Of course, in comics you have the classic wavy lines + flies for bad smells.

From the point of view of taste, I don’t know how you would represent it, except for showing the food as evocatively (which does not necessarily mean as realistically) as possible, and relying upon the viewer’s sense memories. I’m thinking specifically of Annibale Carracci’s “Bean Eater” (you can probably Google it).

Touch in painting is a whole different area: I’d say it’s first done, and done well, by the Venetians, with their color adaptation of Leonardo’s sfumato (ie, sfumato + color glazes). See the nymphs in Giorgione’s Concert Champetre (and yes, that’s Giorgione–don’t let anyone tell you it’s Titian!). The blurry edges of the bodies suggest the give of the flesh, as does the (subconsciously registered, for the most part) fact that our eye does not see only the top layer of paint, but sees through a few more or lest translucent layers.

This makes me think how interesting it is that Kant claimed that the beautiful can exist only in the two, so to speak, “dominant” senses–sight and sound. That taste, smell and touch can have only the agreeable, but not the beautiful. I wonder if that’s somehow connected to their representability.

I certainly get a smell from some over-ripe superhero comics…

Off hand I’m not sure of painters dealing with smell or taste. Touch can be done with texture, paint, stroke, etc. Harder to do in a reproduced medium (like comics or the web), though still, I think possible with mark making and color.

Maybe there’s someone with Art History knowledge around who might have some painters in mind… Andre?

I like my idea of metaphor too, though I have no idea what I mean in a practical visual sense (mouth emanatas? taste balloons?).

labels? pictures? I like oyur idea of metaphor. How have other artists done this? Painters?

I need to try working them into my comics somehow. Either with text or… metaphor? Hmm…

Text/image integration is something I think about, making images into text and text into images. This post gives me some ideas about rendering other senses too. How the hell do we note smell on a page? The “taco smell” panel does a great job.

No, seriously: after my first post, my name has just appeared automatically in your comments section, so I was just wondering. I had read a couple of comments by wwc, and wasn’t sure it was Warren.