Shane Smith: Academaesthetics

Shane Smith is working on an honors project at the University of Canberra where he...I don't know how to say this. Let me think...

He's written an academic essay

He's drawn a comic book

He's produced something new-but-not-new, by using the medium of a comic to vitalize an academic essay discussing the forms and functions of both comics and essays in which he finds both to be oddly constrained because of their open, infinite definitions. His contention is that "certain general social assumptions have cropped up: the essay is boring, and the comic is childish" partly because neither medium has a better, formal definition.

I really can't do justice to it with mere words and strongly suggest that anyone with an academic bent, an interest in communication in general, or in formal constructions of communication in particular check this out.

Here's the link.

via Dirk Deppey