Course: Pictures of Youth: An Introduction to Children’s Visual Culture

So you’re an expert reader of Tintin. But could you read the manga One Piece? Comics literacy is transferrable… but only to a degree. Sometimes, achieving closure is particularly difficult …

Clémentine Beauvais told us about the way she became an proficient reader of Franco-Belgian comics… How did you acquire comics literacy? Tell us in the comments.

As is the case for many media and genres, there’s no straightforward history of comics. If we see comics as just Eisner’s sequential art, or McCloud’s pictures juxtaposed in deliberate …

Closure is one of the most central aspects of comics literacy. It defines the creative mental operation that a comics reader makes when going from panel to panel. When we …

Look at the image above. Why would most people, if prompted, call it a comic? (in this case, a comic strip)? Arguably, because it contains the following elements, which many …

Are picturebook apps a space for freedom and exploration… or strictly regulated reading? In her own approach to picturebook apps, Celia Turrión (borrowing terms by Isidro Moreno) discusses the ways …

Today, there are many picturebook apps for children available online. While some of them are barely more than simply scans of existing picturebooks, others are created specifically for electronic devices …

Do you have any initial thoughts on children’s books such as this? Feel free to share other examples you have encountered which employ similar playful techniques.

The term ‘postmodern picturebook’ refers to picturebooks where the reader has to work particularly hard to fill the gap between words and pictures. There might be numerous gaps, or very …

Books for babies are often dominated by pictures – they are essentially visual. Yet… many of them have other features: texture, size, and even sound and smell, as well as …

What kinds of literacy skills would you say such books encourage? Now think back to the picturebooks you identified as your favourite earlier. How would you characterise the word-pictures interactions …

“The closer words and images come to filling each other’s gaps, the more passive is the reader’s role since there is little left to the imagination. This is also true …

In this video, we have looked at picturebooks characterised by predominantly visual narratives, and complementary or enhancing relationships between words and pictures. What kinds of literacy skills would you say …

Read these extracts from one of the most famous texts on word-image relationships in picturebooks, by Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott. Predominantly verbal and predominantly visual narratives “In a predominantly …

One of the most important aspects of picturebooks is the relation between words and pictures. In many picturebooks, the illustrations aren’t just there to decorate, or look pretty. Instead, most …