More On Comics & Aspergers

Following my post on Auspies and Manga, and how I might learn something from my daughter's obsession with it, I spotted this post at Newsarama's blog. He's quoted a passage from Frank Santoro's post, which frankly is really for die-hard comic fans. But the passage pulled at my earlier thoughts & so I'm going to re-post it here for parents.

There’s often too much emphasis on reading a comic like a novel when really it should be discussed like a painting or a sculpture. Far from dismissing these “out there” comics… I found myself simply hoping to discuss them and appreciate them better, and to do that I think a broader approach has to be encouraged, towards a less conservative definition of comics… I’ve always felt that all comics are inherently narrative because of the form that the book takes. For that matter a single image, an abstract painting, for example, is often narrative. Jackson Pollock’s paintings are narrative — you can follow him, the story of him working by the lassos of color — and the same is true even with the color field abstractionists like Frankenthaler. It’s just a broader range, a greater bandwidth for inventing narrative.

Again, I'm not really certain what this all means -- or if in fact it means anything in the world of Aspergers. But it pulls at the threads of the sweater just a bit more...