2 things I clicked on in today's NYT have famous people — people I greatly admire — taking opposite positions on comics.
Obviously, I could see it coming in the first headline: "Temple Grandin Is a Visual Thinker Who Hates Graphic Novels/'It is too difficult for me to constantly switch back and forth between the pictures and the text bubbles,' says the animal behaviorist and advocate for autistic people, whose new book (with Betsy Lerner) is 'Visual Thinking.' 'I like technical and scientific books with lots of illustrations.'"
Actually, I hate graphic novels. It is too difficult for me to constantly switch back and forth between the pictures and the text bubbles. I like technical and scientific books with lots of illustrations. When I read business books and scientific papers, I often look at the illustrations and graphs first. The next step is to read the text. When I am reading a novel or a memoir, I prefer to create my own pictures in my imagination. As I read the text, my brain creates a movie.
The other one is buried in that article about Keiichi Tanaami that I blogged about in the previous post. Asked what he is reading, he said:
I don’t really read novels. I read a lot of essays and other things, though. I read an enormous amount of manga. Fujiko Fujio often write stories about a character succeeding in life. I loved this kind of manga when I was a small child. The character would move to Tokyo, rent out a tiny apartment, study super hard and succeed. He writes those kinds of success stories. I love them. I still read anything by Osamu Tezuka. He writes many different manga, so I read them all.... I also read Fujio Akatsuka. He is a super famous manga artist....
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Temple Grandin has an article in the Atlantic about not wanting to teach algebra. I didn't bother reading it.
But I did like Claire Danes as autistic Temple Grandin much better than Claire Danes as sweaty, ranting, bipolar Carrie Mathison.
These seem like edge cases. I don't think most people would be so categorical one way or another.
As to Grandin's point about not switching back and forth, I wonder if she also has difficulty watching TV and movies, where it's necessary both to follow visual action and listen to dialogue.
Grandin is a visual thinker, as she continually points out, but she does not produce visual art (maybe visual designs).
Tanaami is producing visual art, so his orientation to visuals is different. He can take images and use them to produce other images.
Grandin isn't doing that, and she has a disability that makes reading *text* very hard. She didn't learn to read until she was 8. So the pictures in a graphic novel are too distracting (or whatever).
What is visual thinking? They say you can't imagine taste and odor. I would say I'm a movie thinker with sound effects and no dialogue. The closest example is much of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Although I have the ability to run this movie at slow and fast speeds with instant rewinds and changing initial and/or boundary conditions. Chemical reactions are color clouds. A ersatz X-ray vision to see the third dimension as well.
I quit reading comic books by High School.
I think a lot of us, when reading a graphic novel/comics are distracted by the *text* — text dominates and we move from panel to panel quickly and fail to take in the image very carefully.
Ironically, he adores comic books.
I had an opportunity to reread a favorite novel as a graphic novel. I liked the graphic novel, too, but in a different way. I think if I had read both versions in the reverse order I think I would have had the illustrations in the back of my mind as I read the text.
Was it Taylor Grandin who made us think that sweaters on dogs were sensible and not silly?
I'd rather hear an audiobook. You get the experience without the effort. I don't see graphic novels as easier to get through than actual novels.
There can also be a discord between the big picture with the giant "Pow!" and the more contemplative text. Film hands us the blend of word and image and we take it in as part of the experience. The solitary experience of reading can make it hard to integrate the word and picture satisfactorily. Our questioning, skeptical minds may not meld them successfully.
Not wanting to teach algebra? Hell, I didn't even want to learn algebra. (And largely succeeded.)
Among my horde of estate-sale finds, to be left to the university library's special collections, is a slip-cased set of five great illustrated classics (vol.I science fiction) published in the early 70s by Now Age Books Illustrated (a division of Academic Industries, Incorporated of Saw Mill Road in West Haven, CT). $4.95.
In "a beautifully illustrated comic format" to attract young or reluctant readers, suitable for age eight and up. (Three Wells, two Verne--I bet you can guess which.)
These were very little used and will be a great resource for the cultural historian of the future--like it or not (I don't, much) but this sort of hybrid form is here to stay.
"What is visual thinking?" What is thinking?
Let me think about it.
I grew up reading a graphic novel named Texas History Movies. Originally, this was a handout to students on the centennial of Texas' independence in 1936. It was published by Mobil Oil and continued to be distributed in schools up to the 1960's. My parents bought my brothers a large, hardback version that I inherited. It stoked my interest in Texas history first, which grew into a love of other histories. The actual history was a text box centered on the page with comic-type illustrations with text bubbles around the outside edges of the page. I believe this state-wide use of this graphic novel, was a great learning tool for kids and I'll bet many many Texas students enthusiastically learned their history this way rather than the classroom instruction. I wonder if their could be one tool in teaching history.
' The character would move to Tokyo, rent out a tiny apartment, study super hard and succeed. He writes those kinds of success stories. I love them.'
I recommend "Kotaro Lives Alone" streaming on Netflix.
Very cute and very Japanese...
I love, Love, LOVE my graphic military war novels.
My favorite graphic novel is Frank Miller's Batman: Year One (1988).
You can peek at the comic book here and see the art.
Frank Miller is kind of famous in the world of comic books for revamping Daredevil, and then Batman. He also did 300 which became a huge movie.
Comic books are very similar to movies in that the art is image driven, plus dialogue. For instance in filmmaking, artists often storyboard a sequence before shooting. Storyboard artist is pretty much the exact same skillset as comic book artist.
Miller came up as an artist, not a writer. He was an artist first, and then took over as writer/artist. (Kind of like a film director who's also a screenwriter).
Miller actually worked with another artist on the visuals for Batman: Year One, David Mazzucchelli. So he gave his artist a lot of room to draw the visuals. It's very well done. I was a huge comic book fan from 6 to 16. (Sold them all to my brother to help pay for my car). The only two graphic novels I still own are this one, and Shade the Changing Man by Steve Ditko (more of an emotional reason for the latter, that was my favorite comic book as a child).
Christopher Nolan's Batman movies were clearly inspired by Miller. I think Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008) is a fantastic movie, one of the top 100 films ever made. (Nolan was 18 when Miller's graphic novel came out).
Hoard, not horde. Stupid computer.
In the 1960s wasn't Ladies Chatterley's Lover considered a graphic novel? That's why I was banned everywhere
Let's just call them thick comic books, shall we? Graphic novel is just highfalutin aggrandizement. Henceforth, I'll shorten thick comic book to TCB.
It was about 1990 when I purchased my first TCB at the premier location of the comic book mega-chain, Heroes Aren't Hard to Find. The cover banner, Dracula, was displayed in a drippy red gothic font and featured the image of a woman with a languid, ethereal expression, who I assumed to be Mina Harker or perhaps Lucy Westenra, two of the vampire count's notable victims. It was expensive, about fifteen dollars, on par with many hardcovers of the time. But it came with a wall poster version of the cover art, so I bought it.
I walked across the street to an outdoor café and began reading/looking (consuming?) my purchase over a steaming cup. I discovered pretty quickly that this Dracula was a woman -- a female vampire, and the subtext was entirely focused on lesbianism. I should have guessed that, as the cover didn't credit Bram Stoker. Halfway through I felt cheated, not because of the homosexuality, another Irishman, Sheridan Le Fanu, quite thoroughly exhausted that precise subject more than twenty years before Stoker put pen to paper regarding vampires, but on account of the book's clumsy and inadequate presentation of important narrative elements, such as time and space. Two more cups o'Joe and a doughnut later I was finished consuming my TCB as well. Not favorably impressed I left it on the table for the next café customer's enjoyment, though I kept the poster.
TCBs fairly suck at describing things, not just intangibles, even purely visual things. If the sunset darkens from a cheery rose-red to the color of fresh blood, presaging the awakening of malign spirits, the artist can't show you this. Production costs demand mostly black-on-white printing. Some budgets allow for a few pages of four-color, but the cost of Pantone inks would devour the margin. Consequently, the TCB must rely on text, just like a genuine novel. However, given the paltry space the panels allow for third-person omniscient narration, the expressive freedom of that POV is artificially limited. Don't look for a TCB version of À la recherche du temps perdu anytime soon.
TCBs don't handle spacial dimensions as well as film, which is something even the great Renaissance masters had to fudge, but their confused approach to time is just style over substance carried to an absurd degree. Golden Age comic book editors insisted on a temporal flow of panels, starting with the top left, preceding left-to-right to the bottom right panel such that what happens in the top left is clearly before the event in the bottom right. No so today. Most of the pages in a typical TCB consist of a single panel, with action mooched and swirled like strawberries in a smoothie. The typical dialogue is no better. Speech balloons are haphazardly arraigned. Is what Van Helsing says a reply to Dracula or vice versa? TCB are often collaborations between a graphic artist and a writer. Given the insertion of speech balloons into spatially convenient rather than temporally logical locations, apparently, the graphic artist is the contractually senior partner.
(continued from my comments above)
More recently I was given the first two of a multi-volume set of TCBs called Age of Bronze, a not entirely successful effort to rationalize the various epics and dramas touching on the events and characters of the Trojan War into a single coherent narrative. The author and artist, Eric Shanower, does a workmanlike and disciplined job of putting much of the classical and Roman-era material into a plausibly Mycenean context, and it is certainly a cut above the usual TCB twaddle, though I believe the Greco-Roman sources contain too many square pegs and round holes to deal with in a wholly satisfactory manner. There's a third column due in December about the fates of the Achaean victors and a fourth in the planning stage about Aeneas and Dido. If TCBs are to your taste, I can't recommend Age of Bronze highly enough.
"I think a lot of us, when reading a graphic novel/comics are distracted by the *text* — text dominates and we move from panel to panel quickly and fail to take in the image very carefully."
This is partly a matter of getting used to it. Children who grow up reading comics find it intuitive and effortless, (as do, I assume, adults who have grown up reading newspaper comic strips). It can also be how each cartoonist balances text, speech, and the drawing within each panel and on each page. Some cartoonists are very heavy with text, and others are lighter. There is often the tendency to read the text and move on with only a cursory glance at the pictures, as we assume all the information to be conveyed is carried in the text, but in comics where the drawing is striking in some way, it is easier to slow down and savor the drawings for themselves. The worst, and I have seen it, is for a comic to be heavy with text that says too much and essentially describes explicitly what the picture shows, by which the text becomes redundant, an anchor hindering seamless flow. Text and drawings must be balanced, with each contributing separate elements which, conjoined, convey meaning that neither convey alone.
There is often the tendency to read the text and move on with only a cursory glance at the pictures, as we assume all the information to be conveyed is carried in the text, but in comics where the drawing is striking in some way, it is easier to slow down and savor the drawings for themselves.
Calvin and Hobbes was always striking because Watterson was such a powerful artist, and always wanted to shatter the box.
In fact I think it was his frustrations with the format that drove him into retirement (that and a lot of money).
Arguably it's the best comic strip ever done. Definitely the most beautiful, in my opinion.
And the name of the tiger is too funny.
Classic Comics worked very well, because the pictures were clearly there to supplement the text. The story dominated the graphics, which were simply trying to illustrate it. Something similar was true of Archie Comics and other "funny books." In graphic novels, the visual comes into its own and often competes with the words and the story. The graphic novel (and superhero comic books in their later years leading up to the graphic novel and the superhero films) are something different from the original product, and different readers will have different reactions to them.
I don’t hate graphic novels, they are like the toads under the porch, I know they exist, but I simply ignore them.
"Arguably (CALVIN AND HOBBES is) the best comic strip ever done. Definitely the most beautiful, in my opinion."
Arguably.
Many comics mavens would give that honor to George Herriman's KRAZY KAT, while others would argue for Schulz' PEANUTS. (Fans of more rarified work might suggest Winsor McKay's LITTLE NEMO'S ADVENTURES IN SLUMBERLAND. McKay, by the way, invented animated cartoons.)
I will nominate the short-lived but brilliant CUL DE SAC by the dead-too-young illustrator and cartoonist Richard Thompson as at least the equal of CALVIN AND HOBBES, if not in some subtle way the better of the two...or, at least, my personal preference. (If you're not familiar with it, see what you can find online. It was a 21st Century strip, debuting after CALVIN AND HOBBES and been retired, but ended too soon due to Thompson's tragic premature death from Parkinson's disease. Thompson didn't even have the 10 years Watterson enjoyed to present his imagined world to the world at large.)
Robert Cook writes, "McKay, by the way, invented animated cartoons."
Not so.
I will nominate the short-lived but brilliant CUL DE SAC by the dead-too-young illustrator and cartoonist Richard Thompson as at least the equal of CALVIN AND HOBBES
it's definitely readable!
future editor of the WaPo
Best of the "new" illustrators post Golden & Silver Age are/were DAVE STEVENS (The Rocketeer) STEVE RUDE (Nexus)...old school, Golden Age... HAL FOSTER, ALEX RAYMOND,
ROY CRANE, STEVE CANIFF, FUJI, REED CRANDALL, WALT KELLY...Silver Age...JACK KIRBY, CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE KUBERT, NICK CARDY, SY BARRY, WALLY WOOD, WILL ELDER, CURT SWAN...there are many more, but they were all at the top of the comic/graphic novel heap. Sadly, all are gone except Steve Rude.
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