Thinking with Comics: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning through Structured Visual Storytelling
Chain-of-Thought reasoning has driven large language models to extend from thinking with text to thinking with images and videos. However, different modalities still have clear limitations: static images struggle to represent temporal structure, while videos introduce substantial redundancy and computational cost. In this work, we propose Thinking with Comics, a visual reasoning paradigm that uses comics as a high information-density medium positioned between images and videos. Comics preserve temporal structure, embedded text, and narrative coherence while requiring significantly lower reasoning cost. We systematically study two reasoning paths based on comics and evaluate them on a range of reasoning tasks and long-context understanding tasks. Experimental results show that Thinking with Comics outperforms Thinking with Images on multi-step temporal and causal reasoning tasks, while remaining substantially more efficient than Thinking with Video. Further analysis indicates that different comic narrative structures and styles consistently affect performance across tasks, suggesting that comics serve as an effective intermediate visual representation for improving multimodal reasoning.
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Andong Chen
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2026-02-03T10:03:45.069Z
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Andong Chen
AndongChen
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AndongChen
698183aece18b18628096312
Wenxin Zhu
698183aece18b18628096313
Qiuyu Ding
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Yuchen Song
698183aece18b18628096315
Muyun Yang
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Tiejun Zhao
Thinking with Comics: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning through Structured Visual Storytelling
Chain-of-Thought reasoning has driven large language models to extend from thinking with text to thinking with images and videos. However, different modalities still have clear limitations: static images struggle to represent temporal structure, while videos introduce substantial redundancy and computational cost. In this work, we propose Thinking with Comics, a visual reasoning paradigm that uses comics as a high information-density medium positioned between images and videos. Comics preserve temporal structure, embedded text, and narrative coherence while requiring significantly lower reasoning cost. We systematically study two reasoning paths based on comics and evaluate them on a range of reasoning tasks and long-context understanding tasks. Experimental results show that Thinking with Comics outperforms Thinking with Images on multi-step temporal and causal reasoning tasks, while remaining substantially more efficient than Thinking with Video. Further analysis indicates that different comic narrative structures and styles consistently affect performance across tasks, suggesting that comics serve as an effective intermediate visual representation for improving multimodal reasoning.
Thinking with Comics emerges as an effective visual reasoning approach that bridges images and videos by leveraging comic structures for improved multimodal reasoning efficiency and performance.
visual reasoning multimodal reasoning temporal structure narrative coherence long-context understanding