Images and word combinations

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“Deep down inside, many comics creators still measure art and writing by different standards and act on the faith that “great” art and “great” writing will combine harmoniously by virtue of quality alone.” –Scott McCloud

In Scott McCloud’s chapter of Understanding Comics entitled “Show and Tell,” he identifies seven common word-image relationships unique to comics. McCloud explains that “people have a misconception that the combination of words and pictures is ‘simplistic.’” Undoubtedly, this chapter attempts to clarify this misconception. Importantly, McCloud does not uphold any element as having more power than any other element.

To begin, McCloud outlines the meaning of the word-specific combination in comics. This relationship occurs when a picture “[doesn’t] significantly add” to the reader’s comprehension of the text. Although the picture illustrates the words, it isn’t necessary for the reader to understand the author’s point. The picture doesn’t add anything to the panel.

Second, McCloud describes the picture-specific element found in comics. This relationship occurs when words “provide little more than a soundtrack” to an already comprehensible picture. The words aren’t necessary for the ready to understand what is going on. This reminded me of a film class that I took concentrating on film noir. In some cases, the voice-over did not help me gain a deeper understanding of what I could visually see was going on.

McCloud then moves on to discuss duo-specific panels in which “both words and pictures send essentially the same message.” In other words, there is no need for both the picture and the words to be paired with one another, because they are sending the same message. Therefore, their existence together on the page appears forceful. Here, McCloud provides an example of a picture a woman named Amy who is crying. Clearly, Amy is upset, and therefore a caption of “I feel so sad” is unnecessary and possibly detracts from the reader’s engagement with the text.

Fourthly, McCloud provides insight into the comic element of additive. In this combination, “words amplify or elaborate on an image or vice versa.” It appears McCloud would classify this relationship as intersecting, because words and images work in unison to produce meaning.  In other words, works or images work off of one another to produce deeper meanings.

McCloud then defines the parallel combination. This combination allows for “words and pictures to follow very different courses-without intersecting.” (Note-in this comic panel the suspicious looking word is ‘Clint’).  Put differently, the picture and the text each relay a holistic message; messages which are unique and follow their own paths without intersecting.

McCloud’s sixth definition focuses upon montage. McCloud describes this as “words that are treated as integral parts of the picture.” He provides an example of a face that is the ‘a’ in the word ‘happy.’ In this combination, words take on the role of images.

Finally, McCloud’s seventh combination is interdependent. McCloud defines this relationship as “words and pictures [that] go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone.” A great example McCloud gives is of a smiling woman in mid-conversation who is really thinking, “He’s lying.” The reader would not be able to know the difference between what they see and what is really going on without the crucial relationship between words and images. In this combination, the words and pictures work in unison to communicate a complete concept.

McCloud gives insight about some of the characteristics of these combinations. For example, interdependent, additive and montage relationships call for for the reader to become more engaged with the text than other word-image relationships. More simplistic relationships include picture-specific and word-specific combinations. These combinations can provide the reader temporary relaxation from the more complex combinations found in comic texts.

McCloud’s in-depth explanation of words and images did make me think more critically about writing and conveying messages. I’d never really taken the time to think before about the various ways that words and images work together. I don’t ever read comics, but the visual examples that McCloud provided within his six categories were extremely helpful in getting his point across. His argument made me feel that perhaps writing comics is more complicated than it seems. Utilizing the wrong ‘combination’ could send the wrong message to the reader, causing them to become disengaged with the text. In this way, I have a new appreciation for how carefully comic writers, and writers in general, must be when using words and images together.

А Посмотрите на картинки и напишите. Используйте эти слова и словосочетания.

eat (есть), see a new film (смотреть новый фильм), do homework (делать домашнюю работу), read the book (читать книгу), wash hair (мыть волосы), do the shopping (ходить по магазинам)

Образец: 1. Алексей только что съел свой обед. Иван еще не обедал.

2. The girl with brown hair has just washed her hair. The girl with dark hair hasn’t washed her hair yet.

(Девушка с каштановыми волосами только что помыла волосы. Девушка с темными волосами еще не помыла волосы).

3. The boy has already done his homework. The girl hasn’t done her homework yet.

(Мальчик уже сделал домашнее задание. Девочка еще не сделала домашнее задание).

4. The young woman has just done her shopping. The young man hasn’t done his shopping yet.

(Молодая женщина только что совершила покупки. Молодой человек еще не совершил покупки).

5. The boy has just seen the film “The Lord of the Rings». The children haven’t seen this film yet.

(Мальчик только что видел фильм «Властелин колец». Дети еще не видели этот фильм).

6. One boy has already read the book. His two friends haven’t read it yet.

(Один мальчик уже прочитал книгу. Его два друга еще не прочитали).

Recently we posted an activity which encourages students to push to the limits the distance between image and text, in large part to demonstrate that in fact you can almost always infer some amount of contingency between apparently disparate series of images and texts. In this post I’m going to discuss a few examples of the creative exploitation of this dissonance.

Chris Ware did a comic years ago which I refer to as “I Guess” because, though it is a truncated phrase, a subject and verb without a predicate, it is literally and graphically the unlikely title of what otherwise appears to be a silver-age style super hero story:

As you scan the first page of this six-page story, you’ll quickly grasp that the text is out of synch with the images. While the drawings show a well-told if by-the-numbers superhero story, complete with mad scientist and “girl reporter” in distress, the text is a series of first-person reminiscences about growing up the only child of a single mother. This incongruity is amusing on the face of it, but the more closely you read the comic, the more you see that the text and image line up in unexpected ways. Consider just the opening narration, in a banner clearly marked for the “origin story” of our super man:

When I was really young, I asked my mom why all old movies were in black and white. She said that back then, everything was in black and white. I took her really literally, and until I was six or seven, I thought color was some weird modern invention…

The notion of things in the past being in black and white refers to the nostalgic nature of the cartooning as well as to the fact that the comic itself is in black and white (Ware would later publish a color version, but I prefer this earlier one). More interesting still is the use of the phrase “weird modern invention” in close proximity of the drawing showing a scientist clearly being infected by some superpower-rendering substance.

Notice that the text flows continuously, without regard to its status in the comic as narration, dialogue, sound effects, or title lettering. This makes for an unusual reading experience, akin to reading text projected on to random surfaces, and it leads to some incongruous and funny moments, such as a narration box containing only the word “eyeholes” or gunshot sound effect rendered as “LIKE”.

The act of reading and parsing the two levels of narrative in this comic and seeing how they clash and fuse is a rewarding experience in and of itself. At the end, however, it’s rendered surprisingly poignant by the identification of the Super-man with the boy narrator, the mad scientist with an ex-boyfriend, and the Lois Lane stand-in with the mother. In the last panel as the superhero whisks the woman away to safety, the narration box, rather than “join us next month for another exciting adventure!” reads “[I  liked things better when] it was just my mom and me, anyway.”

For you cartoonists out there, consider how you might go about creating a comic like this. How much you think Ware planned this out panel by panel and how much was serendipity?

Here’s a very different, and very clever, use of text-image, from Ben Katchor‘s old weekly strip, “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer” (this one appeared in the very first collection, Cheap Novelties):

Read it a few times through and it becomes clear that this comic runs, you could say, on three different tracks: on the one hand there is a narration consisting of a single sentence stating plainly the theme of the strip (“In this novel, the hero is thwarted not by etc etc); then you have the visual track in which panels showing a shop clerk trying to read at a counter bookend a series of intervening panels showing hypothetical calamaties from an adventure novel; and finally the third and most devious track, a series of utterances from the mouths of the characters in the adventure scenarios.

This last track is tempting to skim—one would expect a series of meaningless interjections such as “help!” “Noooo!” and so on—until one notices that in fact these characters are saying things like “Do you have this in small?” and “will these shrink?” Of course what we are seeing is a visualization of the confusion and frustration of the clerk who, every time he starts to lose himself in his novel, is interrupted by a customer. We can see clearly in the color-coded version above that it is between the second and third panels that the banal dialogue (red) of the customer service counter (blue)  insinuates its way into adventure scenarios (yellow), but in the comic the transition is almost seamless and easy to overlook on first read. The device of those incongruous word balloons is not just a clever trick (though: what’s wrong with the occasional clever trick?), instead it recreates (“illustrates” feels inadequate here) the clerk’s sense of disorientation rather than simply explaining it to us (as, after all, the narration could do by itself).

Gary Sullivan is a poet as well as a cartoonist, and a rather experimental one at that. His poetry belongs to the Flarf school, which he co-created, and uses as its primary source not the inspiration of the Muse or even observations from everyday life but, rather, Google searches. He has also written a series of wonderful posts on his blog sketching the interaction of comics and poetry, especially among the New York school of poetry. (It’s a woefully underexplored subject and I do hope he will come back to the topic soon–perhaps here on this blog? In the meantime, a good starting place is Joe Brainard’s Nancy Book) Increasingly, Gary has applied the Flarf technique to comics with very intriguing results. Here is one page from a comic which you can read in its entirety on the Poetry Foundation website:

As you could probably infer even without my introduction, the text is derived from message board searches for the keywords “emo” and “poetry”. The images are edited and redrawn from Thai pulp comics that Gary collects (another woefully under-explored subject?!), somewhat in the redrawn-appropriation style of Kevin Mutch’s Captain Adam. Unlike the Ware and Katchor comics, you would be hard pressed to come up with any clear, continuous “reading” of this comic. The jumps from panel to panel and from utterance to utterance are too great to cohere at all smoothly, even though certain sequences and exchanges read as if they should make sense (for example, the man addressing two young women in the last panel). What we’re left with instead are fleeting associations, a sense that we’re reading a story that is dissolving before we have grasped it, like the last, fading images of a dream. There are moments of mystery, critique of the poetry world, and, of course, slapstick humor.

People talk a fair amount about “poetry comics” and what I have seen are mostly comics illustrating poems or comics that are evocative in a “poetic” way. I find that what Gary does in this comic is more challenging but more rewarding because it enacts poetry’s ability to suggest meaning while evading it at the same time. And the chief technique the comic uses to generate this effect on the reader is the dissonance between words and images.

There’s a dissertation or two’s worth of discussion on this topic. I hope these three examples will point you in a few new directions in your reading and making of comics.