Drawings and sequential images are an integral part of human expression, dating back at least to cave paintings, and in contemporary society, they are most prominently found in comics. Despite this fundamental aspect of human identity, little research has so far examined the understanding patterns and cognitive foundations of visual narratives – until now. This work presents a provocative theory: that drawings and sequential images are structured much like language. Building on contemporary theories from linguistics and cognitive psychology, it argues that comics are written in a visual language of sequential images, combined with text. Like spoken and signed languages, visual narratives use a lexicon of systematic patterns stored in memory, strategies for combining these patterns into meaningful units, and a hierarchical grammar that governs the combination of sequential images into coherent expressions. This book, filled with examples and illustrations, describes each of these structural levels, explains how intercultural differences arise in the diverse visual languages of the world, and outlines what the latest neuroscience research reveals about the understanding of visual narratives in the brain. This lays the groundwork for a new research direction within the fields of language and cognitive sciences, raising intriguing questions about the connections between language and the diversity of human expressions in the mind and brain.