When you were a small child, you probably read picture books.
In the next two videos, I want to show you some strategies for reading the adult equivalent
of these kinds of stories: graphic narratives.
Like those picture books from your childhood, graphic narratives usually include both pictures
and words.
However, as you would expect, the relationship between the pictures and words in graphic
narratives written for adults is often much more complex that the relationship between
pictures and words in a picture book written for children.
In those picture books, the images on the page usually reinforce or complete the textual
narrative.
In this example from Mo Willems’ terrific Elephant and Piggie series, Gerald the Elephant
points to a bowl that Piggie carries, and asks “What is THAT!?”
Piggie holds up the bowl and replies “THIS is slop!”
Simple, right?
But what about this passage from Chris Ware’s graphic narrative “Thrilling Adventure Stories
(I Guess)?”, a painfully awkward coming-of age tale of a young boy who is so obsessed
with comic books that he dyes his underwear different colors so that he can look like
a superhero.
While he is looking for adventure, the story he delivers is far from “thrilling.”:
“Once my grandmother told me this really funny story about [my grandfather].
She said she was up in the kitchen fixing dinner and he was in the basement getting
dressed after taking his shower.
She heard this really loud yelp and she ran to the top of the stairs to see what was wrong.
He said that he’d zipped himself up in his fly.”
If we look at the images that accompany this narrative, we’re immediately confused.
Why is a person being shot?
Who is this caped superhero who crashes in from the glass roof to save the day?
And what the heck does this have to do with the grandmother’s story?
As this (admittedly extreme) example suggests, graphic narratives can often be understood
as two stories in one: a textual narrative and a visual narrative.
These narratives are placed in juxtaposition to one another, calling our attention to differences
or contrasts as well as to unexpected similarities between the two stories.
In the passage from Ware’s graphic narrative, the seemingly simple and mundane TEXTUAL story
that the boy’s grandmother tells him is somehow translated in his head into a hyperbolic,
cartoonish VISUAL story.
Reading the two narratives together is a strange experience for sure, and at first, the two
stories appear totally unrelated to one another.
If we give it some thought, however, here and elsewhere in Ware’s story, we can begin
to see some common features that cross over between the visual and textual narratives.
Both narratives involve pain: the pain of being shot and the pain of, well, zipping
yourself in your fly.
Both involve observation: the grandmother checking on her poor husband and the superhero
observing the crime in progress.
Finally, both involve zips and flys, though the words are obviously used very differently
in the graphic narrative and the textual narrative.
Identifying these ideas in juxtaposition with one another, we can begin to make sense of
this very strange passage as the story of a boy’s struggles to translate unfamiliar
phrases and events into his own limited (and comic book obsessed) worldview.
When the boy hears that his grandfather “zips himself up in his fly,” a superhero zipping
and flying through the roof is, perhaps, what he thinks.
This is, obviously, an extreme example, but it does remind us that we should slow down
when we read a graphic narrative to consider how the words and the images on a page are
juxtaposed with one another rather than reading the visual narrative as a mere complement
to the textual narrative.
Consider one more example from Lynda Barry—a short comic called “Help You.”
The textual narrative involves a young girl named Maybonne struggling to practice her
typing skills in class while dealing with the trauma of being abandoned by her father.
The textual narrative places this anxiety in juxtaposition with the visual narrative—her
father at an anonymous bar seemingly oblivious to the destruction he has caused.
There may be other contrasts and similarities at work in this passage, and if you spot any,
I hope you’ll share them with me in the comments section below.
So, now that we have established a fundamental property of adult graphic narratives—the
principle of juxtaposition—the next question that arises is how exactly to analyze visual
narratives.
As our YouTube series suggests, there are a ton of terms for describing what’s going
on in literary texts, but students of English literature may not have as developed a vocabulary
for close reading visual narratives.
In the next video in this series, I’ll try to give you a handful of terms that I have
found useful in my teaching and research to get you on the path to thinking about and
writing about graphic narratives in as sophisticated a manner as you now read textual narratives.
In the meantime, stay healthy and have fun reading your next graphic narrative!