More advanced picture narratives appeared in works such as the Bayeux tapestry and Paupers' Bibles. Stone age paintings in places such as the Chauvet cave in France seem to show scenes of galloping horses and pouncing lions, using techniques that would be familiar to graphic artists today. The drive to tell stories with pictures certainly has deep roots. 'Drawing has always been about communication – to express an idea in your head to other people,' says Cohn. In some ways the ties with art should be stronger, however – since, unlike music, pictures encode a definite meaning. 'We create sounds using our mouths we can move our bodies with hands and faces and we can draw things… My idea is that whenever these meaning-making channels get structured in a coherent sequence, then you end up with a type of language.' If he is right, the hidden logic of cartoon panels could provide new vistas on art, language and creative development.Ĭohn's theory builds on a growing acceptance that the brain's language toolkit is a kind of Swiss army knife for many different kinds of expression, such as music or dance. 'Human beings only have three ways to convey our thoughts,' he explains.

At a neural level, he says, the pictures of comic strips are processed as another form of language, with their own vocabulary, grammar and syntax. His theory, presented in The Visual Language of Comics (Bloomsbury) next month, is provocative. Now a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, Neil Cohn is finally getting the chance to answer that question, as he carefully dismantles comic strips such as Peanuts.

Understanding comics book