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
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essay, a sense of both pathos and ethos reveal because although there are no words in the first six panels, the audience can sense the fearfulness and how the boy is hesitant and introverted because he says nothing at all which shows the pathos. But, as the panel continues and we see how he begin to speaking of the toy, this sense of emotion is what develops the boy’s ethos. A character has used in the graphic essay. The character points out the main thesis, images help you visualize, while words help you explore, yet both has understandable communications. Pictures and words are like two sides of the same coin. In school, at ‘Show and Tell’, you show and you tell, interchangeably. In kids picture books, simple words and images combine with each other to show something. But we separate show and tell from each other as we grew up, so we paint pictures without any words and write books without any pictures. Traditional thinking of a comic is that it simply was artwork that used words to most often times relay a funny story or message. But a comic is something that is very easy to read and required minimum thought. In McCloud’s graphic essay, “We all started out like this didn’t we?
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…
understand. Evidence of drawings exists before evidence of written words, yet pictures are somehow considered less important than words.
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
words. In Paul’s comics in the “The Ride Together” on page 101, we can see that Paul used a lot more pictures than words to do all of the metaphorical 'talking' for him. Although Paul did not used much words to describe but he has successfully expressed the incident that Paul and his friend unscrew the Exit sign at his school and switch it with others. McCloud gives an example where a scene is illustrated purely visually and then accompanied with text, or is only text. Each of these conveys its own meaning but the combination of image and text causes the reader to evaluate the image in context of the text and the text in context of the image. In this, they become interdependent, the meaning produced by both wholly dependent on the two together. In his graphic essay McCloud tried to show that pictures and words both can coexist together and are part of literature or art. Showing and telling may trade off, and the ultimate form of comics involves a balance between the two. Those who think of it as a fairly new and unproven method, he proved them wrong by showing them that the earliest written languages were actually based on pictures. He even made his essay in a comic format to enhance his written message and to prove the strength of combination of words and pictures as an art of storytelling. Writing is something that doesn’t necessarily have to stand alone. In many cases, such as the case of comics, writing is amplified and made better with the use of images to go along with it. Messages can be delivered through text alone, but it may be better received or catch peoples’ attention more if it is accompanied by a visual. After all, writing originated as images, in the cases of cave paintings. As time progressed, humans felt a need for writing to be conveyed through a written word, so images began to be used far less often. But with the reintroduction of comics and the increasing popularity of them, writing and images found themselves together again. And though combining pictures and words was typically seen as something more suitable for children where the two mediums can go together. McCloud is addressing the younger generation because children often seek and admire comics because it has a sense of creativity while still including literary. His audience is the younger generation because he is encouraging them to not go into what is known as real books, because they are without illustrations. He encourages this because he believes that together, words and pictures are much more powerful.
In this speech he expresses the significance of creating comics for children and how comic books have evolved into a much more sophisticated nonrelation to children industry. This is where producers and illustrators can express themselves through art and other near adult expressions. The gory and dark themes of today comics appeal themselves to a more adult audience However, in this process the audience for children has resulted in a loss. He wants the comic industry to bring it back to the children. His solution is this: to give children stories to hold on to. To let the imagination of children, soar to new heights with stories
By creating a rhyming function, the shapes, sizes and sites across panels privilege a unique composition of the image compared to all other pages. Also, the dimensions of panel 1, 2 and 4 associated with a rhetorical layout which intends to conform to the movement and track of Lucy and random gamers on the street from left-hand page to right-hand page within the pre-existing framework of narrative (Peeters, 41-60). Concerning the speech balloon of one gamer outside the gutter across panel 1 and panel 2, the words function an addictive combination elaborate and amplify the image that the reader is not able to understand why they run away without the words, and vice versa (McCloud, 154). All panels in this page interact with each other and lead to the identical sequence – Lucy runs away for Pikachu, by following this coherent narrative, iconic solidarity as an approach to the hypothesizing linear reading method across all panels (Groensteen, 114). A similar page layout emphasizes the movement of the protagonists in Michael Straczynski’s Thor comic by creating dynamism
Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, documents the author's discovery of her own and her father's homosexuality. The book touches upon many themes, including, but not limited to, the following: sexual orientation, family relationships, and suicide. Unlike most autobiographical works, Bechdel uses the comics graphic medium to tell her story. By close-reading or carefully analyzing pages fourteen through seventeen in Fun Home one can get a better understanding of how a Bechdel employs words and graphic devices to render specific events. One can also see how the specific content of the pages thematically connects to the book as a whole. As we will see, this portion of the book echoes the strained relationship between Bruce Bechdel and his family and his attempts to disguise his homosexuality by creating the image of an ideal family, themes which are prevalent throughout the rest of the nook.
In the beginning, symbolism was used for a means of communication. The reason for this was because during this time most Native American’s were Illiterate. Instead of using letter’s in the alphabet, as we do today , they used pictures (Douglas 42). This came to become what we call symbolism.
In Alison Bechdel’s comic “Compulsory Reading”, she creates an image of how she feels about the world of creative writing. Bechdel mentions different authors and well known titles like “Beloved”, Romeo and Juliet”, and Charles Dickens. She also mentions her distaste to novels as well. Bechdel uses media and design, rhetorical patterns, and tone to communicate how she feels about literature.
Piper’s use of imagery in this way gives the opportunity for the reader to experience “first hand” the power of words, and inspires the reader to be free from the fear of writing.
a way to express how they were feeling so they put their words into paintings and sculptures.
...s own wounded self, unaware of the unconscious connection to the depression of his mother and the unconscious recognition with the danger of his father. This text within a text is another chapter in Art Spiegleman's life that ends in tragedy from the death of a loved one and a piece of him. Artie's emphasis in this section of Maus is illustrated through the creation of a gloomy illusion when he outlined the four pages of the comic in black and illustrated the characters in a darker, more realistic manner from the mice and cats throughout the rest of the book. The purpose of this text within a text was to inform the reader that there was more to Art's story than what his father had to say. The death of Art's mother had a horrific impact on his father and himself, and this small cartoon was a way for Art to tell the story while coping with his memory of the incident.
The Russian writer Ivan Turgenev wrote in Fathers and Sons in 1862, "A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound” (Turgenev 196). Mark Twain was a living testament to that belief because iillustrations were an integral part of Mark Twain’s published work. They embellished his stories, informed the reader, and often reflected his humor. However, today’s fictional novels rarely include illustrations beyond the cover and fly leaf. This lack of illustrations has become more the norm in the digital publishing world because the illustrations often do not translate well to the digital format. My research paper will delineate the reasons that illustrations were relevant and necessary for the 19th century publication and why they are less relevant in the digital age. I will show that illustrations played an essential part in the success of Mark Twain’s books (1) because he made them an integral part of his writing, giving clarity to his written words; (2) because of the subscription publishing model of his era, and, (3) because of Twain’s dependence on them to describe his characters. However, the digital and audio publishing market of today has lessened the impact of illustrations in modern literary works. In Twain’s 19th century era, books were often a work of art as well as a literary treasure. The books I read today on my e-reader or listen to on “Audible” versions -- even Twain’s books -- almost never have a visual impact like Twain’s books had in the 19th century.
When writing any sort of narrative, be it novel or poem, fiction or non-fiction, scholarly or frivolous, an author must take into account the most effective manner in which to effectively convey the message to their audience. Choosing the wrong form, or method of speaking to the reader, could lead to a drastic misunderstanding of the meaning within an author’s content, or what precisely the author wants to say (Baldick 69). Even though there are quite a bit fewer words in a graphic novel than in the average novel, an author can convey just as much content and meaning through their images as they could through 60,000 words. In order to do that though, their usage of form must be thoughtfully considered and controlled. Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic memoir The Complete Persepolis, took great pains in the creation of her panels in order to reinforce and emphasize her narrative, much like a novelist utilizes punctuation and paragraph breaks. Through her portrayal of darkness and lightness, Satrapi demonstrates that literary content influences, and is primary to, the form.
A successful writer is he who is able to transmit ideas, emotions, and wisdom on to his readers. He is cable of stirring emotions and capturing the reader's attention with vivid descriptions and clever dialogues. The writer can even play with the meanings of words and fuse reality with fiction to achieve his goal of taking the reader on a wonderful journey. His tools are but words, yet the art of writing is found in the use of the language to create though-provoking pieces that defy the changing times. Between the lines, voices and images emerge. Not everyone can write effectively and invoke these voices. It is those few who can create certain psychological effects on the reader who can seize him (or her) with inspiring teachings, frightening thoughts, and playful games with the language. These people are true writers…
The first party crasher, "readability," probably makes its presence felt in all of our venues at least occasionally, but it haunts our work all the time. At the simplest and most practical level, readability is a hermeneutic problem. But it is a special problem of interpretation, not just the "same old" questions that come up in any work involving the production of signs and meaning. We try very hard to reduce the special problem to the same old problems, as evidenced by terms like visual, media, and computer "literacy." The question is this: What makes us so confident that our "readings" of visual signs are legitimate or defensible? Okay, that does sound a whole lot like the "same old" hermeneutic questions, but I don't believe it is the same in the case of visual rhetoric as in spoken or written discourse. Or at least, it doesn't seem the same, given the degree of skepticism registered by readers and students about interpretations of visual signs. Leaving aside for a moment the possibility that my interpretations just aren't very good and that that's what's provoking this response, our own colleagues and my students seem to pose far more and greater challenges to such interpretations than they do to those of a speech or a written document. For them, apparently, even in the wake of deconstruction, natural language seems safer, easier, and more stable in its capacity of meaning generation than does the visual image. I wonder why that is the case, and particularly so in a culture in which "seeing is believing" and a "picture is worth a thousand words."
Lefevre, Pascal. “Incompatible Visual Ontologies? – The Problematic Adaptation of Drawn Images. In Film and Comic Books, edited by Mark Jancovich, Matthew P McAllister and Ian Gordan, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007, 1 – 13.
introduced us to the two different kinds of exposition ;( Moon & Birdboot and Simon & Mrs Drudge). Our aim for this exercise was to understand the different uses of exposition; the very easy, flowing. subtle exposition of Moon and Birdboot compared to the "in your face" comic exposition of Mrs. Drudge. To do this we first read through the text in our for, this had already been read thought to us although it became clear we had little understanding of it, by acting the scenes. we were bringing them to life, therefore increasing our understanding.
Most people believe that graphic novels are just an art book with minimal text. They believe it is just for entertainment for kids or young adults. They think that graphic novels are just like comics. But to get to the point, graphic novels are just like all the other novels. They are a piece of literature that tells a story and pulls out the reader’s imagination, so that they feel that they are a part of the story or can even relate to the story. Graphic novels have changed and developed into such remarkable pieces of literature and should be accepted by all scholars to be placed in that category. According to John Ridley, “There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are-at their best-an amazing blend of art, literature and the theater of the mind”.