Show And Tell Analysis

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Words and pictures can stand alone but together they are more powerful

The overall purpose of Scott McCloud “Show and Tell” is to create the impression that comics are still a valid form of telling stories and communications. He proved his point by making his essay a comic itself. Historically, showing and telling originated together but they became separated over time. Traditional thinking holds that truly great works of literature and art are best appreciated when viewed separately. In his graphic essay he states that pictures and words are not necessarily meant to be two separate forms of communication, but can be combined to create comics. And together, words and pictures are much more powerful.

In the first sixteen panels of McCloud’s …show more content…

Using words and images interchangeably. It didn’t really matter which we used so long as it worked. (Page 741)”. This statement is very true especially for little children. We all tried to express our feelings at the beginning by show and tell. McCloud also showed a comparison between word specific and picture specific comic. There are two main option to choose when writing a comic, one is to put more pictures to visually draw the reader into a specific expression or the second choice is to put more words in to heavily describe a specific description of something that a picture would not be able to do. Combining these words and pictures makes a stories more meaningful and easier to understand or picture that story in our mind. Maybe that is one of the reasons why young children are so eager to read comics, because they find it all real and easy to …show more content…

Scott explains that the earliest people used art to express their feelings. In the great book of world history “The Earth and Its Peoples (5th Edition)” we can see that the Shang society in the period of 1750–1045 B.C.E., they used different art or symbol on Oracle bones to express their feelings which clearly shows that words and pictures were connected very early in history. Scholars have reconstructed the major features of Shang society from the so-called “Oracle bones”. The writing on the oracle bones concerns the king, his court, and religious practices, with little about other aspects of Shang society. As the written word evolved, it started to become a separate entity from images. Eventually, many different forms of artwork evolved without words that tried to express certain themes or concepts depending on the artist. This artwork further separated images and

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