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One of these things is not like the other
June 17th, 2003
So, as you most certainly have read Dylan
Meconis’ amazing journal entry about her uneasy relations with comics.
If not, go
read it, I can wait.
It’s a great, revelatory piece. It resonated very much with me and echoed
many of my thoughts. I made a point of dashing off emails to people I thought
would enjoy it. But there is one small point I want to quibble about.
From Dylan’s journal:
I was talking last summer to a well-known speculative fiction writer who happens
to be a patient of my mom’s (…no not that one, the other one). She had
been told that I was a writer and artist, and had a silly comic about vampires.
She asked me if I was working on anything at the moment.
“Well, I’ve got a story,” I replied. “It’s going
to be a big sucker, and it’s a comic, so I dont know if I’ll have
the skills to actually produce it once I finish the script.”
“Then turn it into a prose story!” she cheerfully retorted.
And, yeesh, in a way I wish I could: heaven knows it would be a lot easier.
Where on earth did cartoonists get the idea that writing prose was easier?
Okay, actually, I do know where they get the idea. It’s you, a pencil
and that damn blank piece of paper—traditional or digital or whatever. Or let’s
add an eraser and that hand that just wont come out right. Or that brow, the
cat in the background, or whatever. And it’s important, everything hinges
on it. And there are all those stages of frustration, as you have drawn this
thing a hundred times before, and so on. And the actual writing of a comic takes
so little time in comparison.
But having known, loved and lived with writers, I can attest that a page a day can be a monumental task for them as well. I mean, yes, the physical task of actually typing a page of prose can take only 15 to 45 minutes-so can scrawling out a page of comics. But would you want to show it to anyone? Or, for that matter, read it?
Ive seen writers bang their heads in frustration over a paragraph that they have been wrestling with for the past three hours. The words wont obey them any more. Then there are the rewrites, rewrites, rewrites. Never mind the reviews and feedback of friends and cohorts. Spouses who say, “I know what you are trying to do and it doesn’t work.”
I have heard that James Joyce once said in regards to his story Finnegan’s
Wake, “It took me 16 years to write the damn thing. It better take
you 16 years to read it.”
Which takes me to the other main aspect of prose vs. comics that most cartoonists get hung up on: it takes people longer to read a page of prose than a page of a comic.
This is true, but aren’t we over the whole longer is better mentality?
I mean, it’s really an apples and Studebakers type of comparison. Comics
tell their stories through a whole range of icons and hieroglyphics that can
be more efficient and evocative than the hundreds of words that would be needed
to describe them.
But, okay, let’s look at time sent processing the story. Lets say that
the average pamphlet size comic book takes 15-20 minutes to read. The average
chapter of a book, that would deliver the same amount of story, two hours. Lets
take that as a given.
Now, I’ll wager that the average comic book about the house gets read
3 to 5 times as much as the average book about the house by the same reader
of both. And this isn’t counting the re-perusal of a certain section (which
is often done with a prose book) or the quick re-read when you get the next
issue in the series. Why this is, I couldn’t say. It could be that comics
are more inviting because of the visuals or the fact that because it isn’t
a book, it’s not as daunting on whatever level.
Don’t get me wrong, I love prose, heck I love all forms of storytelling
from books to plays to TV to songs and so on. I wouldn’t chose one over
the other, they all fulfill a need, any can haunt me or skew my thoughts. But
I, like Dylan, have an obvious preference for my own storytelling: comics.
There are many reasons why I don’t think Dicebox would work as
a prose piece. Beyond the desire to play with colors, symbols and shapes, there
is the problem of describing details in an engaging yet unobtrusive way.
One of my main sticking points is Molly’s missing finger. I like the
fact it’s not noticeable to many people for a good long while—and
having known people with missing fingers, I can attest you wont necessarily
notice in real life either (okay both these people were missing pinkies and
had good surgeons, but still). But to do the same in prose would deny readers
a chance to discover it for themselves. I would want it out there at the get-go.
But to describe it right off would make it so important, much more significant
than I would want.
Then there’s Griffen. She’s a scrawny tall woman in her early 40s,
large nosed, flat-chested, with a sharp chin and odd, overly large eyes and
a constant bad hair day. Now, something that commonly happens when people become
enamored of a character in prose is to subtly and gradually make them more attractive
in their imaginations as time goes on. That’s normal, in real life friends
often become more attractive as they become more dear. But it is important that
Griffen is who she is, not grow younger, develop curves and the like. Constantly
reminding readers of a characters physical traits can be annoying and sometimes
down right cheesy. Moreso if you try to be clever about it.
Then there’s the setting. John Aegard, a prose writer of no small worth, commented
on how I was able to easily establish the character of a place in Dicebox,
and how neat it was I could do that without interrupting flow. As he pointed
out, in prose it sometimes takes pages of description that usually stops the
action dead and still doesn’t always get the feeling across. I actually
admire prose authors who can create a sense of place while continuing the story
immensely—even more when they avoid making any one thing very important.
Not that I am too worried about Dylan succumbing to the glamour of prose. As
she has already stated, she is thoroughly in the thrall of her comics muse.
I just hope she doesn’t get too discouraged over the relative levels of
respect the two mediums command. Because I’ve often been told that Dicebox
is a good enough story that it could be a real book.
Update: This entry has under gone some edits. And this is actually just my own ramblings on comics vs. prose, not a manifesto, nor really a direct response to Dylan, just some thoughts sparked from reading her entry.
Filed under Art & Comics, Reading & Writing |27 Responses to “One of these things is not like the other”
To be fair, when I say that it would be easier, I’m keeping that reference personal. I personally write MUCH more quickly (and to my eye, satisfactorily) than I draw : this is why I’m going to illustration school in the future, rather than a writing program.
Prose obviously has its own cachet, which as a Lit student and longtime YA fantasy dork I don’t think I’ll ever get away from—I’d be surprised (and disappointed) if I don’t hammer out a full length prose, ie non-comic, project someday.
But that said, my comics are my COMICS, and my writing projects just that, and nothing else: as long as I have story ideas, they’ll be definitively one or the other.
And let’s not misconstrue what Dylan actually said.
“Where on earth did cartoonists get the idea that writing prose was easy?”
Dylan never said it was EASY, she said, easIER. A huge difference. Everyone knows nothing is easy. And I agree with Dylan 100%.
As someone else who does both, I have to say writing is far easier, and let’s face it: far more NATURAL. From the day we step into a classroom to the time we die, we’re taught and trained to write–to express ourself in words. We’re not taught or trained or encouraged to make comics. Comics is in finitely more specialized. Not only do you need to master writing, you have to master drafting on top of that. And OF COURSE you bang your head and suffer hours trying to manipulate those words as a writer, but I’ve spent hours and days and years more drawing and redrawing and redrawing to get that perfect expression or posture.
I literally have to CONVINCE myself to do comics everyday, especially since most of my comics start out as prose pieces. I think it just comes down to which final version you love more. I look at the original prose version of Super Unleaded and I look at the comics version of Super Unleaded, and even though they tell the exact same story, for me, for ME, the comics version sings to me whereas the prose version just whispers.
Dylan, Derek, I’m not trying to blow what Dylan said out of proportion, nor was I trying to target her. I’m sorry if that feels like the case.
And your quite right, “easier” instead in “easy”. But I’d still quibble with that.
I was speaking to a personal trend that I have encountered amongst cartoonists I have known–I wouldn’t even try to speak to the general worldwide statistics on the matter.
And I’m not saying that I don’t think it would be in some ways easier. But, in similar vein to what Derek said, it would be a different animal.
I too have to flail myself to get to the drawing board.
Then, I don’t know. I don’t dedicate my life to it, I don’t call myself a writer, I haven’t honed and rehoned that particular skill. It is not how I define myself or present myself to the world.
If I was solely invested in writing, if I was publishing my prose novel online for the world to see and evaluate, I’d probably have to flail myself to the writing table.
Actually one more thought.
Derek said:
As someone else who does both, I have to say writing is far easier, and let’s face it: far more NATURAL. From the day we step into a classroom to the time we die, we’re taught and trained to write–to express ourself in words.
Actually, the first thing I was taught to do was fingerpaint. I’m not trying to be facetious here–I just feel you are conflating “natural” and “expected”. You expect the average person to be able to write–in a very technical way. You are expected to know how to write.
On average, are they masters of literature? No. I have read more bad writing than good. God, how I wish this wasn’t the case…
It depends on style to some degree.
If you’re John Porcellino, I suspect the prose equivalent of a given story would take longer to produce. If you’re Chris Ware or Joe Sacco, I’m sure that comics has proved more labor-intensive than its prose equivalent would have (and infinitely more memorable in their cases).
On average, I’d have to say that comics tends toward the more *necessarily* labor-intensive, as opposed to prose where you have a lot of latitude. The sentence “The sun rose over Bombay, scattered by the chrome of ten thousand bicycles” could be offered as a sole “establishing shot” in prose. Took me 20 seconds to write; but you can imagine how long it would take to draw the thing? And yet there are writers who might agonize for 2 hours over such a sentence (and no doubt produce a far better piece of prose than my craptacular burbling). They have certain minimizing options we don’t.
In the end, the Porcellino’s of this world are a minority. Most cartoonists have picked the long, hard road; present company included.
I say:
Good Prose = Hard, Long Work.
Good Comics = Hard, Long Work.
Mediocre Prose = Can be Fast and Easy…
Mediocre Comics = Hard, Long Work
Here’s an idea to throw at you:
What if the reason that comics are perceived as being more difficult to create than prose is because comics are a symbiosis of two art forms, writing and visual art, and in their conception they are melded together. When one writes prose, he (as a non-gender specific pronoun) may think in terms of other art forms, but his output is directed through one channel. He thinks of words and he writes them (granted, it is much more complicated than that, but I like my reduction for the sake of argument). Comics are conceived like a film (substituting sound with its still representation (text) and movement with space) in a medium that is not its final form Ð a script. Images and text separated until approaching the final form. Thereby the comics artist is unable to use one of many techniques that is readily available to prose writers: stream of consciousness. It can be used in the planning of the final product, but rarely can the final product be created through direct creative flow. Prose writers revise, sure, but words that appear in prose are often the direct, original communicatory link between imagined action and perception.
Can a prose writer who’s dabbled in comics get in on this? We play our cards right, after all, and this could be a new flame war—like Macs v. Windows, or cats v. dogs, or bloggers v. LiveJournallers, or coffee v. tea, or Greens v. Democrats—
Or maybe not.
Let’s see: Jenn’s right; Dylan may very well be right; Derek’s wrong; Scott’s looking at a Studebaker-shaped apple; and while Jordan might be describing how he approaches comics, there are lots of other ways to do it, too, that don’t involve splitting “image” and “text.” (The process of deciding which image to juxtapose next to which, after all, is as much “writing” in comics as setting down that deathless dialogue. And both are equally as open to stream-of-consciousness as prose; ask Grant Morrison, say.)
Dylan may very well be right: for her, writing prose is an easier way to tell a story than drawing comics. (I say “may very well be” because there’s a little dæmon in the back of my head that won’t let me utterly discount the fact that people can frequently be wrong about themselves, but I’ve no reason not to give her every benefit of the doubt here, and more besides, so let’s just stuff that dæmon in a box and get on with it.) —This doesn’t change the fact that it’s exceedingly foolish to state categorically that prose in general is easier than comics. (In general.) While Dylan didn’t do that in her journal entry, it’s nonetheless a not uncommon attitude to find among cartoonists, when they’re drinking at a party and bitching about the ink under their fingernails. And you know what?
There’s writers who say cartooning is easy.
All you have to do is draw a funny little picture. You don’t have to stress the characters’ internal lives; heck, they don’t have internal lives. You don’t have to worry about narrative voice or perspective, you don’t have to truck with tricky metaphors, you don’t have to worry about whether that adverb is necessary to the effect you’re trying to achieve, or it’s unnecessary flash that will cause the reader’s lip to curl in a dismissive sneer. You don’t lie awake nights worrying that the bit in chapter two, the bit where you slide without warning into internal monologue, playing out the fantasy sequence, echoing the language you’ll use to describe the apotheosis in chapter seven, you don’t have to worry that people will think it really happened and miss the point entirely.
You just, you know. Draw. Easy as breathing.
Derek’s wrong: telling stories with images is far more natural and innate than telling stories with words. (This does not make it easier, though.) We have to be taught how metaphors work, and similes; we have to learn alphabets, and grammar. The first time we walk into a movie (say), we learn almost instantly how to watch it. The first time we pick up a comic book, the mechanics of moving from image to image are right there, on the page, self-explanatory. We don’t write stories about our houses in kindergarten; we draw pictures of them, and we show each other that cartooning technique for drawing a house in 3/4 perspective: you draw a square, you put a triangle on top, you draw a rectangle next to the square, you put a parallelogram on top of the rectangle that joins up with the triangle. Draw a tiny square on top and put a corkscrew of smoke coming out of it, draw some quartered squares on the rectangle, and a rectangle with a doorknob, and you’ve made your house a home. —The grammar of comics and cartooning is so innate, so natural, that for the longest time we didn’t even bother to look closely at it; there was nothing there, or so it seemed. (Comics is easy. All you have to do is draw.) It’s only now that we’re starting to figure out how to talk about how it works.
This is not in any way to detract from the amount of sheer back-breaking eye-squinting hand-cramping labor necessary to create something with so natural and innate a storytelling medium. (Was it Dave Sim who pointed out that a cartoonist who’s doing a regular monthly book is putting out as much work each month as a small graphic design studio? —It’s an unfair comparison in a number of ways, but it’s still a decent point to make.)
Scott’s trying to compare apples and Studebakers, which is why the one can seem easier than the other. His Bombay splash page has a very different effect than the mere sentence, “The sun rose over Bombay, scattered by the chrome of ten thousand bicycles,” and so it’s an unfair comparison: the “establishing shot” in that bit of prose, for instance, might go on in the narrator’s voice to lay out the relationship of those bicycles and the flow of traffic about the traffic cop standing immobile and solitary on his island in the middle of the helter-skelter flow, and you realize that the traffic cop and his place there in the intersection are a metaphor (perhaps a not very good one, but such is life) for the narrator’s expatriate status here in Bombay. In the comics splash page, that traffic cop is just one more element in a gorgeous composition that gives you an immediate rushing feel of being there. An immediate sense of place. In prose, that sense of place is more elusive; harder to come by; more a state of mind than a snapshot. But it’s much easier to direct the reader’s attention to those elements of the scene that will build that state of mind.
This is not to say that comics can’t do internal monologue or metaphor, for God’s sake. But you wouldn’t (just) use a splash page to do it, most likely. Nor is it to say that prose can’t make with the eyeball kicks: but you’d take more than 13 words to do it. Usually.
—And I’d also like to point out that good prose does not necessarily mean hard, long work. Nor does good comics necessarily mean long, hard work. We artists all of us have a tendancy to remember the bits we slaved over and couldn’t get right and dismiss the bits we set down immediately with a flourish. Good prose can be fast and easy, and so can good comics; and bad examples of either have been labored over far into the night.
(I don’t think we need to get into the fact that writing a finished prose piece and writing a comics script are hardly the same thing, and so attempting to directly compare the two is folly.)
It’s important to go back to some of the points Jenn was making about the things comics does well, and the things prose does well, and the differences between the two. I can’t draw, myself. It’s not in my temperament to sit still for it. The frustration at the difference between what I want to see and what my hand makes is too great for me to enjoy it. —But I love the sounds words make; I love the rhythms of sentences. I love knocking them together and seeing what happens. The little epiphanies you can ring with what Scott calls our “minimizing options” take my breath away. And the frustration at the difference between what I want to say and how it’s coming out of the keyboard is a problem I might hate and gnash my teeth over and rend out my hair and yell and scare the cats over, it may keep me in dread of the computer and my writing desk, but by God, it’s my problem, and I’m going to be the one to solve it. Sooner or later. (I do not like writing, someone said; I like having written.)
And yet, when I’m thinking in terms of story, my natural inclination is to think visually. I see it first, and only find the resonances and voice, the words, with a lot of hard, hard work.
Sometimes, it seems to me that it would be easier just to, you know. Draw it. Or maybe have somebody else draw it. If they’d just pay attention to what it is I want, and draw it just like I want to see it, in my head—
You know?
Hey! I like Griffen’s hair.
And her coat.
Just so y’all know, I made a new entry in response to the discussion going on here:
http://www.jennworks.com/archives/000573.html
k, I think you might have misunderstood what I was saying. For the first point, I’m not talking about splitting image and text Ð it’s combining image and text. Yes, the script writing can occur as a stream of consciousness, but that script is wholly what it is. A script is not a comic. A script can lead to a comic, but it is not one in itself. Writing prose allows for the potential production of the piece in its final form. When I work on a comic Ð and I admit to having done very few (just starting out) Ð I think of the story in terms of its imagined reality, and then write it down. I scribble a few images for future reference and do some more detailed sketches. Offhand, the closest example in comics of what I was describing as direct stream of consciousness to final product is Scott’s 24-hour comics, in which the creator just sits down and starts working. I’m not advocating that comics are more difficult to create than prose writing (I think they are independently difficult or easy in terms of the person creating them) but describing a reason one might come to the conclusion that creating comics is more difficult.
Right, Jordan–but there’s people who don’t do comics with a pre-written script–for whom the “script” portion, the “writing” (by which I mean the wrestling with the storytelling problems of a comics piece, rather than the rendering problems) is actually sketching out tiny thumbnails, say. The combination of word and image isn’t an issue, because it was never split in the first place. –24 hour comics are a good source of stream-of-consciousness; the automatic writing Grant Morrison did for Doom Patrol is an example of those techniques used in a more mainstream form to affect both the narrative text he used and the images (since some of the imagery was either based on sketches done by Morrison, or were attempts to illustrate abstract word salads he generated).
Also, Jordan–I think we’ve got a confusion. “Stream of consciousness” describes a style of writing that mimics a “stream” of consciousness–free-flowing, associative, not at all concerned with grammar or even straightforward coherency. Comics can certainly mimic streams of consciousness: take a look at Joe Sacco, say.
But in prose as well as comics, those streams are the result of lots of hard, laborious work. Trust me.
I think you’re thinking of automatic writing: sitting down and just writing whatever comes to mind. It’s a technique used to generate ideas, but is rarely used in a finished, polished piece. (Grant Morrison being a cheeky exception; 24-hour comics being an exception out of occasional necessity.) It’s more akin to the sorts of warm-up doodles you’d do to warm up your hand–or thumbnailing a piece without regard to where it’s going or what it’s doing or even where the panel borders are going to go.
(It didn’t help I fed the confusion by conflating the two myself. Apologies.)
K, I’d be willing to bet all my life’s savings(all $200) that your first reaction to this WASN’T to make a reponse in comics form but to WRITE what you wrote. No?
Perhaps I used the wrong word when I used “natural”, but when I said natural I’m including all the social/educational training and conformities that we live and grow up with. OF COURSE I know cavemen painted on walls before writing words and we finger-paint in kindergarten, but I’m talking about who we are as a people, as adults, here, today, in 2003. If sequential art was so much more efficient, I don’t think writing would’ve replaced it. Nor would English have replaced finger-painting class.
(Actually, I don’t even see what this argument about learning finger-painting first and such has to do with the discussion. Painting/drawing isn’t comics. Learning how to draw a house in 3/4 perspective has nothing to do with comics.)
And just as a side-note: this is why I rarely get involved with internet discussions. No one can have opinions anymore, everyone’s WRONG or RIGHT. I never said Jenn or Dylan was wrong or right, I just expressed my opinion and my opinion just happened to coincide with Dylan’s on this particular issue. How do you know writing isn’t easier or more natural for ME? Sheesh, I hope I don’t have a different favorite color than everyone else so I won’t be WRONG.
Another thing I hate about internet discussion: we can’t see each other! I’m not yelling or mad, I still think you all are peaches.
I love the idea of debate in the form of comics! Honestly!
Uh, just not here. My bandwidth is killing me as it is…
*Group hug* *Group hug* …
For me, the hardest thing about internet discussions is that any attempt to explain one’s tone winds up sounding like the airplane pilot who comes on the intercom to assure the passengers that “everything is fine” for no apparent reason. Prevention is a lot easier than curing after the fact so we plant smilies whenever we can.
Blog culture recently changed the dynamics of discussions in some interesting ways. Patrick is talking about that right now on his blog in fact under the heading “LJ Etiquette”:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/pfarley
There’s a lot more social reaffirmation going on in even the throwaway posts.
I’m like Kip and Jenn and will leap into any theoretical discussion at the drop of a hat and debate it fiercely, But I’m also paranoid about those ubiquitous tone-triggers, especially in contexts where my opinions might be taken as pronouncements, so I rewrite a lot…
Hmmm…. You might even say that text is kinda…. Hard that way.
^_^
Anyway, I just wanted you to know that I love you all.
No, no really…
No, I mean, I’m being sincere not facetious. I mean I –
Oh, shit! Shit! Shit!
No intent to step on any toes; when I said you were “wrong,” Derek, I merely meant “you don’t agree with me,” which, as I understand it, is the current definition of “wrong” in most internet discussions. –But I never took to emoticons, and I hang out on some rough-and-tumble boards from time to time. So I can be a bit brusque. Just always imagine me grinning, in a bar, with a beer in hand, making my points emphatically though always on the verge of laughing at myself. Occasionally shoving some peanuts around on the bartop. Couldn’t hurt.
That said: Derek, what I turn to naturally now, after years of learning and conditioning, has nothing to do with whether comics storytelling or prose storytelling is more innate. And yes, our culture as a whole values prose more than comics (text? Gad, you start generalizing enough, the words become terribly problematic)–but it doesn’t change the fact that for immediate communication, people are much more likely to turn to comics, cartooning, icons (see? Problematic) than text. Prose. Whatever.
(Psst! Kip! Just because it’s an innate and easily read idiom doesn’t make it easier to, you know, create in it!)
(Shh.)
The thing it comes down to for me is this: it is much easier to tell a simple story interestingly in comics than it is in prose. –Or maybe that’s just me that thinks that way. (This is not in any way to knock the values of comics, or simple stories. The world needs more of both.)
Maybe we need to answer this once and for all with a face-off of some sort. Not so we see which is easier, God no; that’s a chump’s question and a mug’s game. But to get some measurement or at least vague yardstick of the formal properties, the techniques and tricks and traps that each can bring to bear on simple stories, or story problems. Kind of a cross between oulipo and oubapo–like those “Elements of Style” strips that Matt Madden did that used to be up on indymagazine.com, before it went away, only attempted in both comics and prose at once, or variously.
Or maybe not. I dunno. But. A thought.
Note to Derek:
Kip really is always grinning when he says somebody’s wrong. The bar and peanuts thing is exactly right. It’s like he’s just picked up a ping-pong paddle and a ball and said “You think you can take me? Do ya?”
Personally, I love the challenge, but the tone does get lost in translation sometimes. Text being so… well, whatever…
But if we were all sitting around in a smoky bar, we couldn’t edit our thoughts to make them more coherent, and there would be distracting barmaids. And, you could see me in my PJs. :^)
I love all of you. Can we do dinner in San Diego so I can simultaneously weep for joy AND avoid aggravating my tendonitis?
Oh, there are some sorts of things that make writing communicative prose much easier than writing similarly communicative fiction. With prose, it is ever so simple to lay down a fact. And I don’t mean it in the it’s-easier-to-say- there-were-a-thousand-bicycles-melting-in-the-sun-
than-to-draw-a-thousand-melting-bicycles way. I mean that in almost any story, it’s easy to slip in “the last train would be leaving in seven minutes” without having to create expository dialog, an oddly convenient reference image, or a caption that is apt to not fit in with the telling of the story.
In able hands, comics can more easily convey sense of texture and certain subtle emotions, but for direct communication text works better. If the important fact about a character is that she’s beautiful, I can simply write that she’s beautiful. If I’m brilliant like O. Henry, I can write “she was the sort of girl who would look good in a red convertible” and have every reader automatically picture a girl that they considered good looking, even if no two readers see the same girl or even the same convertible. But if I’m a cartoonist, I may be able to draw a woman that I consider beautiful but someone else might not.
The prose writer also has the freedom to not bother with certain details. When I write prose, I may not bother noting what the character is wearing or what sort of hair she has. The cartoonist does not have the freedom to forego it. I have an upcoming work where the lead character is black not because his race is significant, but simply because he had to have some appearance.
There are certainly things that it can be very hard to do in prose, that require skill and patience. The same is true of comics. I would say that writing minimally sufficient communicative prose is much easier than crafting minimally sufficient communicative comics.
(And for those who don’t know me: I’ve written a lot of prose non-fiction — computer books, mostly — a fair amount of comics, and a small amount of professional prose fiction. I’ve drawn very little, and never anything that anyone but me is apt to want to publish.)
I would say that making minimal comics is actually extraordinarily easy; anybody can draw a stick-figure or a blob with two dots, followed by another of same*.
But doing it with aplomb and conveying depth despite visual simplicity is indeed a tricky widget.
I would also cry the apples/studebakers line here. The effect of a Raymond Carver story’s simplicity is a lot different from that of an Andi Watson comic.
*anecdotally, I’ve been banned from family Pictionary games for being too effective. Discrimination! FIE! FIE!
Ah, but Pictionary is the proof that prose is easier! I mean, how much quicker could you convey the info if you were actually allowed to write down the word in question?
True, but images have a big-ass lead on universality.
On the Pictionary issue, I would herein point to that game (name escapes me momentarily…) wherein a person has to describe all the elements of a hidden, simplistic image to players, who then attempt to recreate it. It’s challenging.
This is getting really abstract and I’m going to trip all over my liberal arts education and look like a big stupid puppy dog, so I’ll stop now.
Prose is easier–for certain things.
Comics is easier–for other things. I think, Nat, that you’re shortchanging the things comics can do that prose can’t, in your estimation that prose is easier. (And there’s at least two different values of “easier” at stake in this discussion. We may want to map them out.)
Comics has the ability to build details of a world subliminally, as Jenn noted somewhere up there. Comics also has an effortless intimacy and immediacy that prose does not. (Poetry, yes, but poetry depends on the short-circuits of allusion and metaphor trickery that comics can reach much more directly, if [usually] with [much] less finesse.)
What I wanted to do was point to a strip by Erika Moen called “Create,” but projectkooky.com seems to be down at the moment. Anyway. It’s an example of the immediacy (and simplicity) I’m yammering on about as but one of the things comics can do more easily than prose.
But it’s late and I’m procrastinating and sleepy and my copy of the ashcan is somewhere else at the moment and I’m grumpy and I’ll just go away now.
Ah, but Pictionary is the proof that prose is easier! I mean, how much quicker could you convey the info if you were actually allowed to write down the word in question?
That’s hardly fair. It’s easier and faster to pick my sister out of a crowd if I hand you a picture of her than if I hand you a prose description, too, because I’m far more reasonably assured that the picture in your head–after looking at an accurate drawing–matches what my sister looks like. The end goal in your example is different than in mine, so the most efficient method of achieving that goal is likewise different.
Well, speaking as an aspiring prose writer who’s interest in comics is developing…
From my perspective, it’s about stories. I love the art of storytelling in all forms, although I’ve generally been more attracted to text. Stories demand to be told. And this requires a medium.
My stories tend to express themselves in words. I’ve written a lot of words, of various quality, in prose, poetry, and a lot of essays (I tend to refer to that skillset as “the fine art of BS” when none of my profs are in the room - it’s about pretending you know what you’re talking about until you make it come true). And I can tell you that each of my stories have a particular medium in mind. I don’t always know what it is when I set out.
If it doesn’t work as fiction, maybe it’ll work as verse. Or maybe it’s an insight that will translate into my next assignment on the relationship between postmodernism and postcards, whatever. But changing the medium I choose to work in changes the story I tell. There’s another _language_ at work here. The language of images is more universal than the one I’m typing. It’s the one we use to teach reading. Or does no one else remember Dick and Jane? “Look! Look!” “See the dog! See the dog run after the ball!” Not that those qualified as comics. I like more of a plot, myself.
I’m not a visual artist. The most I can lay claim to is that I play with crayons from time to time. I’m just starting to get into comics, unless early childhood experiences with _Archie_ and _The Cartoon Bible_ count? But I wouldn’t say that your medium is more or less difficult than mine. It takes a different kind of effort is all.
But k, I didn’t say that prose is easier than comics for all things. Yes, there are things you can do more easily with comics, including many things in the ranges you’re discussing — subtlties, textures, emotional nuances can be done quite effectively and at times efficiently in the hands of a talened comics crafter. But in times of minimally communicative composition — raw, brute simple facts — I can write “the cow was purple” in the time it’ll take you to find the right crayon.
And Jason, you may think it’s easier for me to find your sister using a drawing, but how long is it going to take you to make that drawing? You can probably tell me “she’s about my height, long blonde curls, with a t-shirt that says ‘I eat princes for brunch’” more quickly than you can draw a picture that will evoke her, particularly since a drawing is apt to carry information that is not intended and may not be accurate. You may want me to focus on the shape of her hair and glasses, but meanwhile I’m looking for someone with the pointy nose and deep chin that you quickly sketched in. A drawing may be righter when it’s right, but it takes a lot of effort not to make it wrong, and the more detailed, the wronger it is apt to be.
As an illustration: I got to see parts of Understanding Comics in an earlier phase with stick figures, in addition to seeing the wonderful final product. However, the drawings of Scott in the final work don’t invoke Scott to me. The things that indicate Scott in my brain are clearly not the things that indicate Scott in his own brain. Were you to hand me one of those self-portraits (and use a magic wand to erase my personal knowledge of Scott) and set me loose in a very crowded room and say “find this guy”, I would look at Scott and look at the picture and say “nope, that’s not this guy”. On the other hand, if you were to hand me one of the stick figure drawings of Scott from the earlier drafts, while I would definitely not have looked at the Scott and said “yup, it is this guy”, I also would not have said “nope, it’s not”.