Visualizing Information
Sunday, October 14th, 2007Man, it was fun to draw Zip wearing lederhosen. He looks pretty sharp, right. 
On a different note, IBM has an interesting website called Many Eyes which has a bunch of different models for visualizing large amounts of data. It’s semi-comic related, I think, in that part of a comic artist’s job is to either interpret or kickstart the visualization process of a story for the reader. The word tree visualizations on this IBM site are way fun. Check out the number of times people use the phrase “I don’t recall” in testimonies, or the number of times specific words appear in a Shakespeare play.
In typical internet fashion, I stayed up far too late last night, clicking around on this site.
October 14th, 2007 at 1:24 am
So his new jammies feature numbers instead of letters; nice touch!
October 14th, 2007 at 9:57 am
It’s funny, I noticed the zero and one on the jammies immediately on reading today’s comic, but had never noticed the letters before. As soon as I saw this comic, I want back through the archives and checked out the old jammies. I’m astonished that I hadn’t noticed!
October 15th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Glad you guys like the new big woolies.
Don, that’s awesome that you didn’t notice the letters before. I had a similar experience reading some of the old Krazy Kat collections that Fantagraphics has out. I think I had read through two of the books when I noticed in one strip that the artist was swapping out the backgrounds on the panels, for example if it was a room, the chair would be different, the door would be different, the walls would be different, and the window would be different, but because he would keep the placement of the items the same, it wasn’t immediately noticeable. He did it all the time. Way cool.
October 20th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
well with krazy kat the background would change because he realized in arizona the background of the outside landscape really does change like that when he visited his sister or brother i dont remember. but i was lucky enough to take a college lit class where all we red was comic books and graphic novels
October 21st, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Thanks, Kelly. That’s cool to get a little background (no pun intended) on George Herriman like that. That’s awesome that they offer college lit classes which feature comics. That would be so much fun. It is one of the few American art forms, right?