everything they've ever done. The problem is that, you know, comics readers like cool new stuff also, and AI just can't do that because it's always going to be regurgitating only the things that's in its training set largely. And it's not going to push the boundaries of things.

Michael: Right.

Jimmy: Won't there be like a huge feedback loop when the world is flooded with AI generated images? Won't AI start seeing those images and try to pull from those?

Neil Cohn: yes.

Jimmy: More wonky.

Neil Cohn: Yeah. So that is already happening. And there are studies that already show that as you generate text and images that are trained on generated text and images, things get worse, the models get worse, the production gets worse. It's, able to do worse stuff, because it just kind of like, collapses on itself a little bit.

Harold: That makes sense. Yeah. In the case of Peanuts, how do you feel about it? As, you know, the creator has been passed now for 20, 25 plus years. Right. And it. It's agreed upon that the core work that he created is complete. Right. You can make things that are based on it in animation or comic books or picture books or chapter books, but the actual body of 50 years of strips is complete as. At least that's the way it's understood now, while the family is still around and they're honoring his wishes, do you think that gives Peanuts, in a sense, a, leg up now and in the future? Because it can be rearranged, but the rules are set that you have to base it directly on the work. That is, everybody agrees this is the canon.

Neil Cohn: Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, I do get a little bit rankled when I see the clearly AI generated Peanuts stuff. And that's everywhere, you know, and it's. It's everywhere. And you just go, why? Why? So, yeah, I think, you know, I think it's good that you have a clearly demarcated line between here is what was produced, that is the canon, and then everything else is just whatever. Right. And in some cases, it's authorized and hopefully better when it's authorized. And then there's other cases which are just, you know, fluff of stuff. So I think that's at least a nice dividing line. There's not like, I don't think Schulz family is going to be suffering financially as much as, say, other people are from these things. But, yeah, I think it's at least a little bit better as a situation. You know, it would bother me even more in a case like Calvin and Hobbes, where the creator clearly does not want anybody else to be doing this stuff, and there is such a sentiment of it as, like, here is the complete canon, and that's all that should exist. There shouldn't be anything else whatsoever.

Jimmy: Yeah, he couldn’t be more clear about his wishes.

Neil Cohn: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think in, you know, my friends have talked about what happens when Watterson dies, and then his family's like, now we're gonna market everything. He's like, oh, that would be terrible, because, you know, that's not what he wants. Right, right. So, yeah, I think you have to look at it in that context. It's also not like, you know, Peanuts has not been monetized in any sort of way. So it's you know, I think there's, you know, different intents by different creators and, different situations at play.

Jimmy: All right, you know what? Let's get to the comic strips.

Neil Cohn: Yeah. Okay.

Harold: Yeah.

Jimmy: Now, tell us. So you selected a few of these strips for us. Tell us, what was your criteria that went into picking these?

Neil Cohn: Yeah, so there's three strips here. The first one is actually the strip that I looked at the first day of grad school, and I thought that would be a fun historical way to look at and kind of reveal some of the interesting things. And we have actually done experiments completely based on that particular structure. The second one is a variety of that and was a strip that I read and then realized fundamental insights about things. And the third one is something that has a really interesting structure to it that I don't know if people realize this, and I talk about it in nearly every talk that I give. And, in fact, there is a strip in my book that uses that structure exactly. That I redrew to be my own drawing. And if you read the footnote, the endnotes, you'll see that I actually referenced this strip and say, I drew this strip, but it's really based on this Peanuts strip.

Jimmy: Oh, that's amazing. Very cool.

Neil Cohn: So that's why I chose the ones that I did.

Jimmy: Awesome. All right, so we're going to read these strips. And, hey, if you characters out there want to follow along with this, well, what you got to do is you got to go over to unpackingpeanuts.com, sign up for the Great Peanuts reread. That'll get you one email a month that'll let you know what we're up to on this. This podcast so you can follow along with us. So you do that while we start here with 

March 18, 1960. Okay, so Charlie Brown and Snoopy are out in a field somewhere, and Charlie Brown has a ball, and he is rearing back like he's ready to throw it, and Snoopy is ready to pounce. In panel two, Charlie Brown tosses the ball, and Snoopy takes off. Then we have a nice silent panel. Charlie Brown waiting to see Snoopy return with the ball. And then in the fourth panel, Snoopy returns the ball as only he could as a beaglecopter, flying in, using his, ears as the rotors. 

Jimmy: All right, now, why'd you pick that one? That's the first. This is the Big Bang strip for you here.

Harold: All right.

Michael: Yeah.

Neil Cohn: So when I started grad school, I came to my mentor. My mentor was a guy named Ray Jackendoff. He is actually quite famous linguist. He was a, kind of known as the most prominent student of Noam Chomsky's. but he offered much to linguistics and cognitive science beyond that. And he's still active. He's in his 80s now, but he's still writing books and papers and whatnot. And so he also invented the field of music cognition. So he. He had a history with branching out and applying stu-- His knowledge of stuff from cognition and language to other domains. And so that's one of the reasons I ended up working with him. 

So when I first went to my first meeting with him, I brought this Peanuts book, and we just, like, opened at random, and we were like, oh, this strip has no words. Let's look at this strip. I didn't have any plan about it. It was just, let's look at this. So one of the things that's really interesting about this strip is not just what you see, but what you don't see and where you don't see stuff and how. So in the first panel, like you said, Charlie is reaching back and Snoopy's kind of waiting. And you see both Charlie and Snoopy in the second panel, Charlie throws the ball, and you see motion lines following Charlie's arm to indicate that he threw the ball. And you see motion lines of the ball and motion lines of Snoopy leaving the panel. But the motion lines end at the end of the panel, and you don't see the ball or Snoopy. So you already don't see characters, but you know that they are there. They're just off panel in the third panel. Let me ask you, what is happening in the third panel in the larger scene, what happens at that panel?

Jimmy: If you were in the world, you would be seeing Snoopy picking up the ball and, you know, bringing it back, Right?

Neil Cohn: Yeah. So, but, we, the reader.

Jimmy: Because we don't see it. I think that's why we accept Charlie Brown standing there stoically.

Neil Cohn: Exactly, exactly, exactly. And there's actually ambiguity because you don't know if Snoopy is retrieving the ball at that moment or if he's retrieving the ball in between that moment and the final panel, 

Liz: or if he's not retrieving the ball at all, 

Jimmy: if he's just split. Yeah.

Neil Cohn: But you do know by the last panel that he retrieves the ball. So is that retrieval happening kind of in the moment that you don't see between those, or is it happening at the moment of, that third panel? So there's ambiguity there. So that's really interesting. And the fact that you can have a panel where somebody is just watching something that you is happening off panel is also really interesting. So this comes to something in linguistics that we call inference, which is, you know, filling in information that's not provided in the signal that you end up having to know in order to understand something. Now, in McCloud's work, he would talk about closure and, like, understanding in the gutter, but that's actually not true. So I can say people don't fill in the gutters. That's not something that happens. What you do is you take information from different panels, and you, you know, you, you look back and you make connections between the content between things. But oftentimes where you're actually filling in information is at a panel itself, not in between panels.

Jimmy: Uh-huh.

Neil Cohn: So one of the things that we did in my first day is we literally wrote out all the different characters underneath the strip. So I had, I had a row for Charlie, a row for Snoopy, and a row for the ball. And at each panel, we notated whether you see that thing or not and what that thing is doing, whether you see it or not.

Jimmy: Uh-huh.

Neil Cohn: So you know that Snoopy is off running, and he has to retrieve a ball at some point, but you don't see that retrieval process. So that is something that you end up having to fill in in your mind. And maybe it happens at that third panel and maybe not. Now, it changes. If you were to have a bubble there where Charlie looks identical, he has this stoic look, but you have a bubble with an exclamation mark. Now, you know that Snoopy has retrieved the ball at that panel.

Harold: Right.

Neil Cohn: Even so, all that changes is this exclamation mark. But the inference that you make of whether Snoopy is or is not definitively getting that ball changes. Now, in both cases, you still have to infer that Snoopy retrieve. Retrieves the ball. The inference is the same. It's just you get a different, slightly different cue in the surface of the image. And that's really fascinating that you can change how people know what happens and when based on very small, subtle cues, even though it's all still inferred. 

And I have subsequently done this exact pattern in a study measuring people's brains, where the primary comparison was strips that had, I think I, I, I actually showed this exact strip in that experiment, and then the modified version of it would have just a bubble with an exclamation mark in that panel. So, and what you see is the brain does differ at that moment. It does different sort of processes based on whether you know that that thing happens at that moment versus whether you don't know if it happens at that moment and then at the next panel. The brain also does slightly different things, depending on how it has to look backwards and based on whether it knew that information previously or not.

Michael: Can I interject something? do people actually read this sequentially? Because I certainly don't. And maybe this is just something particular to comic strips, but I cannot help see that last panel before I read anything.

Neil Cohn: Oh, interesting.

Michael: I mean, it's not possible for me unless you projected these panels one at a time. I read the strip especially, when it's wordless like this. I just see it as one thing.

Liz: Could that be because it's Whirly Dog?

Michael: No, it's not, because it's Whirly Dog. Because I also have comments about that. No, I don't think people would read this strip, panel one, and not look at panel two and not peripherally looking at panel four. I just don't. I could not do that.

Liz: Yeah.

Neil Cohn: So I can. I can tell you a little bit about that. So, in our brain studies, we do present things one panel at a time because we want to be controlled about what people are seeing and when. And also because eye movements contaminate brain data, because we particularly are measuring the electrical activity of the brain. And muscle movement also, generates electrical activity. And so you get sort of, interference from too much eye movement. So we try to isolate each panel because of that. But if you present it all at once, people's eyes do move around quite, quite a lot. And generally people do follow, you know, the linear order, but their eyes do bounce around quite a bit. And you do. There's actually a recent study that just showed that people do use their peripheral vision to kind of get information that's upcoming in their peripheral vision. So that's not unheard of. And depending. Different people have different ways of going about the reading process. But, generally people read it in the same order, but they do use peripheral information, and they do bounce back and forth. So you may, you know, quickly read through the whole strip, get to the last panel, then back bounce back and forth a bit as you're then putting it together in your mind.

Michael: Yeah, that's what I would tend to do.

Neil Cohn: Yeah. and that is something that happens. Yeah.

Michael: Also, outside of just the visual information, there's a matter of time. The fact that we know this situation because we've seen it before. And so part of the information we're getting is the fact that we know Snoopy hates this fetch thing. He finds it insulting. And that changes the entire reading of this thing. Because when you get to panel four, Snoopy is going, nyah, nyah, nya, nya, nyah. I mean, I hate the Whirly dog. Actually, this was one of my least favorite strips, for another reason. But, you know, it's a great gag. But basically we were saying what is great about Schulz is that everything is particular to the characters.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Michael: a joke for Linus would not work for anyone else.

Neil Cohn: Right.

Michael: This would not work if, you know, if this was Faron, because Faron, we don't know anything about Faron's history with, you know, fetching.

Neil Cohn: Right.

Michael: But we know Snoopy's history with fetching, so that's true.

Neil Cohn: However, I will say this exact same structure of a strip occurs many, many times in Peanuts, including in the first weeks of Peanuts. So in that one, there's one where you see Shermy throw a ball. And then in the last panel, Snoopy comes back with his shoe, and it's revealed, or I believe it's maybe he kicks a ball. But then Snoopy comes back with the shoe and it reveals that, well, actually was being fetched because his shoe went. Right. But it has this exact same pattern where the first panel is him reaching back, the second one is he kicks. The third panel is Shermy looking, and then the last panel is Snoopy bringing the shoe back. there's other ones where it's Charlie throws a ball and Linus returns it. All of them have this third panel looking panel of the thrower or kicker or whatnot. Always has the same structure. where there's. It's what I call an onlooker is that third panel. And they all have the same structure to them. So that was one of the ways that I realized, oh, this is a really clear pattern and there's a very clear structure happening, even though there's other characters doing all these things.

Michael: Yeah, this would not work at all as a three panel strip if you took, a panel three. Yeah, the timing. It's timing. It's just like Schulz is a master of timing it. And that's what that third panel does. It gives you a little pause. He's thinking. He's thinking about something.

Neil Cohn: Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy: That idea of that time and space, you know, are the same on a comic. And if you don't have that, I call them beat panels or, you know, the onlooking panel where he's just taking a ni---. Yeah, it throws off the timing totally.

Neil Cohn: Yeah. So I think there's also what we've called. There's another cartoonist, Neal Von Flue called it the set up a beat panel pattern where you have a silent penultimate panel, essentially. And I think this is a, variant of that. But this is a silent penultimate panel that specifically. I mean, they're all silent in this strip. But this is a specific one that has this sort of onlooker where you are not seeing certain information that is then inferred. And that's what's really interesting. And that actually connects to what is in the second strip that I provided. Actually, if we want to move to that one…

Jimmy: let's do it. 

November 9, 1953. Snoopy is shocked because a football has landed thump right very close to him. And he's curious as to what this is. So he goes over and we see him looking at it with curiosity and the little, question marks over his head. And then panel three, pow. Just a giant great looking pow in his fantastic C1 lettering style. And then the last panel we see Snoopy has been knocked silly. He's lying on his back, eyes are whirling, and Charlie Brown and the gang are in the background with the football. And Charlie Brown says, okay, men, first down, 10 to go. 

Jimmy: There we go.

Neil Cohn: So this strip has. The third panel is the main thing that I want to think about here. So the third panel where it says pow also has this star that's around the pow. And the star is ambiguous for whether it's kind of the carrier of the pow that indicates it's a loud pow, let's say, or it's what I call an impact star or an action star, which indicates the impact, and of the event that's happening. And you can take away the pow and the star itself works fine. And you could take away the star and the pow also works fine. Yeah. So these are two different elements that both are telling you about stuff that you're not seeing. And this is another great case where something is happening at this panel. It's not happening between panels, it's happening at this panel. But you're not seeing that, that event now. So one of the things I also realized by reading this one is that the thing I did was I first I took away the pow, and I should say the pow, the onomatopoeia, the star, the onlookers, those are all part of a larger inventory of specific types of panels that push you to infer information you're not seeing. And there's a whole list of these that are all conventionalized patterns that are. That happen in Peanuts, but they also happen elsewhere. I discovered them in Peanuts because I was reading all these Peanuts strips and this one is one that I read, discovered from this strip. So it's what I call an action star. And that is this star shaped flash is obscuring the actual event. Now, what's really interesting about that is that panel is the climax of the strip. And that star shaped action star you can substitute in other strips for basically any climactic panel.

Jimmy: Right

Neil Cohn: So it essentially is a conventionalized. It's the way I liken it to, is like a pronoun. So a pronoun is a word that you could substitute for basically any noun. And, it still works in an abstracted way. So it. You can substitute for all sorts of nouns in a sentence. So, you know, I don't know. The star raced through the sky. It raced through the sky. So you could replace it for lots of different things. as a pronoun, this is what I call. So a climactic panel is what I call a peak. And this is kind of like a pro peak, like a pronoun of a peak. You can replace it for literally any peak panel. And we've done experiments showing this and it's very reliable. So it kind of ends up being a diagnostic tool. If you want to know where the peak, the climax of a strip is, you stick this panel into it, and see if it works. So you could, for example, replace the onlooker panel in the last strip with that star shape. And it works because that's the climax of the strip. And in virtually any strip where there's a. There's climactic panels or a climactic panel, this will work to substitute for those panels. But it doesn't work if you substitute for other positions in the sequence. It's weird if you do that in other places.

Harold: In what way do you mean it works in that  first strip we were…

Neil Cohn: Yes. So what it worked is it provides a panel that structurally feels like a good narrative. That's the way I'd put it. So not in the meaning sense, like it would be hiding certain meaning because you clearly lose out on the meaning that you're now replacing it with. But it feels good as a narrative sequence where if you were to replace that star shape with, say, the first panel of the strip, it would not feel like a good narrative sequence. It would feel like, wait, why is there this climax at the beginning? And then it dips down and there's a climax again later on. That's strange. So it kind of reveals to you that there is this structure of a narrative arc that's happening in strips and sometimes complexly, with different sorts of organization. But it feels like a good sequence, let's put it that way.

Harold: Are you saying, then, Neil, that if you use POW in that first sequence that we just went through with the Whirly Dog, if you had to place it in one of those four, that would be the most satisfying way to place it, even though it doesn't make sense.

Neil Cohn: Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. Yeah.

Jimmy: It's like an identifier, you know. I obviously never thought about that that way. This is brilliant. And, you know, but when I was doing that, that thing for Washington Post, so much of it was identifying the climax panel. Yes. And realizing, oh, my gosh, that's how he gets such variety out of the humor, because he moves that POW panel all around.

Neil Cohn: Yeah. So technically, actually, the strip we looked at previously is a little more complicated because the third panel, the onlooker panel, is fairly passive.

Jimmy: Right.

Neil Cohn: if you replace the star shape for that, you kind of push it to be the climactic panel. But it could also be that you could insert the star shape between the third panel and the fourth panel, and that. Which would be the case where the retrieval happens in between those panels rather than at the third panel. So there's a little bit more ambiguity to it because of the nature of that particular strip. But, if you have other strips where there's just a climax, you can replace that star shape for the climactic panel and it. Feel the flow. Let's call it the narrative flow. Feels good, even though you are missing out on information.

Harold: and it's a non sequitur, you could say, in that first somewhat.

Neil Cohn: But, I mean, it simply pushes you to infer the information that you're missing is what it would be.

Harold: Yeah.

Jimmy: And I feel like, It's almost like the star panel. Almost maybe works better than the star with the pow. Because the star is slightly more.

Neil Cohn: Yes. I would get rid of the POW part. 

Jimmy: Get rid of the pow, Yeah. Because then I. Because I get what you're saying. Totally. Because moving that panel, the star panel around, will tell you the structure of the joke, and then you can recreate it however you want with your character. Yeah. That's really brilliant. Great. That's good thinking. So that you might go someplace. You might.

Neil Cohn: Thank you. So, I have this whole theory about the architecture of narrative, which we'll talk about in the next trip as well. And this was also a pivotal moment because I realized, oh, I can use this star as a kind of a diagnostic test for revealing the structure of things. And then it pushed us to think of lots of other diagnostic tests for testing other things. So another one that I somewhat stole from an Internet meme is if you want to test what the kind of denouement is of a strip which comes after this peak, you put Geez, what a jerk, a bubble that says, geez, what a jerk. So if you replaced, you know, if you added a, Geez, what a jerk bubble to Snoopy here, it would work in that last panel because it works early around. Yeah, yeah. But you. But you couldn't add Geez, what a jerk to say the second panel.

Michael: Yeah.

Neil Cohn: So that is weird. So you have these sorts of funny little things that tell you what the structure, the underlying structure is. And you can design these little tests to reveal that structure, which ends up being really fun. So that's. That's what this did for me, is it? Both taught me that, oh, yeah, there are these things that you don't see that happen at this panel, not necessarily in between panels. That's important. And that you can, you know, do little. You can use certain conventions to test things, and it reveals to you things about the structure, which is, I think, really fun.

Jimmy: Well, this is, like, so fascinating to me because I, like, I don't work correctly. I can't do anything right. Like, sometimes I will. I will have the general. Okay, I know what, what information needs to be conveyed on this page. This is particularly for my Amelia Rules comic. And I can. I will start dividing the page into panels before I know what's going into the panels, because I know, like, okay, this is where, with this language now, this is where the star panel is going to go. This is where the these what a jerk panel is going. Going to go. And I can leave what's the actual words until the very, very end. Yeah, because the structure is solid.

Neil Cohn: Yeah, exactly. And I think part of that also is when you're creating comics, you don't always create them in the linear order that things appear. And that's because you have a, bigger structure in your mind based on this kind of architecture of narrative structure. And so you can. That really hangs off of the peak panels. So you want to know where the peak panel is, and then you can work towards it, and you can work past it. And so sometimes you don't even know what the lead in is. You know, where those things go, and then you work backwards. And that's, you know, that makes sense when you have a bigger structure to work with, rather than like, well, all structure is kind of in a linear sequence or something. And that's actually a great lead in to the next one, if I might say.

Jimmy: Lets do it. 

May 11, 1958. It's a Sunday, so we're starting off at the baseball field. A beautiful panoramic drawing of a tiny little Linus standing out in the outfield. And then it must be practice or something, because Charlie Brown's at the plate and he takes a big wallop. We see Schroeder back there as the catcher, and it's a high fly ball. Linus clocks it in the air, then he takes off after it. And it must be a really deep hit because he has to run basically between two buildings where he sees Lucy, who is playing in the sandbox, making a little, pile of sand. Linus, in the middle of this play, mind you, stops, looks at what Lucy is doing, takes a moment to make a gigantic sand castle dwarfing anything Lucy would attempt, then sprints again towards the ball, only to make a spectacular catch in the last panel.

Neil Cohn: Very nicely described. So, this struck. This strip highlights very nicely why comics actually have a much bigger, richer structure than I, think people account for. And I will say in my book, I have this example of people playing Frisbee. This guy running for a Frisbee, and then he stops and builds a, blocks, and then catches the frisbee. It's based on this strip. So this is the “ur” strip of my much worse drawings than Schulz's version. I'm essentially imitating this strip. So the thing that I want to highlight first is that if you look at panel four is where Linus goes running and his hat starts coming off.

Liz: Uh-huh.

Neil Cohn: And then look at the second to last panel. What you might notice is that those two panels look nearly identical to each other.

Harold: Yeah.

Neil Cohn: And that is a clue. Now, those two panels bracket the panels where he interacts with Lucy and builds a sandcastle.

Harold: Yeah.

Neil Cohn: Now, I think when people read this linearly, they think, this is okay, they're playing baseball. And then Linus makes a detour, builds a sandcastle, and then catches the ball. But really, structurally, what you have is actually two strips. You have a strip about sandcastle building that is embedded inside a strip about baseball. And you could separate out or cover over the baseball ones. And the sandcastle strip works perfectly fine on its own without the beginning and end baseball strips. That works as a strip. Then if you were to cover up the sandcastle ones, you basically have a strip that is. Charlie hits a ball, Linus runs, he catches the ball. Yeah, Both of those work perfectly fine on their own. So this is essentially a graphic example of what we call an embedded clause in speech. so, in sentence structure, you can embed sentences inside sentences, like, my cat who loves fish ate dinner. And so the who loves fish is an embedded clause inside my cat ate dinner.

Jimmy: This is why all kids need to learn how to diagram sentences.

Neil Cohn: Exactly right. Exactly right. And you can diagram this exact strip with that same sort of hierarchic structure. So this has an embedded clause in it. And what's amusing in this case, the embedded clause is the joke.

Liz: Right

Neil Cohn: And so that's really fascinating that you can have this sort of embedded clause inside this other sequence. Now, what's also interesting about that is that means that those two panels that look similar to each other of, Linus running, you have to make a connection between those panels at, this distance because there's this other thing in the middle between it. So you have to have some mechanism to allow your brain to connect this earlier panel to this later panel. And, you could, in fact, add lots of other stuff happening in between. Linus builds a sandcastle, he goes and takes a bath, he goes and, eats lunch, and then he goes and catches the ball. Or, you know, you could keep adding more and more stuff that Linus does in between, as long as you keep those last two panels at the end. And you're just gonna have a bigger and bigger embedded clause.

Harold: Right?

Neil Cohn: And no matter what, you have to make a connection between the first running and the last running.

Harold: So has anyone ever done a graphic novel where you have those first four panels and then you go through a hundred pages? Probably, Jimmy, you've done this, and then the last page, you finish out what happened on page three.

Neil Cohn: Great question. I don't know. I am not.

Jimmy: I could imagine Chris Ware doing,

Michael: Yeah, I thought of him right away.

Neil Cohn: So, yeah, so that's really fascinating because it means you. There's things in comics that you have to make distance connections between. And it's not that you make distance connections between everything. It's not that every panel connects to every other panel. It's in this case specifically, these bracketing panels need to connect to each other. And that means you have to have some sort of mechanisms to do embedding and hierarchy, which is the foundation of my kind of larger theory of how sequences of images make sense. And so that's. It's a really important structure. And the notion of embedded clauses is actually really fundamental to the way we understand language. And many people have argued that this is, this is a language unique phenomenon is to have this sort of center embedding phenomena. And here I'm able to say, well, yeah, but you also have it in comic strips very clearly like this one. So it's not distinctive to just language. It has to be a larger thing. Or maybe the graphics are also a type of language, because the same sort of structure is happening. 

And then the last thing I'll say about this strip, perhaps, unless you want me to keep going, is, so we have never overtly tested these sorts of, what are called distance dependencies, these distance connections. And it's something that we. We have a current grant project that I'm working on now funded by the European Research Council, and I have a student who is working on this exact project. In fact, this. In the same way that the first strip was like my origin of a whole experiment, this strip is now the origin of a whole experiment that we're currently building. So we will be testing this with brain studies within probably the next year or so.

Harold: And specifically, you're going to be testing for what, how, how long a clause can. Can for it to work in people's minds or how people's minds deal with the.

Neil Cohn: So I can tell you about the structure of it. So imagine if instead of those four sandcastle panels, you had four panels of just Linus running, right? So if you were to extract those four panels of Linus running, that would not be an embedded clause. That's not like a separate strip on its own. So if you then compare the. Find the kind of reconnection panel where he. The second to last panel, you would imagine that the brain is doing something a little bit more when you have to exit that embedded clause than if he was just running that whole time and it was contiguous. So we're going to measure then what the brain is doing to make that distance connection, at the embedded clause version versus a version that has no embedded clause.

Michael: And that's the joke here though is the embedded clause is impossible because of time. The time is different.

Neil Cohn: Absolutely, absolutely. And there is also, fascinatingly, implicitly, the ball is still in the air. Right. And in fact, what's funny is you never see a ball until the last panel.

Jimmy: Right, right.

Neil Cohn: Even the one where he hits the ball, you don't see a ball, but you know the ball. A ball is there and you know a ball is in air that entire time, even though you never see any ball until the last panel.

Michael: So that's another part of this strip is a, a remake, almost an homage to an earlier Peanuts strip, which I, I picked as my number two all time favorite strip. It could have been this one, but it's Charlie Brown who's running after the ball. and so what he's saying here, again, because the joke has to be character specific.

Neil Cohn: Yes.

Michael: is Linus is a genius.

Neil Cohn: Yes.

Michael: And Charlie Brown's doing this amazing thing. Well, you know it because he's running after a ball, you know, jumping over fences and everything. Again, the time distortion. But the last panel, he drops the ball.

Neil Cohn: Yeah, I know that exact strip

Michael:  because he's a loser. 

Neil: We've used that strip in experiments too. So I know the exact one you mean.

Jimmy: You know, one of the things that makes Schulz. It's just that last little touch too, on top of everything else is like if you see Linus running in panel four, he's running to get the ball. The next to last panel, just because of the addition of that line. Now he's rushed to get to the ball.

Neil Cohn: Yes.

Jimmy: You know, it's wild. Wild.

Harold: You know, Neil, looking at this, we've talked about comic strips and comic books being particularly tricky for an author to get humor across to people because the timing can often be reliant on the reader. And a lot of, like, if you watch an animated film, just the removal of four frames can make something so much funnier. You know, whenever the coyote hits. Hits the bottom of the cliff, you know, they said they timed that out and they figured out it was 18 frames from the time he disappears to the time the cloud of dust appears.

Neil Cohn: Nice.

Harold: We don't have that. We don't have that specifically in comics. And there's been conversation about how hard it is to make something fairly universally funny with comic strips and comic books because there's so much that's reliant on the reader to get the timing to make, make, make them laugh. And yet I think Schulz possibly does this better. He makes the choices that almost force every reader to have the same experience. And I would love to see somebody do an analysis of how to set up a joke in sequential panels that will give you the greatest chance of success for the most people to find something funny because it's something that I've never really heard even discussed among other cartoonists. There's so many ways this strip could have been done. What if the last panel, instead of those last two panels, what if he's just down there finishing up the sandcastle and he holds out his hand and the ball drops into it?

Neil Cohn: Right.

Harold: That somehow is less satisfying because you're saying he's setting something up. The ball. We never saw the loss of the hat. He's got the sweat marks coming off of him. he knows he's got to get it done so he can finish it.

Neil Cohn: Yeah. So I think part of what's essential here that you're alluding to and that we've all discussed throughout this time is kind of how an author provides or withholds information. And that's also key to humor is how are you. What are you saying overtly, what are you withholding, and what are you pushing a reader to understand by withholding information? And it is, you know, I think Schulz does this really quite majestically to describe it. He's so good at it. 

And a variant of the one that you describe where if he was just to hold out his hand is the. There's one where he, you know, the ball gets hit, he goes running, and then he gets in the kiddie pool with several girls and then catches the ball. That one doesn't have an embedded clause because he is entering a situation where he is then doing the catching situation. but that has a different flavor of funny there. It's funny because he's in a kiddie pool with other people. This is funny because it's an aside. Almost like the sandcastle building part is this other little event that happens.

Michael: May I point out, he's doing the famous Willie Mays basket catch.

Neil Cohn: Also good note. Yes, yes.

Michael: Yeah.

Neil Cohn: And this, of course, follows other, again, character specific things where Linus is really good at catching things. Right. And good at building sandcastles. So that's part of the genius

Liz:  building everything. 

Neil: Yeah. Yeah.

Jimmy: Well, Neil, thank you so much for coming on the show. You can come back anytime.

Neil Cohn: I'd love to.

Jimmy: Great conversation. Guys out there-- If you're interested in comics as an art form, if you're interested in being a cartoonist, you got to pick up Neil's book. There will be a link in our description. Neil, tell us. Tell everybody where they can find you.

Neil Cohn: You can find me online at visuallanguagelab.com I'm also on Bluesky at neilcohn, whatever the blue sky ending is, and Instagram at the visual linguist. But visuallanguagelab.com is my website. You can find everything there.

Liz: Awesome.

Jimmy: The book is Speaking In Pictures. Be there, be square. All the kids are going to be talking about it. And that's it. So for Michael, Harold and Liz, this is Jimmy saying, be of good cheer.

LM&H: Yes. Yes. Be of good cheer. 

VO: Unpacking Peanuts is copyright Jimmy Gownley, Michael Cohen, Harold Buchholz, and Liz Sumner. Produced and edited by Liz Sumner. Music by Michael Cohen. Additional voiceover by Aziza Shukrala Clark. For more from the show, follow Unpack Peanuts on Instagram and threads. Unpacking Peanuts on Facebook, Blue sky and YouTube. For more about Jimmy, Michael and Harold, visit unpackingpeanuts.com have a wonderful day and thanks for listening.

Neil Cohn: But everybody else was like this, why are we playing business? And I was like, we're not playing. This is real.