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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.)