By William F. Wu
I followed comic books before I could read them, pestering my mother to buy funny animal comics and then to read them to me at home. Later, I moved up to super-hero comics as I was learning to read, though schoolbooks with “See Spot run” were not immediately relevant. I continued pushing my mother to read them to me and found that she didn’t much like “monster comics,” as neighborhood kids called some of them, given that antagonists were often not human. The pictures, of course, told most of the story – narrative panels that showed a pre-literate kid the events but without the details that the text offered.
The fiction in Wild Cards, of course, takes the opposite direction with text only, not counting various adaptations in other forms. Wild Cards comic books then reverse the concept. When I’m writing, I “see” events in my imagination, so in a sense I’m still starting with moving pictures, we might say, and adapting them to text. All of this had me thinking recently about the interplay of text and visuals.
Our contemporary American super-hero comic books are descended from comic strips that appeared in newspapers in the early twentieth century. Characters include Hugo Hercules for a five-month run in the Chicago Tribune in 1902 and the Phantom, starting a much longer run in 1936, before Action Comics presented Superman in a 1938 comic book. All of this had me wondering how far back story-telling by narrative panels goes.
Waaay back, according to a very quick online search.
Ancient rock art from the Acacus Mountains in Libya has some images depicting sequential events. This rock art is difficult to date, but some of it goes back as much as twelve-thousand years. (Alas, no word balloons.) I already knew that prehistoric art showing actions had been found and that many ancient civilizations created carvings that depict events, but I had never thought about how far back in prehistory sequential pictures might go.
At some point, ancient Egyptians added hieroglyphics to narrative panels. I don’t know if those were the first such combinations, but as a kid I would have seen those panels with text as being somewhat like comics. Experts can identify a great deal about the people, gods, and backgrounds just by looking, but I suppose the text must give details that bring them to life even more.
Obviously, if we could send a graphic novel back to ancient Egypt, the people there would understand the concept and be able to follow much of the story even without being able to read the modern text. So would just about everybody across cultures and historical periods, as apparently this concept is pretty much universal in humans. I always took that as a given but I became more interested after finding a wide variety of examples.
The ancient Assyrians had elaborate carvings that also depict narratives about royalty, war, and elements of religion. The larger purpose was to glorify people in power and to intimidate those without power. The examples I’ve seen in books and online do not have text with them, though there may be some that do. That fact led me to a jump that’s not entirely logical, but here goes:
I always liked the work of Carl Barks for Disney comics, especially Uncle Scrooge and the rest of the ensemble around Donald Duck. As a kid, long before I gave any real thought about the process of narrative panels, I noticed something he did every so often: In order to depict characters – I especially remember Huey, Dewey, and Louie in this – who were hurrying somewhere in secret, he would show them running in black silhouette without narration or word balloons. I liked it even back then, I suppose because it was so different. He let the art alone tell the story when words weren’t necessary.
That was a choice he made as a creator. The ancient Assyrians had a written language for which many examples still exist, but, again, it was not used in many of the carved narrative panels. I believe the main reason would be that the masses were not literate and so of course only the visuals conveyed meaning to them. In any case, that was their choice in contrast to those Egyptian narrative panels which do.
Yeah, style matters. They can walk like an Egyptian or come down like a wolf on the fold — or dive into the money bin.
Okay, here’s another jump. In the 1990s, I adapted my novel Hong on the Range to a three-issue comic book series for Image Comics. Remembering the wordless silhouette panels by Barks, I did not use narration or dialogue for a particular panel in which a character – a sentient cyborg steer – sneaks away from where he has been. The artist depicted this well and no words were necessary. However, the editor apparently was not comfortable with a wordless panel and so in the published version, I found dialogue in it, during which the character needlessly talks to himself, conveying information that the reader already has.
I don’t really keep up with comics and graphic novels any more, but sometimes I check something out. They vary a lot, of course, but in many cases I found large word balloons for sizable blocks of text. These put me off, though I also wonder if there’s a generational element to my view as compared to younger readers. (Before I call myself old, I’ll hide behind the long-ago creators who carved, painted, and wrote in ancient Egypt and Assyria.)
I’m jumping one more time, now to storyboards for movies and television. Like the other narrative panels, they depict the story. Storyboards illustrate a movie shot for shot. The first time I saw one, years ago, I realized it was in effect a graphic novel. I don’t know details about the origins of storyboards but I wonder what reaction those ancient creators – sculptors and painters and members of ancient Egypt’s literate class – would have if they saw a feature film, a distant descendant of those ancient examples of narrative panels. (I’m sure there must be science fiction stories somewhere that deal with this.)
Long ago, I read that in the early days of motion pictures some observers believed the camera shots should always show the actors from head to foot and show the entire setting at all times. Basing their opinions on millennia of live performances, they wanted a movie to show a story just as theater patrons would view a stage play. I haven’t been able to locate the exact quote, but I read somewhere that a critic at this time declared that no one wanted to see part of an actor. Instead, of course, directors and film editors gave us the variety of camera shots we’ve enjoyed for generations – establishing, closeups, and all the others. Feature films made of scenes edited together were another way to create a narrative in which a sequence of camera shots stand in for panels. Then again: Go frame by frame through an entire feature film checking out narrative panels? Yow. Never mind.
Above, I mentioned that I visualize a story while I’m writing it. From talking to other writers, I get the impression that this is common. I once met a published writer who said she visualized the words she was going to type, not the scene or characters. That’s the only time I ever heard of that approach, though I doubt she’s completely alone.
When writers describe a scene in text, the result will be a collaboration with the reader. Because we can’t bore the reader or ourselves by presenting every thread of a carpet or every scent in a forest, we describe the most pertinent facts. Then each reader fills in the details – in a somewhat different way. So none of us experience written stories in identical ways and yet we can only compare these experiences to a limited degree by using words or illustrations that simply add another layer of difference. That collaboration, of course, works to a lesser degree with other media. A movie shows us explicit information but viewers still imagine the visuals just outside the shot and more of the background. In the same way, comics panels show us part of the background and we form our own ideas about the rest of the world of the story.
That means the writer who visualizes the text of what she’s going to write is participating even less than those of us who visualize the characters, background, and actions. Some creators write and illustrate their comics. Visualizing only text obviously won’t allow that. I find it especially interesting given that humans started with rock art and then carved and painted panels, when preliterate people had no text to visualize.
For that matter, the idea of universal literacy – a worthy goal only realized by a number of small countries – is only a few centuries old. In Europe’s Enlightenment era, this concept began to spread. Previously, in many societies, only a small percentage of the populace could read and write. Literacy was associated with privilege and therefore power. Yet even the definition of literacy has changed. In the Middle Ages, members of the clergy who could read only the Bible and other religious texts were considered literate, but in the present, someone who could read nothing else would not be. Of course that applies to other societies and their sacred texts. Even much of our labeling now – a picture of apples on a bottle of apple juice – trace back to a time when sellers wanted to make sure potential customers knew what was offered.
So where does all of this lead me?
In my twenties, as a grad student, I had a friend who was learning how to give I.Q. tests as part of her studies. She asked me to let her administer the test to me, agreeing to give me all the written results afterward so I would know the information would not go anywhere else. I agreed, curious about what the test would be like. One of the many challenges included four tiles that had little scenes drawn on them.
After so many years, I don’t recall all the details, but one tile showed people sitting around a small table, I believe playing cards. Another showed someone coming through the doorway from outside, looking agitated. A third showed a woman crying. I don’t remember the fourth, but I was asked to arrange them in the correct order of events while she held a stopwatch and gave me, I think, sixty seconds for this.
I couldn’t do it at all. As I moved them around, I started laughing at the problem I was having. When the time was up, I didn’t have them in any order and received no points on the test for this exercise.
Amused, my friend – who knew I was writing short stories and submitting them to editors, with two sales behind me at that time — said, “You write stories. It should be easy for you.”
Sure, that sounded logical. I asked her to show me the correct answer. She arranged them and I could see how the order of events on the tiles showed a logical sequence.
I said, “The problem is, I can make a story out of any order.”
“No, no, it goes like this,” she said.
I gave her an example, reversing the order of tiles and telling a story that she acknowledged also made sense. Then I rearranged them again and explained another story. She expressed appreciation for my showing her this. (But I still didn’t get any points.)
So the intended narrative of these four narrative panels were a mystery to me. Being a storyteller certainly didn’t help me figure out the test creator’s story. If anything, my experience writing stories interfered with seeing the intended order. And the creator of this sequence presumed it had exactly one correct answer and no others.
Come to think of it, I had a greater understanding of those comics my mother read to me long ago, when all I could do was follow the pictures.