Picturing Words

Kyle Lang guest blogs from Oregon City, Oregon. His previous Cheek Teeth post about graphic novels can be read here.

 

The old chestnut goes “A picture is a worth a thousand words.” But what if what you are looking at is a combination of image and word? Comics are filled with these combinations and it bears a moment of reflection to take a look at the relationship between these two “separate” things. It is my belief that the distance between image and words is not as far as we think it is. Comics have often been referred to as a hybrid media, but if we take into account the origin of the alphabet as pictorial representations, then the mix of text and image actually becomes unified and the distinction of comics as a “hybrid” disappears.

Consider this: written letters are symbols; symbols are a form of image. One doesn’t have to dig too deep into research to find that the physical representations of our alphabet were actually derived from pictures themselves. Take a look at this image to see some of our letters’ origins. “A” was once a representation of an ox. B may have begun as a representation of a house or shelter. The important kernel I’m trying to get to here is that letters are pictures and have always been so.

[Fig 1. Taken from the website “5 Orange Potatoes”]

With the idea of letters as pictures established, we move on to how Will Eisner once defined comics as “Sequential Art.” In this definition there is no distinction between word and image.  In fact, both are often necessary to producing poignancy within a graphic narrative. It is the combination of these different image types that produces the larger aesthetic effect that has driven the graphic novel’s popularity.

Eisner rarely uses the device of the caption box common to comics. A caption box isolates text away from an image. It sanctions it off as something separate and distinct from the image and actually causes a small disruption in meaning making as the eye is forced to isolate image and text and then bring them together in a way that makes sense.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples that blur the lines between words as words and words as images. In his short story “A Contract with God,” from the book by the same name, Eisner draws his words to enhance the overall visual effect of the page.

[Fig. 2: Image reproduced from A Contract With God by Will Eisner published by W.W. Norton & Company.  Page 4.]

Notice how the rain of the scene actually begins to infiltrate the lettering that tells the story.  Eisner didn’t view letters as distinct from the image, but a part of it. By mixing rainfall into the lettering on the page, the text becomes atmospheric to the story being represented, as well as telling the written narrative.

This tradition hasn’t died with Will Eisner though.  There are many modern artists who work hard to integrate text into their works in new and interesting ways. In the comic book Sandman: Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman, Jill Thompson, and Vince Locke, the creative team works hard to make sure that the speech balloons of each character are differentiated from each other in order to exhibit a quality of sound and texture. This creative imagining of word images allows for the reader to form more fully differentiated voices in their heads as the characters speak. This requires both the artist and the writer to consider the text as existing inside the image--a visual representation of the reality they are working to replicate in static form. Words then become not a device of storytelling, but an integrated sense folded into a complex reality.
 

[Fig. 2:  Original images from Sandman: Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman, Jill Thompson, and Vince Locke. Dream, Destruction, and Delirium are represented from left to right.  Image provided by Comic Books: An Evolving Multimodal Literacy by Taylor Quimby]

These ideas are critical to the crafters of graphic novels because they are often limited by the amount of text they can insert into an image. Each word carries a heavier burden than an all-text narrative. This brevity can be enhanced by viewing the text as an image instead. Shape and contour of letters convey mood. Color and font influence reader response. As a result, creators must begin to think about how they will handle the creative challenges word art represents.