Frederick Luis Aldama
Your Brain on Latino Comics
The study of mind through cognitive science and the findings of neurobiology have shed very interesting light on the way comic books are produced and read. I find this fascinating and have used it in my study of the visual and verbal elements at work in comic books by and about Latino and Chicano artists and authors. The result is Your Brain on Latino Comics, the first study of Latino comic books.
Your Brain on Latino Comics is a critical study of Latino comics. But an important feature of it is the inclusion of twenty-one interviews with the actual author/artists of Latino comics. The book joins the theoretical apparatus with the actual practice and experience of the author/artists themselves.
I organized the book in this way to allow a deep engagement for those who are interested in this storytelling form a critical perspective as well as for those interested in an actual practice perspective. Moreover, what we know of Latino comics, and what we know about how our brains process visual and verbal information from panel to panel, both enrich our pleasure in the actual experience of comics – Latino comics and comics generally.
As the serialized story of La Maggie unfolds, our brain has already mapped the verbal narrator’s past-tense, first-person voice to the visual narrator’s focus on the character Maggie. And here things begin to get interesting. The visual narrator can describe Maggie—facial expression, gesture, behavior—in ways that emphasize or conflict with the textual—the verbal narrator's voice. One can depict happiness while the other describes frustration; one comfort, and the other paranoia. In such cases, Hernandez challenges—even plays havoc with—the reader’s cognitive schemas that work to infer inner state from outward gesture, that allow one to determine a state of pleasure or contentment from a smile.
Editor: Erind Pajo
Your Brain on Latino Comics
Frederick Luis Aldama Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez University of Texas Press 320 pages, 9 x 6 inches ISBN 978 0292719347 ISBN 978 0292719736
Get the book →June 10, 2009
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Melissa Soave
Frederick Luis Aldama
Before becoming a professor at Ohio State University, Frederick Luis Aldama (née Luis Federico Aldama) was born in 1969 in Mexico City to a Mexico-City born and bred chilango papa and a Guatemalan-Irish American mama. In a bizarre series of mishaps, he ended up growing up in and around Sacramento, California, and London, England, before going to UC Berkeley (B.A.) and then Stanford (Ph.D.). Today, he uses the tools of narrative theory and cognitive science in his teaching and scholarship on Latino and Postcolonial literature, art, music, film, and comic books. He is the author and editor of nine books, series editor of “Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture” with the University of Texas Press, and Director of Latino Studies at Ohio State University.
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