Week 3: The Difference Between Words and Pictures

What do pictures add to a text?

What does text lose when there are gone?

There are pros and cons to having stories illustrated into comics. A story composed of just words is no less interesting than one acomanyed by pictures. With just words, the reader has to use their imagination to fill in the gaps the author leaves out, details that normally don't matter so much typically about the characters apperence or small details in the setting. Other details are flushed out such as backgrounds and plot while these more visual descriptions are expected to be flushed out with the readers thoughts and imagination.

Comics almost do the complete opposite. They strip a story down to the barest of words, only for dialogue and brief moments of visual information. The rest is the man words transformeded into pictures replacing sentences with panels of the comic.

Reading Tintin it was interesting to see how easily it could be transformed into a written novel in some ways and in others would fail miserably. The characterization we as readers get as soon as we see TIntin is on you might not realize at first. Tintin is the most normal looking of the many cast members with no real exagerations made to his character. At the same time how would you describe his apperence in words? A young man with strawberry blond hair and beady eyes? Thinking with that description in mind would you have come close to how he actually looks in the comics? Probably not. The stylization of the pictures adds a certin character that would normally be left out of a novel.

The first Tintin graphic novels can be a bit wordy, using an excessive amount of words for some dialogue or inner monologue. This changes as the artist and writer figures out how to visualize these thoughts thrust saving space on the page and giving panels a more open feeling. Over all the later Tintin books tend to be better in the long run as Hergé gets better himself. Still over all, Tintin's visualizations with its characters really make it hard for me to thing that it would have the same effect as a novel as it would as a comic.Sometimes there's just no substitute for images and the same goes for the other way around. I think your preference for a series can come from if you've read the novel first or the comic or in these days seen the movie first. The lovely part about media is that it has these multiple art forms to show you a story and in the end it doesn't really matter how you see or read it.