Word+Image: Comics

I used to be one of those people who picked up a newspaper only to turn to the "funnies", and although I've since grown to enjoy other parts of the paper too, the comics are still my safe haven in the sometimes depressing world of news. I know this is true for many people and although I haven't yet delved into the equally popular world of comic books and graphic novels, they certainly intrigue me too.

So what exactly is a comic? Scott McCloud defines comics as "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence" in his book "Understanding Comics". Simplifying this to a very generic classification, I would describe comics as just one form of the fusion of word and image.

It's a simple concept, the pairing of text and pictures, yet this is a very important technique in the world of design. One might argue the reason comics are so successful is that they are reminiscent of the books we read as children, pictures paired with few words, and easy to understand. After reading McCloud's book, I have a newfound respect for comics, and I find this idea very misleading. It may very well be true that the pairing of pictures and words is inherently attractive to us, so we can appreciate the combo at almost any age; however, comics and graphic novels use this pair in a way that is much more complex than your average children's book.

Graphic novelist Brian Fies (author of "Mom's Cancer" and "Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?") recently came to speak to our design class and one of the points he emphasized was the fact that in comics, the words and the pictures are dependent of each other. One cannot exist, at least coherently, without the other. If an adult were to read a book aimed at a very small child, he or she could understand where the story is going by reading only the words, or only looking at the pictures. This redundancy is perfect for a child learning to read and write, but for a more mature person it seems pointless. This explains why we slowly gravitate toward books with less and less pictures as we grow up. However, this combination need not be redundant; comics prove that.

Comics differ from most stories in that they refuse to be only a frame by frame movie-like story or a line by line novel. They are able to remove some of these lines and some of these frames and instead use the words and images to fill in each other's gaps. In many ways this is more advanced than the other formats; comics engage the reader both visually and textually, asking more from the reader than many traditional novels. Readers must be able to make inferences about the story, using the clues from both the images and words. Comics ask us to fill the gap between panels, using the words as clues, and infer the unspoken by way of the visual representation.

I find this mastery of word and image to be very interesting, and feel this type of literature and art is quite underrated. Looking at how comics use the pairing of word and image makes it obvious that they are much more than an adult's version of a children's picture book.

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