Comics as Visual Storytelling
Comics as visual storytelling is a unique art form that combines words and images in a sequential manner to convey narratives. This medium utilizes the juxtaposition of panels to depict actions, emotions, and themes, allowing readers to engage with the story actively by filling in gaps between frames—a process known as "closure." Historically, comics were often dismissed as mere pulp fiction, primarily featuring superheroes, and their potential as a serious form of literature was largely overlooked. However, influential creators and theorists like Will Eisner and Scott McCloud have redefined comics, emphasizing their complexity and legitimacy as a narrative form deserving of scholarly examination.
Comics facilitate a rich interplay between text and imagery, enabling creators to enhance storytelling by presenting visual elements that complement or expand upon the written word. The structural components of comics, including frame panels, contribute to the pacing and flow of the narrative, creating a distinct experience that differs from other media like film or traditional literature.
Furthermore, the accessibility of comic creation has broadened in recent years, encouraging diverse voices to contribute to the genre. As an academic discipline, comics and graphic novels are now recognized for their educational potential, offering insights into communication, culture, and creativity. This evolution reflects a growing appreciation for comics as a powerful medium for storytelling that resonates across various audiences and contexts.
Comics as Visual Storytelling
Definition
Visual storytelling theory recognizes that comic books utilize the complex relationships of words and images in juxtaposed panels to tell a story. This theory investigates and defines the visual storytelling method to legitimize the genre for scholarly study, critical attention, and understanding of the process of composing comics.
Introduction
Comic books were associated with pulp-fiction plotlines and muscular superheroes for most of the twentieth century, and few scholars seriously considered the visual grammar and meaning-making qualities of the comic book art form. While comic book innovators such as Will Eisner, Osamu Tezuka, and Art Spiegelman have expanded the art and narrative form of comics, the rich structure of the visual stories in comics went relatively unnoticed for most of the century. Hence, the subheading of comics theorist Scott McCloud's pivotal work on the subject, Understanding Comics (1993), notes that comics are an "invisible art." Comics are invisible because they are rarely seen as a complex mode of storytelling. However, many comic book theorists and educators began working in the latter half of the twentieth century, and continued into the twenty-first century, to change the perception of comics as a lesser art form, focusing on the complex mechanics and meaning inherent in the visual narrative of the comic book.
Works such as Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art (1985), McCloud's Understanding Comics, and Jessica Abel and Matt Madden's Drawing Words and Writing Pictures (2008) have established the comic book as a visual storytelling tool that highlights the relationships between words and images, frame panels and time, and the comic-creating process. These works maintain that comics need to be redefined in a way that recognizes them as a unique visual storytelling medium in literature. In Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner redefines comics as "sequential art"; Abel and Madden explain that this definition is an attempt to break away from stereotypes present in the genre. McCloud expands on this definition by describing the intentionality of comics: Images are placed together deliberately to convey a story to the reader or viewer.
Eisner and McCloud demonstrate in their works that comics rely on the juxtaposition of image and text as well as space and time to tell a story, challenging the reader to understand a story in a different way: a way that integrates image and text with the reader's visual imagination so that the reader fills in gaps, and thus ultimately participates, in the narrative. Of course, these authors intend for comic book readers and creators to understand these underlying concepts in visual storytelling, and their works are typically labeled as educational texts. These texts seek to persuade audiences that comic books are a legitimate medium of storytelling that deserves critical attention.
Words and Images
A comic book helps readers closely associate words and images in the reading process. After all, words are abstract symbols that people see and interpret, so words and images are natural companions. When a person reads a comic, they process images and alphabetic text simultaneously to exercise the broad capabilities of their literacy. In combining images and words, the comic creator is not limited to describing what is happening in words but can present the viewer with an image that adds meaning to the story.
The interplay of words and images is the basis for the chapter "Show and Tell" in McCloud's Understanding Comics. This chapter discusses how words and images have become separate mediums that only sometimes come together in high literature or art. Yet McCloud states that this separation only inhibits one's ability to tell a story. A comic book's power to tap into the reader's visual and verbal literacy can create a more complete storytelling experience. By combining words and images, the comic book creator can simultaneously show the story in pictures and tell it with words.
Frame Panels in Juxtaposition
Another essential component of a comic's structure is the frame. The frame contains momentary action, and its side-by-side connection, or juxtaposition, to other frames causes movement of action and story. A word following another word causes a verbal story to progress, and a comic book uses this same progression with both word and image.
Additionally, the juxtaposition of frames causes a movement of time and space in which the reader or viewer is transported from one time and space to another, compelling them to fill in the gaps between the two frames to make sense of what happened between the two images. In Understanding Comics, McCloud calls this act of filling in the gaps between frames "closure." The author gives the reader images and text to enrich their reading experience. Still, the author also allows the reader to create the parts of the story that are not visually depicted. Unlike film, in which an image is rapidly replaced in the same space, or art, which typically features just one image in a space, a comic book is composed of a sequence of image frames. This makes comics a unique storytelling tool.
Education in Creating Comics
Once a student of comics understands how a comic book conveys a visual story through sequential images, they can embark on creating one. Just as writing should be an inclusive means of expression, comics should also be inclusive for those who seek to tell visual narratives. A lack of artistic ability should allow everyone to try to create a comic; a sequential artist need not be an excellent artist. The message one is trying to convey is the most essential part of the comic, and the images are meant to guide the reader to the message, however basic and abstract those images may be. Many storytellers have distanced themselves from creating comics because it was not considered a "serious" medium for so long. Still, many others have done so simply because they think making comics is a specialized skill. However, with digital art and image-editing software, one only needs a minor grasp of drawing to create a comic.
Although it is a myth that one must be a superb artist to create a comic book, the creator must understand the fundamentals of making a comic. Juxtaposed panels are explicitly organized to tell a story on a page, just as characters, narrative arc, and world construction come alive in the story. Creating a comic involves layered steps of penciling a draft, lettering the text, and inking and coloring the final draft; these steps are often done by separate people, making comic book creation a collaborative endeavor.
Impact
Visual storytelling theory arose because comic books were not receiving critical attention as a form of literature, and there was a need to define comic books as multifaceted visual texts. Theorists defined comics as sequential visual narratives to connect the creation of comic books with early forms of storytelling, such as primitive cave drawings. These theorists not only helped to legitimize the art form of comics but also broadened the audience for this theory to include rhetoric and composition scholars, art scholars, and communication scholars, to name but a few.
Eisner is known as one of the first comic book creators to theorize the visual narrative process, which he did in conjunction with the sequential art courses he taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. McCloud further popularized and built upon Eisner's concepts in Understanding Comics, an innovative work in which McCloud explains theories about comic book narrative form in the format of the medium itself. Both Eisner and McCloud shaped this theory so that those studying comic books could better grasp the functions and devices of this storytelling form.
By the 2020s, graphic novels and comics had become recognized as an academic discipline. In addition to their utility for storytelling, graphic novels can convey information such as instructions on technical skills. For many, graphic novel formats provide greater engagement and understanding. Many universities had begun offering courses that teach graphic novel formats, the history of comics, and the psychology of learning through this medium.
Bibliography
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Eisner, Will. Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. W. W. Norton, 2008.
McCloud, Scott. Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels. Harper, 2006.
Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionized an Art Form. Perennial, 2000.
Uphare, Sarah. "Storytelling Through Visuals: Crafting Compelling Graphic Narratives." Ruttl, 30 Nov. 2023, ruttl.com/blog/storytelling-through-visuals. Accessed 12 July 2024.