Jarryd Luke, Breaking Graphic Conventions: Capturing Stories through Text and Image , Vol

40,John Carroll university press, 2013, (P.100-114)

https://journals.jcu.edu.au/linq/article/download/8/18

Usually text and image support each other in creating a coherent meaning, but sometimes
they can contradict each other: (102)

stressed both in the way they are drawn as a massive force and by the repeated use of the
first person plural ("We march", "We fight").

They raise questions about the relationship between text and image and how it affects the
reading experience. What do images do in literary fiction?

Peter Sillars wonders how an image could modify the response of the reader to the written
word, how it enable him or her to enter more fully into the created fictive world. He inquires
whether it intensifies the notions and structures of the words, or offers different ones of its
own, as a sort of visual commentary. (Sillars, 1995, p.2)

Sillars, Stuart. Visualisation in Popular Fiction 1860-1960: Graphic Narratives, Fictional

Images. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

McNamara argues, "The space between words and images is a kind of void from which
ideas, passions, narratives, representations emerge. It is the ‘third space’, the in-between
where contingency rules." (McNamara 1996, ) McNamara, Andrew. “Words and Pictures in
the Age of the Image: An Interview with W.J.T. Mitchell.” Eyeline Magazine 30 (1996): 16–
21. 23 May 2010. .

Some critics argue that the tension between these devices and the written word creates a
“third text” (Gutjahr 21). Gutjahr, Paul C. and Megan L. Benton. “Reading the Invisible.”
Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation. Eds. Gutjahr, Paul C., and
Megan L. Benton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. 1-15. Print.

(both verbal and visual) that facilitate the reader’s absorption in the narrative. (p104)

The growing awareness of and openness to design-conscious literature has already begun to
change the way writers and readers think about the novel, and there are still many avenues
of experimentation to be explored. (p. 112)

Similarly, Schiff states that “illustrations are commonly defined as incidental additions to the
words which re-present or repeat aspects of the written material. While [illustrations] create
a different affect for the work, and aid the reader’s imagination, they do not significantly
add to the work’s interpretation, but mostly reify the author’s words in image form” (Schiff,
1998, p.113). Schiff, Karen Lisa. “The Look of the Book: Visual Elements in the Experience of
Reading from Tristram Shandy to Contemporary Artists’ Books.” Diss. University of
Pennsylvania, 1998. Print
Kelley, Brian (2010) "Sequential Art, Graphic Novels, and Comics," SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in
Education: Vol. 1: Iss. 1,
Article 10.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sane/vol1/iss1/10

Cohn, Neil. Comics, Linguistics, and Visual Language: The past and
future of a field, F. Bramlett (Ed.), Linguistics and the Study of Comics.
MacMillan, New York: Palgrave, 2012. Print.

Comics are a social object that is the result of two human behaviors: writing
and drawing. (Cohn, 2012, P. 4)
While language is viewed as a rule governed system acquired through a
developmental period, drawing is looked at as a “skill” subject only to the
expressive aims of the artist and their abilities, which are assumed to be
developed through explicit instruction or practice.(Cohn, 2012, P.6)
Shanower, Eric. The Art of the Graphic Novel, THE ALAN REVIEW Winter, P.32-36, 2005,
Print.

Some comic art historians would include the paintings in ancient Egyptian tombs—which
combined sequential drawings and hieroglyphic lettering—as comic art. Surely the Bayeux
Tapestry— which shows the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066—is a form of comic
art….But, in general, historians agree that the modern form of comic art began in 1895 in the
pages of the newspaper. (Shanower, 2005, P. 32-33)

Graphic novels began to appear on every side—both original material and collections of
material that had first appeared in serialized comic books. (P33)
Wolk, Douglas. READING COMICS: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, Da
Capo Press, 1st ed. 2007. Print.
It’s no longer news that comics have grown up. (Wolk, 2007, P.3)
To collect comic books is to treasure them as physical artifacts—not just vehicles for stories
but primary documents that tell us something about our history as well as their own. (P.3)
The Golden Age began around 1937 or 1938, (Wolk, 2007, P.4)
For the next couple of decades, new comics either imitated the Golden Age’s artistic and
storytelling strategies, developed improvements on them, or (occasionally) rebelled against
them. (Wolk, 2007, P.6)
Over the last decade or so, the main format for narrative comics has been shifting from
periodical pamphlets to books. (Wolk, 2007, P.11)
comics are not a genre; they’re a medium (Wolk, 2007, P.12)

Good comics are sometimes described as being “cinematic” (if they have some kind of broad
visual scope or imitate a familiar kind of movie) or “novelistic” (if they have keenly observed
details, or simply take a long time to read). Those can be descriptive words when they’re
applied to comics. (Wolk, 2007, P.13)
I’m even going to take issue with Will Eisner, the late grandmaster of
American comics, who liked to describe comics as a “literary form.”
They bear a strong resemblance to literature—they use words, they’re
printed in books, they have narrative content (Wolk, 2007, P.14)

Comics are not prose. Comics are not movies. They are not a text driven medium with added
pictures; they’re not the visual equivalent of prose narrative or a static version of a film. They
are their own thing: a medium with its own devices, its own innovators, its own clichés, its
own genres and traps and liberties. The first step toward attentively reading and fully
appreciating comics is acknowledging that. (Wolk, 2007, P.14)
McCloud famously defined comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate
sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the
viewer” (P.17)

When you look at a comic book, you’re not seeing either the world or a direct representation
of the world; what you’re seeing is an interpretation or transformation of the world, with
aspects that are exaggerated, adapted, or invented. It’s not just unreal, it’s deliberately
constructed by a specific person or people. But because comics are a narrative and visual
form, when you’re reading them, you do believe that they’re real on some level. (Wolk, 2007,
P.20)
So the meaning Of the comics story within the world we see on the page is different
from its meaning within the reader’s world. (Wolk, 2007, P.21)

When the art-comics revolution came along, a lot of its point was that the medium was
capable of more than being entertaining in a few overfamiliar, blatant ways. But one thing
that’s always entertaining is being caught up in a story, and since comics simultaneously feed
the parts of the brain that make sense of written language and pictures, narrative seems
natural or at least formally appropriate to them. (Wolk, 2007, P.23)

Moore was arguably the first mainstream comics writer who seemed fully in command of his
style, but a few years later, other writers, mostly British, started to follow his example
of sensitivity to language: Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison, and a
few others belonged to the first wave. (Wolk, 2007, P.26)
The most significant fact about comics is so obvious it’s easy to overlook: they are drawn.
That means that what they show are things and people, real or imagined, moving in space and
changing over time, as transformed through somebody’s eye and hand. (Wolk, 2007, P.118)

what narrative comics convert into an interpreted two-dimensional image is actually

four-dimensional: space in time. (Wolk, 2007, p.125)

The viewer looks at a printed page and sees a series of drawn (cartooned) images, surrounded
by borders, with empty space between them, each one a representation of a single moment or
very short, continuous span of time. Some of those bordered images also include text,
surrounded by lines or other visual cues that indicate whether it’s to be read as speech spoken
(at the time of the moment seen in the image) by one of the characters in the scene, or as
speech by another character who’s not visible in the panel, or as narration from an omniscient
source. (Wolk, 2007, p.126)
In any case, you don’t look at a given panel’s image for less time than it takes to read all the
words in it. (Wolk, 2007, P.129)

what comics can do, as drawn narratives that require the reader’s imagination to play along,
that nothing else can. (Wolk, 2007, 141)