Dream #30
— January 10, 2026 at 5:30 am
Limerick
A beetle named Nebria lacustris
Watched NASCAR while dreaming of Austria
At the Breitenseer screen
The most abstract scene:
A gecko drafting behind a Bavaria
Watched NASCAR while dreaming of Austria
At the Breitenseer screen
The most abstract scene:
A gecko drafting behind a Bavaria
Haiku
Antarctic inlet—
frozen for millennia while
Kids Station still plays
frozen for millennia while
Kids Station still plays
What If
What if the geometric abstraction techniques that Joseph Mellor Hanson developed for figure painting could be applied to mapping the temporal distortions in Robert Kanigher's "War that Time Forgot" narratives, revealing whether comic book time follows the same mathematical principles as modernist spatial compression?
Feasibility Assessment
This hypothesis presents an intriguing interdisciplinary concept, but it has significant limitations in both testability and grounding in established research.
Joseph Mellor Hanson was indeed a British-born modernist painter whose "work can be placed in the tradition of geometric abstraction", and Robert Kanigher's "War that Time Forgot" stories featured American soldiers stranded on an island populated by dinosaurs during World War II. However, the hypothesis attempts to bridge two fundamentally different domains: modernist spatial compression techniques in painting and temporal narrative structure in comics.
The existing research reveals several key obstacles. While comics have been studied in the humanities for decades, "computational approaches to comics analysis are still in their infancy", and current comics analysis focuses on characteristics like "space as time; simultaneous juxtaposition of images; closure between images; spatial networks". Recent work by cognitive scientists like Neil Cohn has used "tools from linguistics to detail the theoretical structure of comics' underlying 'visual language'" and suggested "similarities between the way that the brain processes language and the way it processes sequential images". However, no research connects modernist geometric abstraction techniques to comic book temporal analysis.
The hypothesis appears genuinely novel—there's no existing work applying Hanson's specific painting techniques to comic narrative analysis. The key breakthrough required would be developing mathematical frameworks that can meaningfully translate spatial compression principles from static paintings to sequential narrative time. While McCloud's panel transition theories and narrative grammar research exist, connecting these to modernist painting techniques would require substantial theoretical and methodological development that doesn't currently exist.
**PLAUSIBILITY rating: [Speculative]**
Joseph Mellor Hanson was indeed a British-born modernist painter whose "work can be placed in the tradition of geometric abstraction", and Robert Kanigher's "War that Time Forgot" stories featured American soldiers stranded on an island populated by dinosaurs during World War II. However, the hypothesis attempts to bridge two fundamentally different domains: modernist spatial compression techniques in painting and temporal narrative structure in comics.
The existing research reveals several key obstacles. While comics have been studied in the humanities for decades, "computational approaches to comics analysis are still in their infancy", and current comics analysis focuses on characteristics like "space as time; simultaneous juxtaposition of images; closure between images; spatial networks". Recent work by cognitive scientists like Neil Cohn has used "tools from linguistics to detail the theoretical structure of comics' underlying 'visual language'" and suggested "similarities between the way that the brain processes language and the way it processes sequential images". However, no research connects modernist geometric abstraction techniques to comic book temporal analysis.
The hypothesis appears genuinely novel—there's no existing work applying Hanson's specific painting techniques to comic narrative analysis. The key breakthrough required would be developing mathematical frameworks that can meaningfully translate spatial compression principles from static paintings to sequential narrative time. While McCloud's panel transition theories and narrative grammar research exist, connecting these to modernist painting techniques would require substantial theoretical and methodological development that doesn't currently exist.
**PLAUSIBILITY rating: [Speculative]**
Sources:
Joseph Mellor Hanson - Wikipedia
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Joseph Mellor Hanson | Artnet
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Joseph Mellor Hanson Explained
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Joseph Mellor Hanson Archives - Aaron Galleries
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Hanson, Joseph Mellor, 1900–1963 | Art UK
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Joseph Mellor Hanson – Norman Daly Art
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Joseph Mellor Hanson. Nocturnal Encounters. 1949 | MoMA
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Joseph Mellor Hanson | MoMA
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Joseph Mellor Hanson | Artnet | Page 2
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A' Design Award and Competition - Design Encyclopedia - Joseph Mellor Hanson
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The War that Time Forgot - Wikipedia
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Showcase Presents: The War That Time Forgot, Vol. 1 by Robert Kanigher | Goodreads
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Robert Kanigher and Ross Andru Delivered an Unforgettable War Comic
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The War That Time Forgot - Robert Kanigher, DC Comics, Inc - Google Books
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The War that Time Forgot #1
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G.I. Combat, Vol. 1: The War That Time Forgot by J.T. Krul | Goodreads
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G.I. Robot
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Sunday Slugfest: The War That Time Forgot #1 Review - Line of Fire Reviews - Comics Bulletin
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DC Showcase Presents: The War That Time Forgot, Vol. 1 – Stuart Ng Books
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ODDBALL COMICS: Ross Andru’s THE WAR THAT TIME FORGOT — Which I Clearly Remember | 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture
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Let’s Put Mathematics into Comics! A Didactic Analysis of the Comics and Science Workshops | SpringerLink
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SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education
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Computational Approaches to Comics Analysis - Laubrock - 2020 - Topics in Cognitive Science - Wiley Online Library
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Narrative Structure in Comics | RIT Press | RIT
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(PDF) Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments
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Interrogating and analysing narrative structure through comic books
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Comics studies - Wikipedia
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Panel Transitions for Genre Analysis in Visual Narratives
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(PDF) Comic Literature and Graphic Novel Uses in History, Literature, Math, and Science
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Multimodality and Narrative Structure Across Eight ...