Thinking in Comics
How the Grammar of the Page Shapes the Grammar of Our Thoughts
Abstract
In a world obsessed with finding the quickest path from A to B, what does genuine understanding look like? We often treat the page as a simple container for answers, but what if we saw it as a space for exploration?
In this session, Nick Sousanis, author of Unflattening, argues that the very structure of comics offers a powerful way to navigate complex ideas. He’ll explore how creating on the page, with all its decisions, mistakes, struggles, and surprises, is the essential pathway to insight. It's a process where the journey isn't a detour from the answer; it is the answer.
Speaker Bio
Nick Sousanis
Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author and educator. He wrote and drew his dissertation, Unflattening, entirely in comic book form. Published by Harvard University Press, it argues for the power of visual thinking in learning and has won numerous awards, including the Lynd Ward Prize for Best Graphic Novel.
At the heart of his practice, both as a creator and as the head of the Comics Studies program at San Francisco State University, is a deep belief in creating environments for discovery. He sees his role as a teacher not to provide a direct path, but to build the frameworks that encourage exploration.
Watch the Session
Session Summary
This presentation offers a powerful critique of limited thinking and a deep exploration of comics as a profound intellectual and generative medium. The core message is that cultivating "good seers" is essential for preparing "good thinkers," and that visual literacy, particularly through comics, is a vital way to break free from self-imposed intellectual and systemic limitations.
The Critique of Flatness and The Central Thesis
The presentation begins with the concept of "the nightmare of flatness," a limitation of possibilities inspired by Edwin Abbott's novella Flatland. Nick uses the analogy of two-dimensional inhabitants who cannot conceive of the concept of "upwards" to challenge the audience: What is the "upwards" we cannot conceive of because it is outside our current framework of experience?
He applies this critique directly to traditional education and academia, viewing them as institutions that enforce a kind of flatness. Learning is often segmented into artificial "boxes" of time, space, and subject, leading to a restricted, single-channel form of thinking. This is exemplified by the rigid constraints of a traditional doctoral thesis (e.g., 12-point type, double-spaced), which dismisses images as non-intellectual.
A key insight is the separation between "smart" and "talented." Nick notes that as a mathematician, he was called "smart," but as an artist, he is called "talented." He argues for healing this rift, asserting that art making, which involves the whole human being, allows him to be "smarter" than he could be otherwise.
Comics as a Multimodal Way of Knowing
Nick champions comics as a naturally interdisciplinary and multimodal form that integrates the worlds of image and text. He defines comics, borrowing from cartoonist Seth, as "poetry plus graphic design," rather than prose plus illustration. This definition removes the pressure of being a "facile illustrator" and shifts the focus to effective communication.
In his teaching, Nick emphasizes that how you think is more important than how you draw. He showcases student work where non-artists convey powerful, complex, and emotional ideas through the poetic use of design, simple lines, and the deliberate arrangement of space, demonstrating that the medium is accessible to anyone willing to think spatially and visually.
Tracing the history of comics from the Golden Age back through the Yellow Kid, Rodolphe Töpffer, to ancient storytelling practices like Egyptian murals and the Lascaux cave paintings, he posits that the sensibility of making sense of the world through sequential picture stories is a fundamental human activity.
The Generative Affordances of Form
The unique cognitive power of comics lies in their ability to manipulate and represent time and thought through space. Citing Scott McCloud's definition of juxtaposed images in a deliberate sequence, Nick explains that comics are fundamentally static—the action is performed by the reader, who animates the fragments into the kinetic.
The medium's "superpower" is the combination of the sequential and the simultaneous. While a reader moves linearly through time (left-to-right), the visual nature of the page means the entire composition is taken in at once, creating connections across panels that mirror the complex, rhizomatic way human thought operates (connecting past, present, and future simultaneously). The panels, therefore, do not just mark time, they become part of the story, acting as spatial, psychological, or dimensional barriers.
The Value of Process and Struggle
A crucial insight from Nick's practice is that drawing is not simply a representation of thinking, but an act that generates thought. The work does not exist without the messy process of drawing, iteration, and playing a "game" with constraints.
He describes his process as a "dancing" between words and pictures, where formal decisions and visual constraints drive the intellectual content. In one example, the constraint of fitting a specific visual schema in his Scheherazade comic forced him to research obscure 13th-century Arab astronomy—a path that none of his notes had suggested. The drawing process taught him where to go.
Nick concludes by stressing the value of struggle, mistakes, and bad drawings, which lead to surprises and discoveries that cannot be replicated by shortcuts. It is the small, conscious decisions made during the process that shape the unique perspective of the creator. This emphasis on embodied, effortful making is key to his upcoming work, No-Sitos, which explores how ideas originate from the body, motion, and the hands-on act of creation, ensuring the human element of discovery remains paramount.