Finally… Validation! Kind of:

At the same time, a freshly minted Ph.D. named Neil Cohn is watching the readout from my brain, an exercise he has repeated with some 100 subjects to date. Many people would consider tracking Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes comic strips unworthy of scientific inquiry, but Cohn begs to differ. His evidence suggests that we use the same cognitive process to make sense of comics as we do to read a sentence. They seem to tap the deepest recesses of our minds, where we bring meaning to the world.

Cohn has discovered that the brain “reads” comics in the same way that it “reads” text – Something that Cohn describes as comic strip “grammar”. “The brain is processing these different kinds of grammars in a common way,” he explains, comparing literary and comic grammars, and the work our minds do to help both make sense inside our heads. Cohn apparently intends to study this in more detail, saying “My goal is to create a field of study for this stuff.” Comics + Science. The combination is kind of awesome.

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